A resource from Grand Staircase Escalante Partners
background, policy, and where to read more
Two hundred and seventy-five MILLION years… and then there is the last thirty. We have been given an opportunity to touch a dinosaur’s footprint and literally feel the moment that connects us between place and time, yet it falls prey to policy.
That is why we #standforgrandstaircase
Let us introduce you properly, because most of what gets said about this place is said in the language of acreage and administration — and that is the least interesting thing about it.
Before anything else, the oldest introduction, in the words of the nations whose homeland this is:
"The Monument is home to cultural places of profound importance to Tribes, including sacred petroglyph panels, ancestral dwellings, and pilgrimage trails. For some Tribes, this is our Holy Land. Our people have interacted with the landscape since time immemorial and today we still come to Grand Staircase to gather food and medicine, hunt, collect firewood, and to visit springs and sacred places."
— Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition: the Hopi Tribe, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Navajo Nation, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Zuni TribeWhat follows is a geological and human account, assembled from published science and published history. It is one way of telling it. It is not the oldest way, and it is not the only one.
It is roughly 275 million years old, if you start counting at the oldest rock you can stand on and stop at the youngest. It has been, at various points in its life, a shallow tropical sea, a desert of moving dunes larger than any sand sea on Earth today, a swampy coastline on the edge of an inland ocean, a river delta walked by tyrannosaurs, a lake district, and finally — only in the last few million years, which is to say recently — the canyon country you can drive to.
It has been home to people for at least twelve thousand years. It has been farmed, hunted, prayed in, painted, mapped, misnamed, homesteaded, grazed, mined around, photographed, argued over, designated, reduced, restored, and reduced again.
It has never once been empty.
What follows is its life, in order. The policy starts halfway down. We put it there on purpose.
The nations connected to this land have their own accounts of how it came to be. Those accounts belong to them. Some are told only in winter. Some are restricted to particular people. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office's research protocol states plainly that the Tribe "reserves a right to determine how shared knowledge and information will be used," and the Kaibab Band's language program is equally clear: "Tribe's linguistic knowledge belongs to us."
We looked for traditional narratives that the nations themselves have published about these specific landforms, and did not find them. That absence is not a gap to be filled by us. If you want to hear a Southern Paiute creation account, hear it from a Southern Paiute woman who chose to make it public: Eleanor Tom tells it here, in We Shall Remain: A Native History of Utah.
Everything here is sediment. Every cliff you photograph was once loose material settling somewhere quiet — on a seafloor, in a dune field, at the bottom of a lake — and the colour of each layer is a record of the world that made it.
In 1880 the geologist Clarence Dutton looked at the whole stack and described it as a staircase. The name stuck because it is exactly right: five great steps, each a cliff of a different colour, climbing north through younger and younger rock for a hundred miles.
Roughly 200 to 180 million years ago, this was sand. Not beach sand — an erg, a sea of dunes, the kind of landscape that has no water in it at all for most of a year. Those dunes hardened into the Navajo Sandstone, and you can still read the wind in it: the long sweeping cross-beds in every canyon wall are the faces of dunes, frozen mid-migration.
You will often read that this dune field was larger than the Sahara. It was not. It was larger than all of the Sahara's dune fields put together — which is a stranger and better fact, and the Utah Geological Survey has had to correct the first version more than once.
Even then it was not lifeless. Recent work at the University of Utah found lake deposits between the dunes, and a climate wetter and more active than anyone had assumed. There was water in the desert. There usually is, here.
About 93 million years ago the middle of North America flooded. The Western Interior Seaway ran from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and split the continent in two, and for several million years this ground lay under it. The mud that settled on that seafloor is the Tropic Shale — grey, soft, full of ammonites and marine reptiles, and now weathering into badlands with no water in sight for miles.
In 2023 the monument's paleontologists described Sarabosaurus dahli from that shale, a 94-million-year-old mosasaur and the oldest known in North America. Its name means "Dahl's reptile of the mirage," after Steve Dahl, the monument's longest-serving volunteer. That is how most things here get named: someone spends years walking, and eventually the rock gives something up.
Then the sea began to withdraw east. The shoreline swung back and forth across this ground for millions of years, leaving coastal swamps that compressed into coal seams — the same coal that four generations later would decide the monument's political fate. Some of those seams have caught fire naturally and burned for centuries. The 1996 proclamation notes it almost in passing: "Naturally burning coal seams have scorched the tops of the Burning Hills brick-red."
