On March 4, in senseless acts of violence, Linda, my neighbor, and her niece Natalie Graves were murdered at the base of that mountain.

The murderer, on a road trip from Iowa, had been stranded in Wayne County after hitting an elk and totaling his truck. Broke and in need of a car, he first killed 86-year-old Margaret Oldroyd in nearby Lyman. The much-loved elder had the fatal luck to live at the edge of town, in the first house the murderer came to.

After killing Mrs. Oldroyd, he decided her Buick Regal was unsatisfactory. When he encountered Linda and Natalie setting out on a hike, he murdered them both, took their Subaru, and went on his way, leaving behind nothing but grief.

Using an app connected to the Subaru’s key fob, authorities tracked him for 400 miles to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and arrested him the next day. His killings were brutal and senseless—and utterly random. Any of us could have been pulling into that trailhead.

Linda and her husband Alan retired here five years ago, to revel in this wild country surrounding Capitol Reef National Park. Natalie, 34, was visiting from Massachusetts.

The Deweys were the exceptional retirees who quickly became embedded in the community. Alan volunteered for Capitol Reef’s biologists, scouting for bighorn sheep and cougar. Linda, a spirited connector, ran yoga classes and helped found a public service group, Rural Voices of Utah.

Margaret Oldroyd was a connector, too. Hundreds attended her LDS funeral, both newcomers and the extended Mormon families who had known her throughout their lives, all honoring this kind “guardian at the edge of the town’s heart,” as her memorial card put it.

Neither Torrey nor Lyman numbers more than 300 people. I-70 is 35 miles away—with no services for 110 miles. The county has no stoplights. In 1940, 2,500 people lived in Wayne County’s 2,500 square miles. We’ve since added just 100 people.

Relationships among these scattered communities are tight but complicated. Legacy Mormon families dominate. Torrey is the anomaly, full of newcomers. The murderer struck all three county demographics: proud settlers, thrilled move-ins, and one joyful and awestruck visitor.

These violent acts by a stranger who knew nothing about these people or this place disrupted our sense of safety. As I grapple with raw sorrow, I try to imagine the flood of grief following a mass shooting or a community devastated by war. Unimaginable, we say. Now, I understand viscerally.

Even as we all were texting updates and talking in the aisles of the county’s sole grocery store, our community felt quiet, pulled inward.

Utah’s canyon country has always been a source of rejuvenation and connection for me—the kaleidoscope of rocks, raucous pinyon jays, the legacy of millennia of inhabitants. I picture these connections as a web of humming cables, vibrating through time in unique chords, leading outward to every being, every person, every influence. This vast bundle of life and existence whirrs continually, creating the comforting harmonic tone that defines this place.

There’s tension, sure, between the conservative politicians who rule the county and the conservation-oriented move-ins. But the violence that came unbidden eclipses our differences. We are leaning on each other in our loss. Maybe some of that solidarity will last.

Pink ribbons now encircle every post and sign as a gesture to our loss. As Tonya Moosman, who works at the grocery store, told a reporter: “When somebody asks where you’re from, you don’t say Bicknell or Loa. You say Wayne County. We are one community.”

In Navajo culture, such fracturing violence requires a ceremony to restore balance, to heal. For those of us who are not Native, we’ll need the powers of both land and community to get back to the reassurance and resonance of this place. 

The women we lost knew something of that power. The solidarity of the community after their deaths amplifies that power. We’ll be looking for ways to reconnect with everything that makes this place special, as this place—our place—helps us to heal what a heedless man has broken.

Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent non-profit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. His book, The Capitol Reef Reader, is a tribute to his home landscape.

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The study, covering roughly 8.6 million acres in six management units, will run for at least three years with the goal of indiscriminately exterminating “as many (lions) as possible.”

Buying into this ancient predator-prey superstition are the nonprofits Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and Utah Wild Sheep Foundation. Each has contributed $150,000 to the cull.

Wildlife managers have no idea how many mountain lions roam the state because estimating populations is essentially impossible. Lions are solitary, elusive and range over vast territories they defend. Unlike ungulates that compensate for mortality with fecundity, predators don’t “overpopulate,” and they’re much slower to recover from culling or hunting.

