Report from the Paria River

Slideshow

Last weekend, 120 off-road vehicles drove illegally up the protected Paria River in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They did it to protest the BLM’s announcement that it would start enforcing a years-old ban on off-roading in that canyon. The protestors' basic position runs like this: since the riverbed has been traveled by vehicles beginning in the wagon train days, the BLM did not have the legal right to close it to off-road vehicles.

Across the river, a group of counter-protestors held a "peaceful protection picnic" on the beach. They shared food and held up signs opposing the vehicle trespass and supporting the protection of the Monument.

The BLM and county law enforcement attended, but as observers only. They made no effort to stop the off-roaders from driving up the canyon.

A Little Background

There's a lot of weird information floating around on the internet, so we'll start with the basic story: The controversial portion of Paria Canyon, in addition to being a part of the Monument, is mostly inside a Wilderness Study Area. The ghost town of Pahreah, now almost entirely gone, lies on the riverbank a few miles north of Highway 89. A dirt road leads from the highway to the ghost town, and no one is proposing to close that road. The river corridor leading north of the town and current road, however, was used as a wagon road and town access when the town still had residents (until about a hundred years ago). The river itself usually has low flows braiding over a flat sandy bottom, which is why it was a good wagon route.

In later years, people began driving the river bottom with motor vehicles, though highways built to both east and west made it obsolete as nonrecreational transportation. In the late 1970s or early '80s, the Bureau of Land Management declared the area eligible as wilderness, because occasional vehicle use had not left a permanent road-like imprint in the riverbed. The canyon was thus protected as part of a Wilderness Study Area (WSA), awaiting further determining action by Congress, which has never come. WSAs are legally protected from any action which might make them ineligible for future Wilderness designation, such as road building, power lines, mines etc.

In 1996, President Clinton designated a big chunk of south-central Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Our part of the Paria River was right in the middle.

In the next few years, the new Monument’s staff came up with a management plan that including closing Monument lands to cross-country driving and closing many “phantom roads”—dirt tracks through the desert that the BLM concluded were no longer needed for vehicle use. The Paria River canyon was formally closed to vehicles in 2000.

However, the Kane County government was furious at restrictions on the use of much of the federal land in their jurisdiction. The Kane County Commission used an old set of laws (part of the 1866 Mining Law and the organic legislation for the BLM, Revised Statute 2477) to claim that hundreds of miles of dirt tracks in the Monument were actually controlled by Kane County. Therefore, under their argument, the County and not the BLM had the right to say whether these routes could be driven.

A few different lawsuits and several years later, the problem of RS 2477 highways was still not resolved, and looked to be in legal limbo for quite some time (which is still the case). The Kane County Commission posted county “open” road signs on the closed lands in the Monument, and released maps telling people they could drive there. The BLM did not remove the signs, and did not try to prosecute off-roaders for driving into the disputed lands. Two years ago the BLM issued a policy of “voluntary compliance” with its own protection for Paria Canyon. Many off-road vehicle users have decided not to voluntarily comply. The Paria River has an ATV trailer staging area nearby, and many tracks on the river bottom.

The county’s stated position is still that RS 2477 claims do not have to be proven with evidence, but that any route claimed under the statute is automatically theirs to control. The Utah state legislature passed a law reiterating this position at the state level last year.

One lawsuit, however, finally made it through. Frustrated with the BLM, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sued. The suit was brought under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which, as any first semester law student knows, declares that federal laws overrule conflicting state and local laws. The tenth circuit court agreed, and in 2008 ordered Kane County to remove its signs from the Monument and desist with any activity encouraging illegal driving there. The county appealed this decision and lost in April 2009. This newest decision affirmed that any highway claim made under RS 2477 must be proven in court before it’s considered official, and that the Monument’s plan superceded unproven county claims.

Let the Games Begin!

In response to the court orders, the Monument management issued a vague announcement that they planned to start enforcing their protection laws. Two Utah politicians, State Senator Mike Noel (R-Kanab) and Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw, went ballistic, and ORV groups announced a “protest ride” up Paria Canyon.  The Monument was unclear on whether they intended to enforce their laws and keep the off-roaders out of Paria Canyon.

So Kane County small business owner Susan Hand sent out an email to a large list of Kanab area hikers and activists, inviting people to a “peaceful protection picnic.” Its purpose: to witness the illegal off-roading and show that local people supported the protection of the Paria River and the lands on the Monument. Her group did not, she emphasized, intend to try to block the river, or be rude or aggressive. Everyone should bring a lawn chair and a pot luck breakfast.