Sources: Utah Geological Survey PI-64 · USGS, Geology of the Grand Staircase · UGS Special Study 99, Paleontological Survey of GSENM · UGS, Navajo erg vs. Sahara · University of Utah, dating the Navajo Sandstone · BLM, Sarabosaurus dahli
While the seaway split North America, the western half became an island continent. Scientists call it Laramidia — less than a third the size of North America today, roughly the area of Australia, a long narrow strip of land running from Alaska to Mexico.
This monument holds one of the best records of what lived on it. Between about 76 and 74 million years ago, rivers here buried animals fast enough and completely enough that the Kaiparowits Formation became, in the words of the 1996 proclamation, "one of the best and most continuous records of Late Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world."
The oldest known member of the tyrannosaurid family — T. rex's lineage, pushed back at least two million years by this one animal. Found in 2009 by Scott Richardson, a BLM employee.
Fifteen horns and horn-like structures on one head — the most ornate skull of any dinosaur ever found. Named for the same Scott Richardson, then a volunteer.
A duck-billed dinosaur up to 40 feet long, probably the largest animal in this ecosystem. Its species name is the monument itself.
Named for Alan Titus, the monument's paleontologist. Nobody knows what the enormous nose was for; it was not for smelling.
An armoured ankylosaur, dated to within a hundred thousand years. Its closest relatives are Asian, not North American — evidence of animals crossing from Asia and moving south. Named for Randy Johnson, a volunteer who prepared the skull.
Up to 22 feet long, four tonnes, with a skull over seven feet. Named for Mike Getty, who managed the collections.
Look at those names again. Richardson, Titus, Getty, Johnson, Dahl. The scientific record of this place is signed by the people who walked it — several of them volunteers who gave decades to it. That is worth noticing on a page otherwise full of proclamations.
In 2010, describing Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops, researchers documented something nobody expected: the dinosaurs of southern Laramidia were different species from those in the north, at the same time, on a landmass smaller than Australia. It was the first documented case of intracontinental endemism in dinosaurs — two distinct worlds on one narrow island continent, and this monument is where the southern one is written down.
Since 2000, roughly 165,000 acres have been surveyed for fossils and more than 3,900 significant sites documented. The named-species tally from those surveys: 14 dinosaurs, 12 lizards, 10 mammals, 4 fishes, 4 turtles.
The asteroid is not in these rocks. The dinosaur-bearing layers stop around 74 million years ago, and the next unit up is a river conglomerate with essentially no fossils in it. There is an eight-million-year gap where the end of the Cretaceous should be. We mention it because it is the kind of thing that gets written into a story that the rock does not actually support — and the honest version is more interesting: the record here is extraordinary, and it is also incomplete, and most of it has never been surveyed at all.
Sources: Loewen et al. 2013, Lythronax (PLOS ONE) · Sampson et al. 2010, endemism (PLOS ONE) · Wiersma & Irmis 2018, Akainacephalus (PeerJ) · Royal Society, Nasutoceratops · Natural History Museum of Utah · BLM, 25th anniversary tally
All of that rock was laid down flat, near sea level. Then the whole Colorado Plateau rose — a mean of about 2,100 metres of rock uplift since the Late Cretaceous, and remarkably, without crumpling. The layers went up nearly intact.
Geologists still argue about when and why. One estimate puts most of it in the last 15 million years; a widely cited 2002 study describes two separate phases beginning much earlier. What they agree on is that a large part of the uplift is still not explained by any mechanism anyone has demonstrated. There is an open question the size of a mountain range sitting under this landscape.
What uplift did was give water somewhere to fall. Rivers that had been meandering across a plain suddenly had thousands of feet of gradient, and they spent it cutting. In the Glen Canyon reach, measured incision runs 350 to 600 metres per million years — and the cutting has not been steady. Recent work found long pauses followed by bursts.
The famous slot canyons are young — astonishingly young. Between roughly 55,000 and 48,000 years ago the broad canyons here filled with sediment, in places 40 metres deep. When the streams cut back down, they came down beside their old buried channels and sliced into fresh sandstone.
— Loope, Goble & Johnson, 2014So Peekaboo and Spooky and Dry Fork are not the patient work of millions of years. They are the most recent sentence in a very long book, written in the last few tens of thousands of years, and still being written now. The Escalante River — ninety miles from where North and Birch Creeks meet, down to the Colorado — is still cutting today.
