A special report by the Tri-City Herald

A sunset burns colors into the southern Utah sky over the Dixie National Forest. Preserving the stark beauty of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument presents obstacles for the region's resource-based industries, such as logging, which is one of the largest employers in the region.

Land-use debate heats up near Escalante

ESCALANTE, Utah -Steve Gessig, former environmentalist, said he was suckered in.

He first came to the Grand Staircase in 1974 as a Cal-Berkeley student to fight coal mining proposed on the Kaiparowits Plateau.

"We were told through the colleges that the land was being abused here," said Gessig, 50, a house painter by trade. "Basically, I fell for it.

"After I moved there, I basically found out that I was brainwashed. ... Everything seemed to contradict what I had been told."

Today, he's among the area's most vocal "wise use" advocates - a man who tries to employ environmentalist publicity tactics to further mining, logging and ranching.

Now he talks about "multiple-use land" and "balance" in a way that would make the lightest greeny turn purple with rage.

"I am reborn," he said.

For the last 18 months, Gessig has been on the go continually, tilting with environmentalists wherever he can as an officer in the People for the U.S.A., a group that rails against "excessive government regulation that impedes our American freedoms."

"I feel I've got to make up for what I did before."

For an hour, however, Gessig slows down enough to sit in his two-story log cabin at the edge of town to talk about the conspiracy against "wise use" of the West.

"What they have basically done is destroyed everybody who was making a livelihood off of public lands," he said.

Statistics show he's right - if not in determining the cause, at least in seeing the effect.

In the last 20 years, mining and agriculture have dropped from 5.8 percent of Utah's employment to 2.2 percent, and in 20 more years, it will be down to 1.4 percent, according to state statistics cited by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA.

Above Gessig's couch, a bumper sticker is tacked on the wall: "SUWA sucks."

Next to that is another mocking the environmental group Earth First: "Earth first! We'll log and mine the other planets later."

Mining lands locked up

When the boundaries for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument were drawn, they included one of the world's largest coal reserves on the Kaiparowits Plateau - the same mines that generated protests in the 1970s.

Clare Ramsay, 67, Garfield County commissioner, said if the monument boundary was drawn correctly, it would have just included obviously scenic areas such as the red rock canyons along Highway 12, not the "common" Kaiparowits. "You can go anywhere in the western U.S. and find country like that," he said.

Katie Thomas, publisher of the Garfield County News, sums up local sentiment. "This was nothing more ... than tying up a lot of natural resources."

For decades, giant companies had tried to figure out how to untie those resources.

Thirty years ago, a consortium of Southern California utilities proposed four coal mines and a power generation station on the plateau, plans that were eventually shelved.

Then in the late 1980s, Andalex Resources obtained the coal leases and proposed "a huge underground coal mine, roads and other mine-related garbage," according to SUWA's history of the region's environmental battles.

"For almost seven years, SUWA challenged Andalex at every step," the group said. "We brought media attention to the absurd proposal by the Dutch company to open a coal mine in these national-interest lands for export to Pacific Rim nations."

By some accounts, the coal is difficult to reach and extraction would have kept busy 450 coal trucks a day for 40 years.

Today, because of its monument status, there's little evidence of the mining business in Escalante.

"The nightmare of an industrial complex atop the Kaiparowits is just a bad dream, and nothing more now," SUWA penned after the monument designation, only to spend the next several months fighting oil development by Conoco.

There still seems to be some potential of mining on the Kaiparowits, but memories of the economic hope mines once held are drying up. "We were always going to have better jobs for us and our kids by having the oil," lamented Marjie Lee Spencer, town mayor.

Logging on life support

Like the other resource economies in Southern Utah, logging is on the way out as well, driven elsewhere by unfavorable markets, dwindling resources, changes in federal land management and challenges by conservation groups.

That means Stephen Steed is having to cover more and more ground to find trees for his small sawmill outside town. As manager of Utah Forest Products, he used to look 50 miles around Escalante for timber. Now he goes 250 and more.

The Forest Service's current attempt to restrict logging roads is a bigger threat to his business than the monument - but monument status hasn't helped his cause. The way he figures it, the monument has given ammunition to those who already opposed logging on nearby Dixie National Forest.

