The Donald Trump Burr Trail? Oy!
Plus: More Biden public lands action; uranium mine safety violations

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡
You really can’t make this stuff up: The Garfield County board of commissioners really wants to name a highway in their midst after President-elect Donald Trump. They will consider two options at their Jan. 27 meeting, with the first one being to change the “Burr Trail Scenic Backway” to the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Burr Trail Backway.”
Oy frigging vey.
The Burr Trail, which runs from Boulder, Utah, through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Waterpocket Fold, and Capitol Reef National Park, ending up just outside Ticaboo, started out as a livestock trail in the 1880s and is named after rancher John Atlantic Burr. It is now not only a spectacularly scenic drive, but also one of the most controversial roads in the West.
Portions of the trail became a road in 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission bulldozed the switchbacks through the Waterpocket Fold to provide motorized access to uranium mining claims. According to a National Park Service history, the road was widely used by uranium miners throughout the ‘50s and into the ‘60s. In 1967 the federal government funded improvements to the route as part of a project to provide road access to the new Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell (which started filling up in 1963)

Ever since, Garfield County has wanted to continue to improve the road and, ultimately, pave its entire 66 miles, thinking it would attract a more conventional, bigger-spending brand of tourists than the dirtbag backpackers that frequented the region in the 70s and 80s. The county was in tough shape economically, largely because market forces were crushing the uranium mining industry and small-scale ranching, and so it was looking to fill the void with tourism. In 1983, Wayne County Commissioner and paving advocate H. Dell LeFevre told the New York Times:
''They come in here in a Volkswagen and their backpacks, they buy a dollar gas and a dollar groceries, and they're gone for a week. You can't blame them, but paving the road would open this end of the county up to the people who stay at the motels and eat at the cafes and spend some bucks in the county.’’1
Environmental groups and the National Park Service, however, have pushed back, saying paving the gravel, washboarded route would encroach on federal lands and increase access — and impacts — to the backcountry. Conservationists launched lawsuits countering county claims that it owns the road and should control how it’s maintained.
The Burr Trail thus became yet another symbol in the long-running culture war over roads, federal land management, and an arcane federal mining law statute known as RS-2477.
In 1987, as an environmental lawsuit seeking to block blacktopping made its way through the courts, someone poured sugar into the fuel tanks of Garfield County bulldozers being used to work on the Trail, a la the Monkey Wrench Gang. A local uranium miner and founding member of what would become the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance was charged with the crime but acquitted.
Shortly thereafter, a district judge ruled against the environmentalists and allowed the BLM to greenlight Garfield County’s bid to blacktop the section of road from Boulder to the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park.
That didn’t end the battle, however. Garfield County has continued its crusade to pave the remainder of the route, and the Burr Trail has been featured in many a court case. In 1996, the National Park Service dragged the county to court after its crews bulldozed a hill to fix a blind corner. And in 2019, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management permitted it to chip-seal a seven-mile section on the other side of Capitol Reef NP; the county carried out the work before environmentalists had a chance to challenge it. A judge ultimately let the asphalt remain.2
The Burr Trail, in other words, is almost as polarizing as a certain president-elect, which could be one reason a rural Utah county wants to rename the backroad after a Manhattan real estate baron and reality TV show host who has never set foot in that part of the world and sure as hell couldn’t tell a juniper from a piñon tree even if a giant coyote whacked him over his orange head with it.
But Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollack says he wants to rename the route to show his appreciation for Trump’s first-term policies, including shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, telling KSL: “This is just a sign of appreciation. This guy right here was good to Garfield County and he was good to all of the Western public land counties.” Sure, Leland.
The Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners opposes the renaming, even going so far as to refuse to utter the proposed new name in its press release. The statement notes:
“Scenic byways and scenic backways are traditionally named after their intrinsic qualities, which are based on the local archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational, and scenic values that make them special and unique. They are not usually named to curry favor with Washington DC politicians.”
Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the real reason for this proposal is merely to entice the narcissistic Trump to order his Park Service to clear the way for paving the rest of the route. After all, the guy with gold plated toilets surely doesn’t want a bumpy dirt road named after him, does he?
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
In its waning days, the Biden administration has been quite active on the public lands front. In a future post I’ll get into Biden’s environmental legacy, but for now here’s a quick rundown of some of the administration’s latter-day moves:
Biden’s designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument in southern California adds another link to what is now being called the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, a strip of protected lands that follows the Colorado River from southeastern Utah to the Mojave Desert. Prior to Chuckwalla, Biden bolstered the corridor by restoring Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments and by establishing the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni and Avi Kwa Ame national monuments.
