Bears Ears National Monument

He will not be able to pull it off. People want public land. It's going to create rage and court battles tooth and nail.
 
WasatchWill said:
Tis true. Some spots also get much more social media hype and therefor become tourist hot spots. These places tend to be the more accessible areas not far from a main road, highway, or other easy to drive road. Since dating and marrying my wife over 10 years ago, I've visited Capitol Reef multiple times each year and can say that the crowds have definitely picked up there. Her family, which has a lot of ancestry among the pioneer history down there used to do reunions down in Fruita every summer and it used seem like there were few others outside of her relatives that would be in any of the picnic areas there when we'd gather. Her family could almost always count on a certain picnic area being available on a Saturday afternoon and half the campground there would be vacant as well. Not so any more. That said, I find that the crowds tend to stick along the trails right off the highway and along the scenic drive corridor. For those willing to go beyond those trails and particularly off trail, there's plenty of solitude and tranquility to still be had. Seems like this is the case for so many other areas out there as well, and I imagine this would still be true of Bears Ears.
Click to expand...
To build on this, the statistics apparently indicate (though I can't find them at the moment) that there are actually fewer people using the backcountry than say, thirty years ago... with the exception of certain high-use areas. For example, the designated National Scenic Trails are exploding in popularity, along with places like Cirque of the Towers, Coyote Gulch, or Indian Peaks Wilderness. Part of that is the changing demographics of the West, but a lot more of it has to do with social media.

Social media, I think, promotes laziness. You see an amazing picture on somebody's Instagram and say "I want to go there". So you google it, and voila, there's a nice pre-packaged trail guide for you. Download it and go. Meanwhile, a place like Bonneville Lakes Basin or Stevens Canyon, mere miles from the tourist attraction, is no more visited than it was years ago. Why? Because people naturally follow the crowd, and the crowd ain't going there.

So in summary, you don't have this huge surge in backcountry usage overall but you do have a concentration of all the people into a small number of areas. What that means, of course, is that there's plenty of solitude for the rest of us... in certain areas. This also spurs an interesting issue of "to post or not to post" a trip report in a seldom-visited place.
 
Venchka said:
If it involves a 9th Circuit judge Trump stands an 80% chance of the ruling being overturned on appeal.
Wayne


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Judges from the 9th Circuit have decided over 50,000 cases, and over 11,000 cases on appeal. Of those the Supreme Court accepted 10 cases this last term and of those 8 were overturned. So there is a .016% chance (or less in other years) a decision of the 9th will be overturned. Year over year the 9th Circuit is about the same as the other circuits. Any case accepted by the Supreme Court on appeal has a greater that 50% chance of being overturned (except when it has original jurisdiction or is mandated to accept the appeal) because their cases are hand picked for that very purpose.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Ben
WasatchWill said:
Catching up on TR's. What a neat experience! Great photos too. Congrats on the award winner. If I could stow away in your pack for this year's outing, I'd probably try to.



That's what I thought too @Bob, until I stumbled into this: https://www.visitutah.com/things-to...country-southern-utah/dark-canyon-wilderness/

I figure once the official state office of tourism posts a trail guide to a specific trail/area, it's officially on the radar. That said, there's so many other places out there on the radar and that canyon is still pretty remote, that it probably often takes a backseat to so many other destinations that people plan trips for. I'm sure it still sees a lot less people than so many of the other canyons closer to the highways down there.
Click to expand...

Yo I think it's gettin on the radar.o_O

 
That's what a Monument designation will do..... get people looking around the area
 
And the trip report was based on outing in what looks like Sept 2016. Also prior to BENM.
 
SKLund said:
I'm saying the place was popular and will be more and more popular, the more we see Bears Ears photos and politicos yapping about in the paper, TV news, etc.
Click to expand...

So are you suggesting wonderful outdoor places should just not ever be discussed? Security through obscurity is not a realistic method to preserve anything, in my opinion. The land within Bears Ears will continue to get more popular with or without monument designation, the same is true for ALL outdoors places as population grows and sharing information gets easier. It's inevitable. Get pissed about people making babies.
 
slc_dan said:
That video was 2012.
Click to expand...
Yes...... since somewhere around then I have run into a lot more people throughout the GG, DC, BW area...
 
I really love solitude in the desert. There are a plethora of areas where one can experience this solitude.

The trade off of having people go to these wonderful places, is that they get protected. Best case scenario is that the places get a boost of advocates, worst case you get some garbage left behind.

Either way, it's better than some extraction industries coming in.
 
Bob said:
Yes...... since somewhere around then I have run into a lot more people throughout the GG, DC, BW area...
Click to expand...

Makes sense. I haven't had the opportunity to explore the area yet. Only a matter of time.
 
Interesting discussion. Will also throw in the fact that I have this book of photos of Glen Canyon pre-dam sitting on my coffee table at home. The title is apt and speaks to the discussion above "The Place No One Knew." One big reason Brower/Sierra Club "traded" the proposed dam in Dinosaur National Mon. at the confluence of the Green and Yampa for the Glen is that they didn't know anything about GC. Brower regretted it all is life after seeing what he had bargained for.
I agree with others who posted about the fact that plenty of places on the CP where one can find solitude still. Can't imagine the Pollywog Bench ever getting overrun.......Advocacy for an area is so critical and the only way to build a constituency for place. When people lose connection to these public spaces they are prime for extractive development. Ultimately Katie Lee aptly called it an ecological catch 22 - that to save a place you ultimately have to "ruin" it. Ruin is debatable here. In the end I will take sharing the trail with people who're overjoyed to be out there vs. sharing it with oil wells , ATV's and itinerant livestock or losing access all together.
I certainly understand being frustrated seeing trail heads packed with cars but 9 times out of 10 the people I meet out on the trail are overcome with awe for the landscape they're traveling through and super friendly/happy to boot. The surest way to lose our public lands is for the public to no longer have any connection to them
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top