I asked veteran mountain lion researcher Dr. Rick Hopkins, board president of the Cougar Fund, what science supports a claim that killing mountain lions generates more deer. “None,” he replied. “For years, agencies have made such claims, but when pushed to provide evidence, they can’t. Predator control has never worked anywhere.”

Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources estimates the state’s mule deer population at 295,200—73 percent of the “long-term goal.” That goal is based more on desired hunting-license sales than science. Still, considering the natural ebb and flow of deer populations, 73 percent isn’t bad.

Mountain lions have little or nothing to do with the decline of Utah’s mule deer. Predator populations are limited by available prey. What we learned in Biology 101—that predators control prey—is incorrect: Prey controls predators.Utah has experienced prolonged drought, which peaked in 2022. Reduced forage starved female deer so that fewer fawns were born, and those fawns were sickly and therefore less likely to survive winters. When record-breaking snowfall occurred during the winter of 2022-2023, there were massive mule deer die-offs.

Utah’s mountain lion cull follows hard upon a 2023 state law that opened up year-round, mountain lion killing without requiring permits. Both this law and the current cull outrage environmental and animal wellness communities. The Western Wildlife Conservancy and Mountain Lion Foundation have filed a lawsuit (ongoing), asserting that the law violates the state’s Right to Hunt and Fish Act, which requires a “reasonable regulation of hunting.”

The Mountain Lion Foundation dismisses the mountain lion cull study as a “lethal program without rigorous science,” and reports: “Decades of peer-reviewed research across the West show that intensive predator removal rarely delivers sustained or landscape-scale recovery of prey populations. Instead, it often destabilizes predator populations, leading to younger, transient animals, increased conflict and little long-term benefit for deer.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “The science shows that healthy lion populations create robust and healthier deer herds, with lions selectively removing deer afflicted with the 100-percent fatal and highly contagious brain-wasting scourge known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by malformed, self-replicating proteins called ‘prions.’”

All threats to mule deer pale in comparison with CWD. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunter-support group, calls it “the number one threat to deer hunting.”

In Utah, CWD has been detected in 356 of the few mule deer checked. Symptoms include fearlessness and loss of coordination, behaviors inviting lion predation, and thereby removal of disease vectors.

What’s more, mountain lions are resistant to CWD. They deactivate prions through digestion, removing them from the environment. That further protects mule deer as well as possibly protecting people. In 2022, two hunters who ate venison from a CWD-ravaged deer herd in Texas died from prion disease. Given the rarity of human prion infections, this seems an unlikely coincidence.

The Idaho Capital Sun quoted Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, as follows: “We are quite unprepared. If we saw a (CWD) spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans.”

Dr. Mark Elbroch of Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to conserving wild felines, told me this: “Heaps of science show the beneficial contributions of mountain lions. Humans are healthier when we live with mountain lions.”

So are mule deer.

Ted Williams, a longtime environmental writer, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

A mountain lion drinking, photo by David Neils, Wild Nature Photography.

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Maloy has long criticized this southern Utah national monument that was halved by President Trump during his first term, then restored under President Biden. One million awestruck visitors come here every year and spend money in the two Utah counties surrounding the monument, whose towns total less than 14,000 residents. Yet Maloy discounts data showing the economic value of preserved public lands. She neglects the world-class scientific value of these 1.9 million acres, detailed in Biden’s proclamation.

Rep. Maloy’s attack is wily. She and the rest of the congressional delegation know there’s too much public support to ask President Trump to again chop down the monument’s size. Nearly 3 out of 4 Utah voters are on record as wanting to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante protected as a national monument.

So Utah politicians are betting the public won’t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing. They’re using a controversial tactic to force the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the current Resource Management Plan—a blueprint for how the BLM puts the presidential proclamation into effect on the ground.

But monument supporters are paying attention because management plans matter.

After President Biden restored the boundaries of Grand Staircase in 2021, the BLM worked with the public for two years to create the 2025 Resource Management Plan, listening to every conceivable collaborative partner. Such plans guide decision-making for years, and this true compromise keeps ranchers’ grazing permits in place while also factoring in a warming planet, persistent drought, the need for biodiversity and a sustainable future.