Sources: Pederson, Mackley & Eddleman 2002, GSA Today · Cook et al. 2009, incision rates · Loope, Goble & Johnson 2014, "Prelude to seven slots" · BLM, Geology of GSENM
At the edge of the town of Escalante there is a rock shelter where people camped roughly twelve thousand years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. They hunted deer. They came back, again and again, across generations. North Creek Shelter is one of the oldest well-documented occupation sites on the Colorado Plateau, and it is the beginning of a human record here that has never been broken.
For the next seven thousand years — the Archaic, roughly 8000 to 1000 BC — people moved with the seasons between elevations, gathering seeds and tubers and berries and hunting small game. Seven thousand years is longer than all of recorded history. It is easy to compress into a sentence and worth pausing on.
Then people began to stay. The Fremont appear in the Escalante River basin around AD 500, building storage cists and masonry granaries tucked into cliffs, and pithouses with benches around the walls and ramped entryways. From the Ancestral Puebloan world to the south came small pueblos with courtyards and subterranean kivas, on the Kaiparowits Plateau and along the river.
They farmed at seven thousand to seven and a half thousand feet, on rainfall alone. Anyone who has tried to grow anything in southern Utah should sit with that number for a moment.
The farmers left. The reason usually given is drought, and there was one — a severe one around 1280. But the fuller account is more human than that. Ancestral Paiute people had arrived by about 1250, foragers who used the same wild foods the farmers depended on in bad years. When the drought came, the fallback was already spoken for.
And the two groups appear to have lived alongside each other for fifty years or more before the farmers moved on. Not a collapse. A long, slow, negotiated change — which is what most change here has actually looked like.
Southern Paiute people were farming along these creeks and rivers when the first Europeans came through in 1776. Three bands held this country: Kaibab, Kaiparowits and Panguitch. Their descendants are here now.
"Southern Paiute people view their traditional lands as a Holy Land where the Creator originally placed them… Creation established a birthright bond between the Southern Paiute people, and all their generations to come, and the natural resources of this environment."
— Ethnographic Assessment of Kaibab Paiute Cultural Resources in GSENM, 2004That study also records something the geology sections above cannot: that springs here have names and personalities, that natural resources are understood as alive, capable of speaking, willing to give life. Skutumpah — Rabbitbrush Water. Tupac — Black Water. A different and older system of knowing exactly the same ground.
"Our relationship to the Monument is not only historical, it is living and ongoing. Tribal citizens continue to hunt, gather, visit sacred places, and conduct ceremonies connected to this land."
— Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition"Many assume that cultural sites have been abandoned, or refer to them as 'ruins.' These places are not abandoned, nor are they ruined. These are living landscapes for which Tribes are the original stewards, and we are the living descendants of the ancestors that left their footprints and writings on these landscapes."
— Georgie Pongyesva, HopiMost features here carry two names. Some of the Southern Paiute ones have been published by Shanandoah Anderson, a Shivwits Band tribal member, on a Nuwu family website — not as an official tribal publication, and we cite it as what it is.
As that source notes: "In reading the following Paiute names it should be remembered that Indian languages have many idioms not found in English."
Roughly four thousand archaeological sites have been recorded inside the monument, and staff have estimated the true number closer to six thousand. Somewhere between five and seven percent of the landscape has ever been surveyed. Whatever is written into this ground, we have read almost none of it.
Sources: Spangler & Zweifel 2021, Deep Roots: A 10,000-Year Indigenous History of GSENM (BLM) · Stoffle et al. 2004, Kaibab Paiute ethnographic assessment · Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition · Utah History Encyclopedia, Paiute · 2017 Interior Department analysis (site counts) · Nuwu place names, Shanandoah Anderson (Shivwits Band) · Grand Canyon Trust, formation of the Coalition
In 1776 two Franciscan friars, Domínguez and Escalante, crossed Utah looking for a route to California. The river here carries Escalante's name.
He never saw it. The expedition passed well to the west and never entered this drainage. The name was applied in 1872 by Almon Harris Thompson of the Powell Survey, honouring a man who had been dead for eighty years and had never stood on the ground. Thompson then suggested the same name to the settlers arriving in 1875.
You will also read that the Escalante was the last river discovered in the lower 48. What that means, precisely, is the last river of its size to be mapped by Euro-Americans. Southern Paiute families were farming its banks the entire time. It is a good illustration of how this landscape's official record works: things become real at the moment someone from elsewhere writes them down.