The administration finalized the management plans for both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. I’m not going to give a full rundown on the plans here, because they are so similar to the draft plans, which I detailed in earlier dispatches (GSENM & Bears Ears). There are a few modifications, however. Perhaps most significant is that a ban on recreational shooting throughout Bears Ears was scaled back to apply only to campgrounds, developed recreation sites, rock writing sites, and structural cultural sites. Meanwhile, both plans, especially Bears Ears, take an overly laissez faire approach to livestock grazing, perpetuating impacts on ecological and cultural resources.
The federal Bureau of Land Management terminated Utah’s right of way for a proposed four-lane highway across the Red Cliffs Conservation Area outside St. George. The state and Washington County have been trying for years to build the road in order to “accommodate” the area’s breakneck growth. In 2020, the Trump administration finally issued a right of way, but conservationists sued and forced the BLM to reconsider. In December, the agency sided with the conservationists, revoking the right of way and suggesting St. George expand the existing Red Hills Parkway rather than build a new road through desert tortoise habitat.
The Interior Department launched the process of banning new mining claims and mineral leases on about 270,000 acres of federal land (plus an additional 40,000 acres of private land the feds hope to acquire) near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. Conservationists had been looking to get added protections on the area after lithium mining and geothermal energy companies began eyeing it.
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Republican lawmakers have launched their latest bid to diminish a president’s power to protect landscapes and cultural resources. This week, Rep. Celeste Maloy, of Utah (and who happens to be Ammon Bundy’s cousin), and Rep. Mark Amodei, of Nevada, introduced the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would gut the 1906 Antiquities Act and end a president’s power to establish national monuments. I doubt this will make it very far, since national monuments and parks are pretty damned popular, and Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, and many other national parks were first established as national monuments under the Antiquities Act.
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On that note, the Senate held hearings on Trump’s nominee for Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. Burgum is the former governor of North Dakota, which, by the way, is not considered a public lands state. So it’s a bit bizarre that he’s even being considered for this position — except he is big on fossil fuels and is clearly on board with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill-energy dominance” approach. In the clips I saw, Burgum displayed a lack of knowledge on the public lands he will probably soon oversee. For example, he talked about timber harvesting on public lands, when most public-land logging occurs on U.S. Forest Service land, which is overseen by the Agriculture Department, not Interior. Then he responded to a question about the aforementioned Antiquities Act, saying: “The 1905 Antiquities Act … it’s original intention was to protect … antiquities … areas like Indiana Jones type archaeological protections.” Uhhh… that would be the 1906 act, buddy. And what the hell are Indiana Jones type archaeological protections? Do we really want an Interior Secretary who gleans his knowledge from the movies? Oy.
⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️
Energy Fuels — the owner of the White Mesa uranium mill and the Pinyon Plain mine — is perhaps the most active of all the uranium companies making a lot of noise about exploration and reopening long-idled facilities. They are also the most vocal, telling reporters that current safety and environmental standards and regulations and enforcement are far better than during the Cold War era when the industry ravaged lives and the landscape.
As if to prove the point, the federal Mine Safety & Health Administration recently issued 16 citations to Energy Fuels and its contractors working on the company’s La Sal Mines Complex in southeastern Utah. Violations related to radon concentration and radon monitoring requirements, worker training, personal protection equipment use, and explosive material storage.
Sarah Fields, of Uranium Watch, says she’s “never seen this many violations of this nature at an operating uranium mine from a single inspection.”
One of the contractors, Three Steps Resources, is run by Kyle Kimmerle, holder of numerous mining claims throughout southern Utah and a party to Utah’s lawsuit seeking to revoke Bears Ears National Monument.
LeFevre would become an outspoken opponent of Bill Clinton’s 1996 designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Interestingly, many opponents of that and the Bears Ears designation worried that they would increase industrial-scale tourism.
Garfield County also wants to pave a portion, at least, of the Hole-in-the-Rock road, which also crosses a section of GSENM near Escalante. Conservationists are also pushing back.
Regarding renaming the Burr Trail: You don’t have to live in Utah to voice your opinion on this awful idea.
Leland F. Pollock, Commission Chair
Phone: 435-616-2718
Email: leland.pollock@garfield.utah.gov
Jerry A. Taylor, Commissioner
Phone: 801-856-5566
Email: jerry.taylor@garfield.utah.gov
David B. Tebbs, Commissioner
Phone: 435-231-1272
Email: david.tebbs@garfield.utah.gov
The three-person County Commission will hold a public meeting on Jan. 27 at 1:30 p.m. to hear from the community. Pollock said that a two-thirds vote would determine if the renaming proceeds.
Full KSL article: https://www.ksl.com/.../proposal-to-rename-burr-trail...