Now, Rep. Maloy has obtained an opinion from the Government Accountability Office to treat the 2025 plan merely as a “rule” that Congress can overturn. This unprecedented allowance can’t be challenged in court and permits the Utah delegation to use the Congressional Review Act to kill the conservation-based plan and bar the agency from issuing any “substantially the same” plan in the future. The Trump-era plan that would take its place leaves much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.

Maloy says that emphasizing conservation “undercuts rural economic development.” Frrom 2001 to 2022, however, real per capita income grew by 41 percent in the monument’s counties.

She says that local residents and “trail users” oppose the Biden plan. This is cherry-picking. Motorized trail users always want greater access, even though the Biden-era plan left more than 800 miles of dirt roads and trails open for motorized vehicles.

When Maloy talks about “deep cultural traditions” being disrupted by the current management plan, she isn’t listening to Indigenous people who have made this place their home since time immemorial. The six Native Nations of the Grand-Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition oppose her move, noting that without the “clear roadmap for protection and conservation” provided by the current management plan, “our ancestral lands and … cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation.”

To support their attacks, Utah’s politicians use their timeworn template to argue exclusively for “the needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land.” These politicians, however, listen only to county commissioners and legacy ranchers, not to a much broader constituency.

This is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, not Grand Staircase County Park. The environmental, scientific, interpretive, and Indigenous values and potential of these public lands have national and international importance.

This new attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante from Congress—along with a parallel attack on Minnesota’s Boundary Waters—would set a national precedent with no public input that could upend public lands protection for years. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.

The exhausting years-long battle to protect the resources and restorative magic of Grand Staircase-Escalante can wear out supporters. But this place gives us no choice but to speak up once again. Staying silent puts federal agencies in an impossible position and places all of our public lands at risk. Let your members of Congress know that preservation of the monument requires leaving the current resource management plan in place.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He’s been hiking in Grand Staircase and writing about Colorado Plateau conservation for 50 years.

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Hours earlier, I scrambled up to this cliff to watch the sunset. A lot of people take in the play of light over the red rocks every evening. But the route up a boulder wall that seemed so clear in the daylight was no longer obvious in the twilight. I was stuck.

Count me as one of the many hikers who’ve found themselves in a pickle. I was lucky, though, and finally found my own way down to the trailhead below. 

These days, I’ve been researching how the busiest search and rescue team in Utah, based in Moab, responds to an average of 130 calls per year from people who are not so lucky. This team has to be ready for urgent calls from climbers, mountain bikers, off-roaders, backcountry skiers, hikers, BASE jumpers and river rafters. The team handles it all.

“A lot of emergency situations are like improv because you don’t get to say no,” said Grand County Search and Rescue member Jordan Lister. “It’s just ‘Yes, and…we will get through this together.’”

Lister is one of the dozens of first responders who share their personal stories in a new podcast series that I’m producing, called Back From Beyond. The 60- to 90-minute episodes are a collaboration between the search and rescue team, Grand County tourism and trails staff, and Moab-based KZMU community radio.

In the episode “Hiking Behind the Rocks,” hiker Jason Goldsmith talked about how he got turned around in the maze-like terrain above Moab’s rim. With a fast-moving winter storm approaching, he said he had no choice but to find shelter.

“It was a huge emotional roller coaster,” he recalled, “and I don’t recommend it to anybody.” 

Like most people who call Moab’s search and rescue for help, he didn’t get in trouble by pushing a sport to the limit. Instead, something unexpected happened and the person is unprepared. Perhaps a route takes longer than anticipated, they twist an ankle a few miles in, get turned around and lost, their climbing rope gets stuck or they didn’t pack enough water.

“When I was younger,” said Grand County Search and Rescue member Michelle Leber, “I would hear about accidents and think, ‘Oh, that would never happen to me.’ But small decisions can add up to a miserable day outdoors. I mean, how many things have we all gotten away with and we didn’t even know it?”

The podcast has covered climbers stuck on Castleton Tower, one of the most challenging desert monoliths in the world; a backcountry skier tells of coping with an injury in the remote La Sal Mountains; and an off-roader recounts what happened after flipping their vehicle off a 150-foot cliff. All the stories in this first season of Back From Beyond serve to remind people how quickly things can go south, and how much we depend on somebody helping when they do.

