A special report by the Tri-City Herald

Grosvenor Arch - one of the many spectacular landmark rock formations on Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument - catches the last rays of the setting sun. The arch is accessible to visitors only by a twisty dirt and gravel road.

Staking a claim to the New West

BOULDER, Utah - When President Clinton stepped to the north rim of the Grand Canyon on Sept. 18, 1996, and delivered a lofty speech about protecting the "high rugged, remote" region of Southern Utah, Mark Austin's heart leapt.

He and his wife Katie - well-known environmentalists and lodge owners in this map-dot town about 125 miles northeast of the Grand Canyon - had responded to an invitation from the president delivered by Federal Express.

Clinton was about to announce the creation of the massive Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move that would prove to be just the start of his efforts to secure western landscapes using the Antiquities Act of 1906.

Together with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the president is trying to shape an environmental legacy by invoking the name of Teddy Roosevelt and locking up unique or threatened lands.

The most recent evidence is new monuments created in June by executive edict at the Hanford Reach, Arizona's Ironwood Forest, Oregon's Soda Mountain and the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado.

Together, those four total 525,000 acres - only about 30 percent of the area the president declared a national monument four years ago when he invited people like Mark Austin to the Grand Canyon and created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

"The West is becoming assimilated by the development that has occurred on the coast," said Austin, a builder who is known throughout Southern Utah for his architecture. "It needs to be preserved in big tracts of land so future generations might have some idea of what it was like when the West was first discovered," he said.

Wild West lives on

Escalante retains that impression of the Old West - in more ways than one. While its nearly 2 million acres remain largely untamed, so are the emotions of the people in the tiny towns that edge the monument or stand as islands in the massive federally owned desert.

In and around the monument are curiosities of every manner: 1,000-year-old junipers, prehistoric Anasazi dwellings, native rock art, massive rock arches and the tracks of cowboys and Mormon pioneers who settled the land.

Along with one of the world's best fossil records of the Late Cretaceous period - the end of the dinosaur age - the monument contains one of the world's largest coal reserves on the Kaiparowits Plateau. Just a few weeks ago, monument officials announced they'd found a dinosaur that appeared to be new to science.

The "staircase" itself is too large to be easily seen. It rises in a series of cliffs some 6,000 feet from the Colorado River beginning at the Grand Canyon and reaching north and west to Bryce Canyon National Park.

All around the monument is more federal land - a sprawling national forest, the Navajo Indian Reservation, five national parks and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

National monuments, which don't have to be approved by Congress, are only one way to slow the pace of development.

The attempt to preserve the West is much broader, including the Forest Service's attempt to ban roads on 43 million acres - including more than 3 million acres in Washington.

"Rapid development and shrinking open space make our remaining roadless areas increasingly valuable to many people," Mike Dombeck, chief of the Forest Service, said in May. "New roads pose the most immediate threat to the many social and ecological values of these areas."

And in the Northwest, there's a controversial federal proposal called the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Plan, ICBEMP, to coordinate management on roughly 63 million acres of public land in seven states. It, too, has been opposed by those who say federal agencies are butting in too many places.

Often, the Endangered Species Act drives a federal agency's agenda - something that hasn't gone unnoticed by property rights advocates, who are suing, countersuing and pushing legislation to limit the power of the law.

"Utah used to be alone in wilderness and monument issues," said Louise Liston, county commissioner in Garfield County, Utah.

"Now, all of the sudden, it's hitting everyone else."

Tempers flare

At the edge of Escalante's Main Street recently, a rancher listened to a reporter's questions about how the lessons learned from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument might apply to the Hanford Reach. He sidled up to the reporter. "You oughta hang Bruce Babbitt, that's what you oughta do," he muttered from underneath his cowboy hat, then scurried away toward the general store.

Because the communities near the Escalante are so small - a few thousand people at most - the impacts and passions of the monument stand in high relief.

"Before this is over with, there will be people killed, but it will probably be some poor innocent potlicker," said Dan Spencer, manager of the regional telephone company. "Tempers will rise."

