Roads triggered rage long before obscenities and gunfire encroached on the daily urban commute, especially in the vast and empty landscapes of the American West. Good roads are still rare there, and little angers some Westerners more than roads. Even the loneliest roads in the most remote places trigger lawsuits, threats of violence and rebellion.
This may be hard to fathom while stranded in freeway gridlock or dodging the potholes of crumbling city streets, but the distant and disparate communities of the rural West desperately depend on the few roads that link them, even when the roads are gravel or dirt or dusty tracks in the desert. In fact, the rougher the road, the more important it may be in the battle for control of millions of acres of publicly owned and federally managed land in the West.
That’s what Cal Black understood when he fired up a bulldozer almost 20 years ago, lowered the blade, and carved a path straight and wide in a Utah canyon. He didn’t go far but County Commissioner Black made his point. Local people had been using the canyon bottom as a thoroughfare for cattle. The path they made, he reasoned, constituted a road. And since it was a road, the canyon could not be designated wilderness under federal law. The federal government pro- posed wilderness designation for the canyon and Black and other local people feared their access to the canyon would become restricted. So to be safe, he used the county road grader to make the canyon bottom more demonstrably a road.
That act of civil disobedience was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion in which many rural Westerners sought to gain control of federal land in the American West. The rebellion faded with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President and the appointment of James Watt as Secretary of the Interior.
But the rebellion and road wars are back. In recent years, bulldozers in Nevada and Utah have been sent scraping into protected places and those proposed for protection. One of the roads has been the subject of lawsuits, court hearings, federal negotiations and even the intervention of President Clinton. The Burr Trail in southern Utah has long been more of a road than its name implies. Fifteen years ago, it was rough and dusty in dry weather, a river of muck when wet. It snaked around white sandstone mesas and into narrow canyons with walls as red as sunburned skin. When it came to a creek, it didn’t rise to a bridge. It simply plunged in and climbed out. Driving the Burr Trail’s 66 miles was an eye-popping, spine-cracking adventure.
The few people who lived near the Burr Trail considered its potential unfulfilled. Pave it, smooth its sharp switchbacks and bridge the creeks and dry washes, and the Burr Trail could bring prosperity to one ofthe poorest regions of Utah. Tourists might flock to it, unafraid of flash floods and car-swallowing mud. Prospectors for minerals and oil and gas would find it reliable. And local folks could use it as a shortcut, saving hours when driving to town.
Canyon hikers and environmentalists wanted to leave the road rough. They didn’t want pavement and Winnebagos diminishing their adventure. They feared mines and drilling rigs in a place so wild and remote it was the last region mapped in the lower 48 states.
So for 15 years the Burr Trail has been a battleground, for bulldozers, legal briefs and dueling editorials. People even argue about it in coffee shops. President Clinton entered the fray last year, declaring the region the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. An act of rebellion on the Burr Trail lead, in part, to the President’s action. County Commissioners in southern Utah had been winning the Burr Trail battles. Most of the road is now paved and bridges and culverts cross its streams. But that didn’t satisfy Commissioners in Garfield County. Two years ago, they sent their road grader to the last unpaved section of the road. The bulldozer crossed into Capitol Reef National Park and, without permission, it not only widened the road, it obliterated a hillside inside the National Park. The National Park Service and environmentalists went ballistic.
This act of defiance was proof to some Clinton administration officials that the area needed to be protected from the people living around it. That and Congress’s failure to declare the region a wilderness gave the President a moral imperative to act (there was also the political imperative of a grand environmental gesture before the 1996 election to solidify support among environmentalists). The President used his executive powers to name the area a National Monument.
The monument designation doesn’t change the status of the Burr Trail. If anything, it’s attracting more sightseers and feeding the fervor to pave the final 16 miles. But the federal government is standing firm. It’s suing Garfield County for the damage it caused to the road and the hillside in Capitol Reef National Park. And it wants a federal court to establish a precedent and rule that roads like the Burr Trail cannot be used to assert local control over federal land. The lawsuit is set for trial next spring.