"The monument has been a reason not to do things in the national forest," he said. "The boundaries of the monument are there, but the effects are going beyond the boundaries."

Given the climate of the day, it's not unusual for one of Steed's 80 employees to ask him where logs are coming from next. "It's on everybody's mind."

Steed has been forced to innovate to keep the mill open, bringing in new laser equipment that sizes up saw cuts on odd-shaped logs to obtain the most lumber from each log. And he's gone into specialty markets, such as paneling products and cabin logs that he can mill from downed trees.

"We have to take these cracked, dried logs," he said. "That's what the government is selling."

The prevailing opinion in town seems to be that Utah Forest Products will soon go the way of a much larger mill that folded in the early 1990s, especially if environmental groups continue to block Forest Service timber sales. Steed, whose father also was a sawmill operator, opened Utah Forest Products in 1993 but soon realized he didn't have the money to keep it going.

So he sold the business and stayed on as manager, retaining a special concern for the future of his workers and the town's schools, which he estimates are filled one-third by children of people who make their living off the mill.

If the mill closes, Escalante will lose roughly $200,000 a month in payroll - and an employer that provides benefits such as vacations. Such jobs aren't common here.

"We haven't seen anything come along that could really replace this," Steed said.

Ranching's future limited

Everyone here, it seems, used to ranch.

"I am glad I am not a cattleman today," said Melvin Alvey, former rancher.

"My husband said it is no longer the type of life I want to lead," said Louise Liston, former rancher.

"The writing is on the wall," said Curtis Koyle, current ranch manager.

The business that's as ingrained here as fishing is in Astoria, Ore., is on the way out, whether or not ranchers technically are allowed to retain grazing rights on monument land. When the president declared the land a monument, he said grazing rights and rates were not affected.

And the BLM maintains it is not trying to run out ranchers, but grazing may have to be curtailed to prevent harm to the monument. Nonetheless, ranchers see the end is near, and there's no end to the speculation about how BLM will manage to finally get them off the land.

Part of what grates on old-time Westerners is the bigger picture - they see their lifestyle squashed everywhere. One report, for example, said that without public grazing lands, nearly half of all grazing for sheep and cattle in 11 Western states will end.

But there are other thoughts about how the end will come, such as environmental groups outbidding ranchers for grazing rights and property prices getting high enough that farmers are willing to sell their livelihood.

"Farmers and ranchers usually sell out when the price is right," said environmental activist Patrick Diehl, in a letter opposing a new irrigation reservoir in Escalante. "As it is, (landowners) can sell out, pocket the money and, if the reservoir does not happen, blame the environmentalists for making it impossible to farm here. ... Money and victimhood, both - what a deal!"

Looking at Mayor Spencer, it's hard to believe she wants either. Her face wrinkles as she tries to stifle tears prompted by the story of her 160-acre ranch, where she and her husband moved in 1955 and lived for a year without electricity because they couldn't afford to extend power lines to the land.

The place now belongs to her son, who put it up for sale for $2 million because he fears the end of ranching is near. "The older people ... didn't mind living on nothing, as long as they lived the way they wanted to," Spencer said. "Now they can't do that."

Spencer's son turned down a $1 million offer - an almost inconceivable amount in a town so small and homey the only fast food restaurant closed one weekend for a family reunion.

"I'd hate to see him sell it," Spencer gasped. "It would just crush me."

'What's right?' locals wonder

Like just about everything else in the region, the truth about modern extractive industries is hard to find, though even hard-core land use advocates admit abuses in the past degraded the land.

"What's right?" is a question often on the lips of the more philosophical in town - those who wonder if doing away with all industry is really the best thing.

For instance, what if all the cows are pulled off the monument and their trails - popular with hikers - disappear? Or worse, what if unchecked vegetation growth someday erupts into a massive fire and erases the town?

And what if eliminating timber companies from forests leaves spruce stands victim for the bark beetle, which is already at near-epidemic levels in Southern Utah?

"We have been here over 100 years and haven't ruined it," said telephone company employee Lori Coleman. "That's why (the government) wants to protect it."

Stephen Steed, manager of Utah Forest Products in Escalante, looks over beetle-damaged logs at the company's lumber yard. The mill is struggling to survive, and Steed makes the best of whatever wood he can buy for it.

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