“Outdoor recreation is a community,” said Rachelle Brinkman, recounting her mountain biking accident in the episode, “The Whole Enchilada.” Brinkman suffered injuries after crashing her bike in technical, rocky terrain around Moab. A lot of people came to her aid that day, she said, and she now makes sure to check on any rider who might need a hand.

“We look out for each other,” she said, “and we help each other, whether you’re in search and rescue or not.”

By now I’ve talked to many people about their trips in the backcountry, and it still amazes me how many times they recall saying to themselves before setting out: “Better grab an extra layer, this battery charger, a headlamp, and also tell someone where I’m going.” They realize that one small, smart decision before heading outdoors can save the day.

If you’re exploring the rugged outback of Moab someday and need to make an emergency call for help, you’re in luck. A team of seasoned professionals with Grand County Search and Rescue will work hard to get you home safe.

Molly Marcello is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She directed KZMU News in Moab for more than six years and is the producer of the new documentary podcast series, Back From Beyond.

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Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it’s so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump administration proposes abandoning the 2023 Bureau of Land Management travel plan for Labyrinth Canyon. This 300,000-acre Utah wildland along the Green River just north of Canyonlands National Park is a gem—a fretwork of slickrock canyons along the river. Labyrinth preserves quiet for rafters, hikers, and bighorn sheep. No death-defying rapids here on this lazy, looping stretch easily paddled by families in canoes.

In a model compromise, the current Labyrinth plan maintains access to more than 800 miles of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) routes, closing only 317 miles to vehicles. In the surrounding Moab region, more than 4,000 miles of routes remain open. OHVs have plenty of room to roam.

But moderation is never enough for Utah politicians determined to motorize every inch of our public lands. They are pushing to reopen 141 miles of closed OHV routes at Labyrinth and hoping for even more. You can comment here before October 24.

In another backtrack on conservation in Utah, the administration has solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 acres of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks. The big views from Capitol Reef, Zion, and Bryce Canyon don’t stop at the park boundaries. Visitors, many from other countries, would be horrified by such industrialization of these world-class destinations. Rural Utah depends on these tourists to survive economically.

These are lands that even the conservative second Bush administration deemed unsuitable for mines. As Cory MacNulty, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the proposed leasing, “It’s absurd.”

Now the OHV battalions are threatening to overwhelm Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill on October 5 to open virtually every road in Capitol Reef to off-roaders. They claim that disabled Americans need this fundamental change to park policy, though even the park’s back roads are currently accessible by moderately high-clearance cars and trucks. There’s absolutely no need to permit noisy and destructive OHVs.

The senators’ second bill would potentially open other national parks to OHV use. Lee tried to pass nearly identical bills in 2021 and encountered a buzzsaw of resistance from national park advocates.

As retired Capitol Reef superintendent Sue Fritzke said, “OHVs would denigrate the very resources those sites have been set aside to protect, with increased dust and noise and impacts on wildlife, endangered species, and visitors.”

At each mile farther into remote corners of the park, off-highway vehicles become more problematic. Even though a majority of riders obey the rules, some will go off-road. They just will. Their vehicles are designed for this exact purpose. In Capitol Reef’s considerable backcountry—as in all underfunded national parks and monuments— staffing does not allow for constant patrolling to apprehend and ticket wrongdoers.

Capitol Reef is a place to slow down, not speed up. To revel in quiet, not reach for earplugs. To share the healing land with tenderness and restraint.

Lee disrespects national park values with these twin bills, and Curtis, who likes to tout his nature sensitivity on hikes with constituents, should know better. Their misguided proposals should be left to wither in committee and die. Those of us who love the restorative peace of national parks will just keep fighting such regressive bills.

In her last interview, Jane Goodall asked us to never give up: “Without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing. If people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. Let’s fight to the very end.”

We will.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Utah.

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Virtually everything most Americans think they know about glyphosate—the active ingredient in products like Roundup—is wrong. That’s because social media and ads by lawyers offering to sue Bayer (owner of Monsanto, glyphosate’s original manufacturer) are rife with misinformation.

What most Americans don’t know about glyphosate is that it’s often the only option for saving native fish and wildlife from alien plants. When non-native infestations replace habitat, the animals don’t go somewhere else. They die. That’s why boots-on-the-ground environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy depend on glyphosate.