At the Paria

I set off towards Paria to watch. While I had hiked into the Paria River from the north a few years back, I’d never driven up to the ghost town end. Driving the minivan down the dirt road towards the river, map in hand, I noticed that there were no signs telling people that they could not drive in the river. There was one paragraph on a historical marker, but no barrier, nothing that said “closed.” As I approached the river, trying to see where I was supposed to go, there were several branching routes, none of them marked. The official Monument map was too low-resolution to figure it out. I picked the most likely route and followed it, coming to the riverbank itself, looking around for the ghost town. I passed a huge dirt parking lot with several empty ATV trailers on my way.

I didn’t find out until a couple of days later that the legal route branched off to the right. There was no way to tell. So really, I can’t blame any casual off-roader if they didn’t know they weren't supposed to drive up the riverbed; the BLM didn't keep up signs. The dirt route led plainly up to the river’s edge, and there were an uncountable number of tire tracks across the sandy banks. The next day’s off-roader rally, however, cannot plead ignorance, since the whole point of it was to protest the canyon’s closure. Mike Noel and Mark Habbeshaw talked about the awfulness of federal laws limiting ORV access to the Paria for quite some time during their parking lot speeches the next morning.

At the river the day before the rally, I walked up the canyon, into the thick sunlight of afternoon.  Six ATVs and two rock crawlers passed me, covered with dust and mud. When the engine roar died down, the canyon was lovely in the slanting light; red slopes, deep blue sky, rippling water over golden sandbars, the rushing sound of wind in the cottonwoods along the banks. The canyon gets deeper and narrower further north, and little noises echo off the vertical sandstone walls. In the part nearer the road, salts rime the banks after evaporating out of the silty water, and the canyon is wide and shallow, with many little channels snaking over the sand. Big messy deposits of sand and dead leaves and branches tangle in the stands of tamarisk, showing the flash flood level from last year's monsoon. It was above my head as I stood barefoot in the sandy water. Those floods are what drove the settlers of the ghost town--Pahreah--to abandon their homes. The historical sign notes that Brigham Young had looked at the shape of the canyon and warned the settlers about the dangers of that townsite. I've noticed he seemed to have pretty good sense about that sort of thing. 

That night, I stood on the bank and watched a near-full moon rise over the canyon rim, huge and yellow. A big cottonwood tree clattered its leaves behind me in the wind, and the water's surface crept blue and black down the channels. After a time, I turned away, and went off to find a place to sleep. 

The next morning dawned clear and cool, a blazing blue sky over red rock. The protection picnickers set up food, chairs, and picnic tables next to the shallow river under an already hot sun, and set up on the far bank where all of the off-roaders would have to drive right past us. Most of the picnickers were from nearby Kanab.

Everyone was in high spirits, with a little edge lent by the tension of the situation. Two women built sand castles, everyone drank tea and coffee and juice and ate donuts and pie and muffins. The law enforcement came out, shaking everyone's hand and said they had been sent just to monitor the situation and make sure everyone was okay.

The off-road protestors came in small groups of five or ten, on ATVs, dirt bikes, jeeps, a few pickups, and those weird side-by-sides that have suddenly become popular and look like golf carts on steroids. We waved and smiled, and they waved and smiled back. This is a common thing at the few protests I've been to, maybe because there have always been too few people on each side for anonymity. Everyone on both sides stayed polite, and there were even a couple of reasoned exchanges.

That was how it went, for a couple of hours as the vehicles dribbled by.  There were 115 or 120 vehicles, most with one or two passengers (the exact tally is still with one of the picnic leaders in Kanab). They eventually disappeared up the canyon to the north, and the picnickers cleared out, heading home. I spent the sunset on the banks of the San Juan River, sitting under the tammies at the Mexican Hat put-in, thinking of rivers. 

The San Juan, the Colorado, the Paria. The Green, the San Rafael, the Dolores, the Escalante, the Fremont, the Dirty Devil. All rich veins of life, holy places, rivers in the red desert, home of the best land and the weirdest blessed people, home of my heart. Thank you, I said to the sky, as I had said it the night before, under the moon by the Paria. Thanks you for the privilege of looking after this place. May it always be. 

Slideshow (again)

Salt Lake Tribune:

"Call Off the Fight"

 "Road Warriors to Roar Past BLM Ban"

 "Peaceful Picnickers to Take Stand Against Off-Roaders"

"Protestors Roar Through Federal Lands"

"Feds Reviewing Evidence From BLM Protest Ride"

From the LA Times:

"Utah Off-Road Rally Revs in River"

From the Salt Lake Trib blog:

"Off-Roaders Get Run Over"

From Wonkette, as discussed in the above (saucy language alert for this one):

"Off-Roader Idiots Break Federal Law, Whine About Maybe Being Prosecuted"

Letter to the Editor:

"Banditos and ATVs"