Aug. 07, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
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Escalante, Utah
There is a 20-mile stretch of Utah’s Scenic Byway 12, from the small town of Boulder to the other small town of Escalante, where the whole world appears made of sand-colored plateaus dotted with desert brush. In the stillness, birds swoop over slot canyons. The occasional car stops on a crumbling roadside shoulder, its passengers staring into the expanse of green valleys and orange cliffs.
This area of southern Utah is as old as it is sweeping, with pottery shards and campsites still scattered about from when the Ancestral Pueblo people farmed this dry land through the 12th century. Tens of millions of years before that, dinosaurs roamed a landscape that looked utterly different: a lush hothouse whose muddy flood plains have held some of the best-preserved dinosaur fossils in the world, including at least 15 species that have been found only here. This place has taught scientists more about the end of the dinosaur era than anywhere else in the world. All of this richness, from then and now, led President Bill Clinton to sit at a wooden desk on the edge of the nearby Grand Canyon in 1996 and establish roughly 1.7 million acres of public land here as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
But 75 million years after the dinosaurs, 900 years after the ancient farmers, and 30 years after Mr. Clinton’s designation, President Donald Trump has opened the door for possibly the greatest changes to this environment since rivers carved these canyons. In July, Mr. Trump signed orders cutting the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and the neighboring Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 90%, removing nearly 3 million of the previously protected 3.5 million acres. While this swath of southern Utah remains public land under federal control, the loss of national-monument designation means this land will now be open to mining for coal, minerals, and uranium.
The U.S. government is slashing two revered national monuments in Utah. What happens next could determine how vast public lands in the western U.S. are managed – or exploited.
“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” said Mr. Trump from behind the Resolute Desk in Washington, flanked by Utah’s smiling GOP congressional delegation and governor. “It was very unfair to the people of Utah. And now, fairness has been brought back.”
The question of “fairness” and public lands has animated the American West ever since its states were admitted to the Union, when swaths of federal land became, in many places, the price of acceptance. No state in the modern era has pushed back against this arrangement quite like Utah, whose Republican political leadership sees it as an affront to state autonomy, conservative ideals, and a vision of Wild West independence that endures today. And within Utah, no place has been more emblematic of the power of grassroots support of these places – or the power of dogged policymakers – than Grand Staircase-Escalante, which had been, until July 13, the largest national monument in the 48 contiguous United States. Now, this place – with its canyons and dinosaur bones, as well as its ATV trails and coal deposits – has become the face of not just the GOP’s fight against public lands, but also the future of how public lands could or should exist in the West.
With a map several feet wide by several feet long unfolded atop the register’s counter in his outfitting shop on Escalante’s Main Street, Nate Waggoner uses his index finger to suggest a morning hike alongside the meandering Escalante River. But choose to drive down a dirt road several inches to the left on the map and, well, “You better pack some water and a sleeping bag,” he says. A few specks of rain could turn the red dirt to a hungry mud that will devour even the stoutest four-wheel drive pickup.
That’s what so many locals here, in the small towns dotting the edges of the monument, love about it: It’s unpredictable, difficult, and utterly wild. Compared with national parks, “which are a lot of groomed paths to an overlook” for an Instagram post, says Mr. Waggoner, national monuments such as Grand Staircase-Escalante take a certain kind of spirit. Visitors often check in with local outlets such as Mr. Waggoner’s Escalante Outfitters, which he opened two decades ago and has since expanded to include a popular pizza restaurant and cabin rentals.
“You turn off onto a dirt road, get out and walk for a couple of days, and then boom, you are in it,” he says. “It’s a different kind of wilderness experience.”
National parks might be what comes to mind for most Americans when they think of public land: Yosemite’s granite domes or Yellowstone’s roaming buffalo. But national parks managed by the National Park Service are only one slice of America’s roughly 640 million acres of federally owned land.
Of the four major agencies that manage federal land – including almost half the land of the West – the Bureau of Land Management oversees the most acreage, including Grand Staircase-Escalante. The U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service have their own allotments. National wildlife refuges, national forests, national monuments, and national parks all come with different rules about what’s allowed to happen within their boundaries and how they are supposed to be managed.
But of all the federal government’s land in the United States, which totals about 28% of the country’s land area, national monuments stand out to public-land opponents as the most problematic – and that’s largely because of how they are created.
In 1906, amid concerns that collectors were looting Native American artifacts, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law that allowed presidents to unilaterally set aside public land as national monuments. The Antiquities Act, Roosevelt and other supporters said, would protect American landmarks or objects of “historic or scientific interest.” Since Roosevelt, every president (including Donald Trump) has used this power, except for three. Today, there are 168 national monuments, including marine areas.
From the beginning, opponents worried the Antiquities Act could lead to government overreach. That one person can determine the future of an area larger than the state of Delaware, with merely the stroke of a pen, feels like a personal affront to many conservatives. The national monuments in southern Utah, created or re-expanded by the three most recent Democratic presidents, stoked this debate as opponents argue these vast allotments go against the Antiquities Act’s instruction to reserve “the smallest area compatible” with protection.