But fear of glyphosate has created big business for lawyers and a fundraising bonanza for some environmental outfits.

In 2015, with no original research, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—an appendage of the World Health Organization (WHO)—placed glyphosate on its speculative list of “probable carcinogens” along with “red meat” and “very hot beverages.” It did so even though all scientific authorities that have done original research, including its parent WHO and the United States EPA, report no link to cancer. 

Some studies that review existing research do report possible links to cancer. But the study subjects are farm workers who used large quantities of Roundup for years, frequently without protective gear. Roundup is applied by wildlife managers in relatively tiny amounts.

Still, based on IARC’s speculation, there have been glyphosate bans or restrictions in 28 nations as well as municipalities and counties in 15 U.S. states. And Bayer has paid $11 billion to settle lawsuits brought by cancer victims blaming their illnesses on Roundup.

California responded to the IARC review by requiring that glyphosate products carry cancer warnings. But a federal judge struck it down, ruling it “inherently misleading …when apparently all other regulatory and governmental bodies have found the opposite.”

According to the international news agency Reuters, IARC “edited findings from a draft of its review of the weedkiller glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion.”

And this from Dr. Lee Van Wychen, science director for the National and Regional Weed Science Societies: “IARC’s review was such a crooked scam. I’ve never seen anything like it. IARC cherry-picked a couple studies and on top of that fudged the results… Now there are people on the conservation side who are afraid to use glyphosate.”

Utah Lake’s brackish water and extensive wetlands make it one of North America’s most important staging areas for migratory water birds. The watershed also provides vital habitat for other birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, including the federally threatened June sucker.

Fifteen years ago, this biodiversity appeared doomed by an explosion of phragmites, a non-native, deep-rooted reed that spreads through wind-blown seeds and rhizomes. It grows out to four feet in water and all the way to the transitional zone of dry land.

So thick was Utah Lake’s infestation that wildlife couldn’t move through it, and people couldn’t access the lake. Phragmites created fire hazards, sucked vast amounts of water from the already diminished lake, and generated swarms of mosquitoes by blocking water flow.

Large infestations of phragmites can’t be cut or bulldozed, leaving herbicide as the only option. Dead stalks are then crushed or burned to make new growth visible for retreatment.

Spraying with glyphosate formulations began in 2009. “Each year, managers would focus on a different area,” reported the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. Every area of the lake got three consecutive years of the spray and trample treatment.

Today, fish, wildlife, and human access have been largely restored. Glyphosate has eradicated 70 percent of the phragmites and future applications will kill most of what’s left.

Revegetation started this spring. With help from local organizations, the Utah Lake Authority has planted 7,500 native seedlings. “Planting parties” of 400 volunteers will plant 10,000 more native plants by year’s end.

“For the lake,” said Luke Peterson, director of the Utah Lake Authority, “this is a turning point.”

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes exclusively about fish and wildlife.

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It is our place of origin and Navajo spiritual traditions are rooted here. Even when we were forcibly removed from our homeland by the federal government’s Army in the 19th century, our spiritual and cultural connection to these lands has never been extinguished.

Utah Navajos still make use of this historic homeland, which is now known as the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, designated by President Obama in 2016. It is where we practice our ceremonies; gather herbs, firewood and cedar poles; hunt for game; rejuvenate our spirits and caretake our sacred places. Because the monument closely involves us, Navajo and other tribes in the area have been pushing for tribal management.

For many years, the Navajo and other local tribes—Hopi, Uintah, Ouray Ute, Zuni and Ute Mountain Ute—worked together to gain federal protection for this land. But what we gained is now threatened by developments that defile and dishonor the cultural and spiritual significance held by Navajo and other Native peoples.

The most recent example is the plan to build a 460-foot telecommunications tower on a parcel of land owned by a Utah state agency, the Trust Lands Administration. The land that would house the tower is in the heart of the Bears Ears National Monument.

If erected, this alien-looking tower will be a spear in the heart of the Bears Ears area. I am also saddened to think there will likely be more inappropriate developments on Utah Trust Lands within Bears Ears, now that the state has derailed a proposed land exchange between the Trust Lands Administration and the federal government.