Men from Panguitch came looking for a milder climate and grazing land and founded Escalante in the spring of 1875. Boulder followed in 1889. These are small numbers of people in a very large country, and the difficulty of that is not decoration — it is the whole character of both towns.
In November 1879, 250 men, women and children set out with 83 wagons and more than a thousand head of livestock to build a wagon road to the San Juan. Escalante was the last town they passed through.
They reached a notch in the cliffs above the Colorado — a drop of nearly 2,000 feet, at an average grade of 25 degrees and in places 45 — and they went down it, on 26 January 1880, using pick axes, shovels and a limited quantity of blasting powder.
For decades Boulder was effectively unreachable. Between 1924 and 1940, farmers there shipped cream out by postal mule train three times a week. A roadside marker records the consequence with more poetry than most official documents manage: "In summer, pails of cream occasionally fermented en route, blasting off their lids and coating the mail bags with sour cream."
The Civilian Conservation Corps built Hell's Backbone Road in 1933, and then spent five years and many tons of dynamite building the road now called Highway 12, finished on 21 June 1940. It was the first all-weather connection between Escalante and Boulder. Boulder Mountain was not paved until 1985.
Boulder is often called the last town in America to get its mail by mule. The documented version is narrower and still remarkable: as late as 1940 Boulder was receiving mail by mule train for part of the year. The claim to being last does not hold — the Postal Service still packs mail down to Supai, Arizona, by mule today. Boulder's own town website is careful to phrase it as a claim rather than a fact, and we will follow their lead.
Ranching arrived with settlement in the 1870s, peaked in the 1940s, and has been declining economically ever since — while remaining central to how people here understand themselves. That gap between economic weight and cultural weight explains a great deal of what follows.
Under the Kaiparowits Plateau lies an estimated 62 billion tons of coal. How much could ever have been recovered is disputed — the Utah Geological Survey said 11 to 16 billion tons, the federal government said the recovery rate would be under ten percent. In the mid-1990s, Andalex Resources held 17 leases across nearly 35,000 acres and proposed the Smoky Hollow mine: roughly 75 million tons over thirty years, and about 155 truck trips a day through this country.
On 18 September 1996, President Clinton designated the monument, and that mine was never built. Everything on the rest of this page proceeds from that day.
Sources: Utah State History, Domínguez–Escalante expedition · NPS Glen Canyon, naming of the Escalante · NPS, Hole-in-the-Rock · Utah History Encyclopedia, Escalante · Living New Deal, Highway 12 · USPS, mule train delivery to Supai · GAO RCED-98-5R, Kaiparowits coal · "Cows and Conservation in Grand Staircase-Escalante"
Everything above took 275 million years.
Everything below took thirty.
On July 13, 2026, two presidential proclamations reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 90 percent and Bears Ears National Monument by about 91 percent. Both were published in the Federal Register on July 17. The excluded lands open to entry, location, selection, sale or other disposition under the public land laws at 9:00 a.m. eastern time on September 11, 2026 — sixty days after signing.
Grand Staircase-Escalante keeps two units: the Canyons of the Escalante Unit (approximately 172,641 acres) and the Kaiparowits Horizon Unit (approximately 8,900 acres). Bears Ears keeps two: Shash Jáa (approximately 106,816 acres, in five non-contiguous parcels) and Indian Creek (approximately 14,279 acres).
The proclamations give two reasons. First, critical minerals: for Grand Staircase-Escalante the text names chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silver, thorium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc and zirconium, citing “our Nation’s need to reduce its reliance on foreign sources.” Second, a reading of the Antiquities Act: that “generic topographic and geologic features” — plateaus, cliffs, sedimentary layers — are not “objects of historic or scientific interest” and so cannot be the basis for a reservation.
The Bears Ears proclamation also disbands the Bears Ears Commission, the five-nation co-management body seated in 2016, stating that the Secretaries “shall have no obligation to engage, consult, or coordinate” with it. It is replaced by a fifteen-member advisory committee: five tribal representatives, four local government representatives, and six stakeholders recommended by the Governor of Utah.
Grazing is unaffected by the change. Both proclamations state that nothing in them affects existing authorizations for livestock grazing.
Mining claims were filed on excluded land within a day. As of mid-August 2026 at least nine claims had been recorded in San Juan and Kane counties. Earthjustice has argued they are premature, since the proclamations themselves state that appropriation under the mining laws before the restoration date is unauthorized; the claims could be refiled after September 11.