That's not hard to believe in a land where every rancher tells stories about burned cabins, killed cattle and watering holes poisoned by diesel fuel. When asked who would do such a thing, they sputter: Envi-ro-mentalists.

And, as far as the longtime locals are concerned, enviros are in bed with the federal government, the leaders of which are suspected of having an agenda to turn America over to the United Nations.

So it's not surprising that an undercurrent of hostility toward federal agents runs across the West, the most notable example being the resignation last fall of a Forest Service supervisor in Elko, Nev., who said, "Fed bashing is a sport here."

"When actively hostile citizens threaten to break the law using 'Remember Waco' as the rallying cry, and the local sheriff, the FBI and the Justice Department warn you and your employees to stay 100 miles away ... is that the warning salvo that violence is just around the corner?" wrote Forest Service supervisor Gloria Flora in the spring publication of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The newsletter reported other spots around the West where Bureau of Land Management employees were issued gas masks and bulletproof vests. There have been reports of automatic gunfire in wilderness areas and intentional destruction of archaeological sites, it said.

Despite harsh rhetoric, things aren't overtly violent in Escalante.

"For those of us who moved in, it was a big question mark," admitted Barbara Sharrow, BLM monument official. But, she added, "People actually have been friendly."

But there have been plenty of threats, bickering and name-calling, all of which frustrates Tom Mansell, who operates a bed-and-breakfast in Escalante that was built by Mark Austin and painted by Steve Gessig, a primary instigator in the local property rights forces.

"It's like a sixth-grade class," said Mansell, a monument advocate who does his best to get along with the naysayers. "You got to a meeting and they don't talk, they yell."

Anti-government emotions spiked after the presidential proclamation, an executive order that even some supporters say was chicken because Clinton did it long-distance from Arizona.

"He didn't dare show his face in this area," said Katie Thomas, publisher of the Garfield County News in Tropic.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt - born in Southern Utah - bristled at the news.

State trades land, loses trust

Leavitt got wind of the monument first through the Washington, D.C., press, nine days before Clinton's announcement, according to his testimony before a House subcommittee in April 1997.

His attempts to get information from the administration were rebuffed.

"Mr. Babbitt ... continued to indicate (he) had no information, insisting that this matter was being handled by the White House," said Leavitt, a Republican. "When we called the White House, we were referred to the Interior Department."

He finally got through to the president on the morning of Sept. 18. They talked for a half-hour at 2 a.m.

"The president told me that he was just then beginning to review the matter," Leavitt said.

Less than 12 hours later, Clinton was at the Grand Canyon flanked by supporters to announce the creation of the monument.

Leavitt complained he wasn't told about it."This is not about courtesy," he said. "This is about process and public trust."

Like it or not, the designation stuck - and, ironically, Leavitt ended up with a political shiner in Southern Utah because of what happened next.

In May 1998, he and Babbitt announced what was at the time the largest public land exchange in U.S. history, in which Utah exchanged 176,000 acres of state school trust land for $50 million and a wad of coal, oil, gas and land rights elsewhere in the state.

Also, the trust lands board agreed to drop its lawsuit challenging the creation of the monument.

More than the property itself, southern Utahns were angered the governor limited their access to the monument, which they had by virtue of the scattered state lands. It gave the federal government all the cards and the ability to close roads.

Many longtime residents - the people whose Mormon parents and grandparents had scratched out a living in the sand - saw that as the beginning of the end.

The BLM plans to close more than half of the roughly 2,200 miles of roads on the monument, sparking more protests - and potentially more lawsuits - by residents, and drawing promises of more pressure to close more roads by environmental groups.

"Roads is the key, and it always has been," said Garfield County Commissioner Clare Ramsay, 67, a retired school teacher. "If we lose access, we have lost it."

After the initial shock of the monument, its neighbors largely figured they would make the best of it or at least try to live with the monument, Commissioner Liston said. But that sentiment has started to evaporate now that the government is executing its management plan that took three years and numerous public meetings to create.

"There are just a lot of things now that the plan is being implemented that are causing the hostility to resurface," Liston said. "My opinion is that it's going to get angry. It's going to get violent."

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