The land exchange would have helped ensure that Navajo homelands are managed to protect our cultural and spiritual traditions. Now these lands—our heritage—face death by a thousand cuts.

The company placing the telecommunications tower has applied for and received a conditional use permit from San Juan County. But the company must also apply for and receive a variance from the county, because any tower higher than 35 feetis prohibited. So far, it has not applied for a variance.  

The National Park Service opposes the tower and has submitted comments to both the Utah Trust Lands Administration and San Juan County. The federal agency said the tower would blight the viewshed, diminish the area’s dark skies, and harm habitat for several threatened and endangered bird species.

For more than a century my people have had to fight for our rights. In 1868, when Navajos were finally allowed to return from forced exile, we were confined to a reservation south of the San Juan River. It was much reduced in size from our original homeland.

The prime lands higher up near the water and lush vegetation of Bears Ears were denied us. Nevertheless, these lands have always been a part of our cultural traditions, despite a documented history of racial injustices levied against Utah Navajos.

At every level, from county to state to the federal government, that history includes violations of voting rights, education and civil rights. All had to be litigated in federal court. Through all of that, Utah Navajos have fought to conserve and protect the public lands we traditionally used.

These lands need to exist as nature intended—to regenerate traditional plants and provide homes to wildlife that in turn sustain Navajo cultural traditions.

The Utah Trust Lands Administration and the federal government have a chance to do the right thing for Bears Ears. I urge the state of Utah and the federal government to restart discussions about a land exchange.

Otherwise, more out-of-place and inharmonious developments such as this 460-foot blinking tower could come to dominate the Bears Ears landscape.

Mark Maryboy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He served from 1984 to 2000 as a San Juan County, Utah, commissioner, and from 1990 to 2006, he was a delegate to the Navajo Nation Council.

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For six weeks, nearly 80 people were trapped in a cage, sleeping in tents and hastily constructed hogans. Only meager meals were provided, and the captors sometimes tossed food over the fence.

Like the infamous Japanese American prison camps during World War II, the only crime my relatives committed was belonging to a group of people that the white majority deemed a threat. There was no due process for Japanese Americans or for the Utes.

But while Japanese American incarceration sites, including the Topaz Camp near Delta, Utah, have memorials to the victims, there are no plaques or interpretive displays in Blanding acknowledging the suffering my ancestors endured.

In fact, the events that led up to their imprisonment are best known by misleading names like the “Posey War” and the “Last Indian Uprising.” My ancestor, William Posey, was a leader in the Anikanuche Band who continued traditional hunting across the vast Canyonlands and Bears Ears region into the 1920s, long after many other Indigenous people had been forced onto reservations.

On March 19, 1923, two Ute men were convicted for the alleged raiding of a shepherd’s camp. After an altercation with the San Juan County sheriff, the two men fled and joined their families.

They escaped over Comb Ridge into what is now Bears Ears National Monument. A posse of 50 armed white settlers pursued the Ute people on horseback and in a Model-T Ford. County commissioners also requested an airplane equipped with WWI bombs for use in the chase. Before a plane arrived, the posse found the families, forced them into trucks at gunpoint, then transported them to the barbed-wire stockade in Blanding.

I tell this story because the jailing of Ute people 101 years ago had devastating consequences for my community and healing is necessary even today.

Two Ute men were murdered, including Posey. Ute children were among those shipped to Indian Boarding Schools, separating families and cutting off traditional teachings. As a condition of release, prisoners in the camp had to sign allotment papers for small parcels of land that relinquished their claims to the large Ute reservation that had once been proposed for nearly all of San Juan County.

These events were tragic but they were not a “war” or an “uprising.” Like the Long Walk of the Diné people in 1864, or the Trail of Tears that began in the 1830s, my Anikanuche ancestors were subjected to brutal settler violence in Utah, which had no similarities to a war fought between two nations’ militaries.

Despite these injustices, my people carry on what we call a Legacy of Resilience, and last year the Ute Mountain Ute community of White Mesa began telling our side of the story for the first time.