Several tribal nations and conservation organizations have said publicly that they will challenge the proclamations in federal court. As of the latest reporting we could verify (mid-August 2026), no new lawsuit had been filed. The 2017-era cases remain stayed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., and a separate case brought by the State of Utah and Garfield County — challenging the 2021 restorations — was revived by the Tenth Circuit in June 2026. Those are different cases and are easy to confuse.
Sources: Proclamation 11044 (Grand Staircase-Escalante), Federal Register · Proclamation 11043 (Bears Ears), Federal Register · White House fact sheet · Mining claims filed — Earthjustice · Opponents headed to court — AP
Most of the country is still there, still public, and still open. What changes is which rules apply where. Maps, signage and management authority are all mid-transition, and the BLM’s own monument page had not been updated to reflect the new boundaries at the time this page was written. Check current conditions with the BLM field offices in Escalante, Cannonville and Kanab before you go.
Official page: BLM — Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
President Clinton reserves approximately 1.7 million acres under the Antiquities Act (Proclamation 6920), calling it “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” He signs at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. Utah's congressional delegation and county officials say they were not consulted; the designation ends a planned coal project on the Kaiparowits Plateau. Local opposition to the manner of the designation has never gone away, and it is the root of much of what follows.
Sources: Proclamation 6920 (BLM, PDF) · High Country News, 1996
The BLM's first monument management plan prohibits cross-country motorized travel and designates roughly 908 miles of routes open to street-legal vehicles, about 553 of them open to ATVs and dirt bikes.
Sources: Federal Register
The Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni form the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and formally petition the President for a 1.9-million-acre, tribally co-managed monument. It is the first time tribes collectively petition a president under the Antiquities Act.
Sources: Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
President Obama reserves approximately 1.35 million acres (Proclamation 9558) — less than the 1.9 million the Coalition requested — and creates the Bears Ears Commission, one elected officer from each of the five nations, to guide monument management.
Sources: Proclamation 9558
Bears Ears is cut to approximately 201,876 acres, an 85 percent reduction, and split into Shash Jáa and Indian Creek units; the Bears Ears Commission is replaced by a Shash Jáa Commission that adds a San Juan County commissioner as a voting member. Grand Staircase-Escalante is cut to approximately 1,003,863 acres, a 46 percent reduction, and split into three units. Tribes and conservation groups sue in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Sources: Proclamation 9681 (Bears Ears) · Proclamation 9682 (Grand Staircase) · Hopi Tribe v. Trump — NARF
President Biden restores Bears Ears to approximately 1.36 million acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante to approximately 1.87 million acres, and re-establishes the Bears Ears Commission with authority over the whole monument. Both monuments end up slightly larger than at their original designation.
Sources: Proclamation 10285 (Bears Ears) · Proclamation 10286 (Grand Staircase)
The State of Utah, Garfield County and Kane County, joined by recreation and mining interests, challenge the 2021 proclamations as exceeding the Antiquities Act. Tribal nations intervene. In August 2023 the federal district court in Utah dismisses the case for lack of jurisdiction. Utah appeals.
Sources: Utah Attorney General · Grand Canyon Trust
The BLM, the Forest Service and the five nations of the Bears Ears Commission sign a cooperative agreement for co-management of the monument — tribal participation in decision-making, with federal funding to support tribal management work. The BLM Director calls it “true co-management” that will “serve as a model.”
Sources: Department of the Interior
Six nations — the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Zuni Tribe — form a coalition to advocate for long-term protection of Grand Staircase-Escalante and for tribal voices in its management.
Sources: Moab Times-Independent · The Coalition
The BLM signs the Record of Decision for a management plan covering all 1.87 million acres, following two years of tribal consultation. It establishes four zones — front country, passage, outback and primitive — with roughly 1.23 million acres in the primitive zone, and closes about 7 percent of the monument to livestock grazing, mostly riparian. Utah's delegation objects that it was pushed through “in its midnight hours.” This plan becomes the target of the next year's congressional fight.
Sources: Federal Register · BLM announcement · Utah News Dispatch
In January the Government Accountability Office finds the management plan is a “rule” subject to the Congressional Review Act, opening a window to repeal it by simple majority. In March, Senator Mike Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy introduce resolutions of disapproval. The fast-track window closes in June without a floor vote; the resolutions remain technically pending but lose privileged status.