I was selected to direct the 100 Years of Silence project, and I’ve been working with elders, historians and artists to facilitate healing. We’ve hosted many meetings to listen to community members talk about this history. Seven local artists produced pieces now on display at The Leonardo Museum of Creativity and Innovation in Salt Lake City until May 28. On March 23, we hosted a public launch for the project with presentations from 18 Ute Tribal members.

Throughout the process, I’ve been inspired by the courage and wisdom of my community. Our collective effort aims to end a century of silence to usher in an era of recognition and empowerment for all sides.

As the 101st anniversary of the Anikanuche incarceration drew to a close last month, we hoped Utahns would begin to acknowledge the events of 1923. We ask that those awful weeks no longer be referred to as the “Posey War,” a term based on misinformation that spread as the events unfolded. The 100 Years of Silence project is currently seeking input from the White Mesa community to rename this series of traumatic events.

Perhaps one day, a memorial could be installed on the site of the incarceration camp that is near the historic bank building that still stands in Blanding. As the Ute scholar Forrest Cuch reminded us at the anniversary, healing cannot occur until the truth is known and accepted.

Shaun Ketchum Jr is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He directs the 100 Years of Silence project and is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

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Three presidents have signed Bears Ears proclamations. Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, but supporters were devastated when Donald Trump eviscerated the monument the following year, reducing its area by 85%. In 2021, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries and then some.

What’s clear is that Bears Ears remains reviled by Republican officials and cherished by Indigenous tribes and conservationists.

The monument, 1.36 million acres in southeast Utah, lies within San Juan County. The Navajo Nation covers 25% of the county, and Native people account for more than half of the 14,200-person population. Just 8% of the county is private land while another 5% is state trust land.

The rest — 62% of the county — is federal land owned by the people of the United States and administered by the Departments of Agriculture and Interior. This immense commons testifies to the sublime difficulty of the place — beautiful enough to warrant preservation as national parks, monuments and forests. But it’s also arid enough to attract only a few 19th-century settlers to what had been Indigenous homeland for millennia.

I think it’s fair to say that San Juan County’s white residents never envisioned challenges to their political power. But in 2009, the feds came down hard on generations of casual pothunting by local white families. Then, after a century of oppressing their Indigenous neighbors, lawsuits strengthened Native voting rights. The county commission became majority Navajo from 2018 to 2022.

Native influence keeps expanding. The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition first envisioned a national monument and became co-stewards for these 1.36 million acres. They have a champion in Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, but such historic changes make the dominant culture uneasy.

In February, Utah Governor Spencer Cox dramatically withdrew from a Bears Ears land exchange poised for completion. This swap of state trust lands for Bureau of Land Management lands would hugely benefit the state. Details were already negotiated; each side compromised; the stakeholders were largely content.

But in 2024, Utah politics are stark, compounded by distrust and disinformation.

At statehood in 1896, Utah received four sections per township to support public schools and universities. The Utah Trust Lands Administration manages these scattered lands — blue squares on ownership maps — but blocking up these blue squares into manageable parcels means trading land with federal agencies.

Such trades aren’t rare and can be grand in scale. A 1998 negotiation between Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt traded Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument’s 176,000 acres of school sections for BLM land elsewhere — along with a hefty $50 million payment to Utah from the U.S. Treasury. Utah Trust Lands still brags about the deal on its website.

But the old guard is up in arms about the draft Bears Ears Resource Management Plan released for public comment on March 8. The BLM’s preferred alternative emphasizes traditional Indigenous knowledge and land health.

Any such gestures toward conservation elicit local outrage about the feds “destroying” the pioneer way of life. The subtext: the people long in charge don’t want to lose power.

Denouncing federal overreach is always a sure win for Utah politicians. In this year’s Republican primary, San Juan County-based legislator Phil Lyman is challenging the incumbent governor with fierce anti-public lands rhetoric. Governor Cox will need to protect his right flank.

Meanwhile, school trust lands within Bears Ears remain at risk. The second tallest structure in Utah, a 460-foot telecom tower with blinking red lights, could rise on state land in the heart of the monument. It’s been approved by county planners, and the Trust Lands Administration could add poison pills on other lands proposed for exchange.

The elected leaders of Utah have decided that the monument’s integrity and the needs of the state’s children matter less than political gamesmanship.

The five tribes of Bears Ears know better: “It is our obligation to our ancestors…and to the American people, to protect Bears Ears.” Their big hearts will win in the end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Utah and will publish the 35th anniversary edition of his book The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin next winter.

Corrections: The 4th paragraph has been changed to reflect the monument is 1.36 million acres. Previously it read 5 million acres. The 7th paragraph read 1.3 million acres and that has been updated as well to 1.36 million acres. Paragraph 15 is changed to reflect the proposed telecom tower would become the second-tallest structure in Utah. Not the tallest.

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Writers on the Range has a simple two-part mission. One of its aims is to engage Westerners in thinking and talking to each other about issues important to the region. The other aim is to entice readers to look forward to these fact-based opinions, with the hope that they’ll then want to keep their local journalism outlet alive and flourishing.

This year, the focus of writers ran the gamut from A to W. Abortion bans, wrote Idaho-based Crista Worthy, caused women’s health to suffer severely, while wolves, wrote Story Warren, were unfairly blamed for killing livestock in Colorado.

Several columns covered the depleted Colorado River, while longtime journalist Rocky Barker wrote that at last, four Klamath River dams would be demolished in the Northwest to help struggling salmon populations.

Greg McNamee made an excellent case for paying wildland firefighters what they deserved for their hazardous work, and Pepper Trail, the renowned Oregon biologist, wrote several opinions, including one about his own efforts to save wildlife from fatal encounters with vehicles.

No matter what Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff writes from her perch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—insulting hikers for their lack of trail etiquette, mocking visitors for their Instagram obsessions— readers love how she slings her stings. Her pieces routinely run in 50 or more outlets.

From the Yellowstone area, Molly Absolon was also a popular writer, telling about backcountry heroes—mostly volunteers—who extricate hikers, climbers and drivers of snow machines from dangerous situations they’d gotten themselves into.

In Colorado, Erica Rosenberg detailed how federal land exchanges almost always serve the wealthy, and in Alaska, Tim Lydon wrote about his recreationally oriented town of Girdwood, so out of whack economically that teachers can’t find local housing.

Ernie Atencio celebrated the work of two Westerners who died recently, the New Mexico rancher Sid Goodloe, who transformed ranching by promoting short-duration, rotational grazing, and Dave Foreman, founder of EarthFirst! who worked to save old-growth forests, wilderness and migration corridors for big game.

The most-read award goes to Writers on the Range publisher Dave Marston, whose piece about the looming energy gap appeared in 67 publications. It also prompted an invitation from Amory Lovins, the guru of energy efficiency, for Marston to visit his Rocky Mountain Institute and learn why his column was so wrong about small, modular nuclear power being an option. Marston accepted that invitation, and this January his opinion will reveal whether he’s seen the light, so to speak.

Writers on the Range fields diverse reactions on its website, and some, to put it mildly, get personal. The column by Dana Johnson headlined “Mountains don’t need hardware,” enraged some technical climbers. The director of The Access Fund, which wants climbers to be able to put bolts into mountains in wilderness, vilified Marston, even accusing him of securing his position through “nepotism.”

Marston, who wrote eight opinions this year, didn’t bother to point out that not that many people choose to work for free, no matter what their last name.

There also emerged a healthy conversation about whether too many out-of-area hunters crowded public land. Andrew Carpenter’s opinion prompted rancher Lesli Allison to reply that 80 percent of scarce winter habitat for big game is provided by ranchers, and that cutting hunting tags for outsiders threatened the ability of ranchers to make a living.

Whatever retired land-use professor Rick Knight writes about—monster mansions polluting views or how much fun it can be to work like a dog restoring neglected land—readers love his message. They can tell he knows and cares about protecting the region’s open lands. But then, every opinion writer this year seemed to share his passion for the fascinating and often contentious West.

Finally, opinions can have impact if they’re sent out at the right time. “Outrage in Wyoming,” by Savannah Rose, urged the state not to auction off 640 acres within Grand Teton National Park. Her piece helped raise the number of angry objectors to 9,000, with 7,000 comments coming in the last week. The pressure worked: Wyoming officials postponed a decision on an auction until sometime in 2024.

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, an independent opinion service that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. Want to comment, get on our newsletter list, or write a column? Go to writersontherange.org.

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