Sources: GAO decision B-337705 · S.J.Res.109 · Rep. Maloy · SUWA on the deadline
In Garfield County v. Trump, the Tenth Circuit reverses the dismissal and sends Utah's challenge back to the district court, holding that the Antiquities Act's requirements — “objects of historic or scientific interest” and “the smallest area compatible” — impose limits a court can review. One judge dissents in part. The ruling cuts both ways: it is the legal opening Utah wanted against the 2021 restorations, and it is also the reviewability hook that challengers to the 2026 reductions will use.
Sources: Tenth Circuit opinion · Harvard EELP analysis
Proclamation 11044 reduces Grand Staircase-Escalante to approximately 181,541 acres. Proclamation 11043 reduces Bears Ears to approximately 121,096 acres and disbands the Bears Ears Commission. Together the two monuments fall from over three million acres to about 302,600. Both 2026 cuts go deeper than the 2017 cuts did.
Sources: Proclamation 11044 · Proclamation 11043 · Bloomberg Law
At 9:00 a.m. eastern time, the excluded lands become open to entry, location, selection, sale or other disposition under the public land laws.
Sources: Moab Sun News
Grand Staircase Escalante Partners' land acknowledgment names nine nations: the Hopi, Zuni, Dine/Navajo, San Juan Southern Paiute, Kaibab Paiute, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Jemez Pueblo and Acoma. Its Native Perspectives page uses a longer list and an important qualifier — the Monument has “deep historical and modern-day connection to Native peoples, including (but not limited to)” thirteen named nations, adding the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Tesuque Pueblo, San Felipe Pueblo and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. The 2021 proclamation names a third, overlapping set. No list is the last word, and that is worth saying out loud.
“Our people have interacted with the landscape since time immemorial and today we still come to Grand Staircase to gather food and medicine, hunt, collect firewood, and to visit springs and sacred places.”
— Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal CoalitionThe Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition was formed in July 2015 by five nations, operating under a memorandum of understanding signed by all five tribal councils — described by the Coalition as an extension of each nation's sovereign authority rather than a conventional nonprofit. Thirty tribes have expressed support for Bears Ears protection.
The Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition formed on March 25, 2025 — six nations advocating for long-term protection of this monument and for tribal priorities to be meaningfully included in how it is managed. Autumn Gillard, Cultural Resources Manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, coordinates it.
Created in 2016 and reaffirmed in 2021, the Commission was made up of elected leaders from the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation and Pueblo of Zuni. In 2022 the federal agencies signed a cooperative co-management agreement with it. The Commission authored “Alternative E,” a standalone management alternative that became the preferred alternative in the Bears Ears resource management plan adopted in January 2025 — the first federal land plan to embed Indigenous leadership and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge at every stage. The July 2026 proclamation disbanded it.
“Our Tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable. Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult.”
— Autumn Gillard, Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, July 13, 2026A 2017 Interior Department analysis counted 3,985 recorded archaeological sites within Grand Staircase-Escalante, with BLM staff estimating roughly 6,000 actual sites given a records backlog. Only five to seven percent of the monument has been archaeologically surveyed. In the five years before designation, about 72 cultural sites were inventoried each year; after designation, about 161.
The 2021 proclamation directed the BLM to provide access for tribal members' traditional cultural, spiritual and customary uses, including the collection of medicines, berries, vegetation, forest products and firewood. The July 2026 proclamation retains only generic language directing consultation with federally recognized tribes and state and local governments.
Sources: GSEP land acknowledgment · GSEP Native Perspectives · Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition · Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition · Bears Ears Commission · 2017 Interior analysis · HCN on the Commission’s end
Grand Staircase-Escalante is often called the science monument, and that language starts in the founding document. The 1996 proclamation describes “exemplary opportunities for geologists, paleontologists, archeologists, historians, and biologists,” notes that the area “remains a frontier, a quality that greatly enhances the monument’s value for scientific study,” and cites “one of the best and most continuous records of Late Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world.”
Counts vary with the cutoff date — a 2019 congressional witness said thirteen dinosaur species, the 2021 proclamation said at least fifteen previously unknown species, and a 2025 twenty-five-year review of the monument's paleontology reported fourteen formally described with more than fifteen awaiting description. Named species include Nasutoceratops, Kosmoceratops, Utahceratops, Teratophoneus, Akainacephalus, Diabloceratops, Lythronax and Gryposaurus monumentensis. Specimens are curated across seven museums including the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and the Yale Peabody Museum.
Beyond fossils: the monument holds about fifty percent of Utah's rare flora and 125 plant species that occur only in Utah or on the Colorado Plateau, along with hundreds of bee species, dozens of which are believed to be unique to this landscape. Moqui marbles collected here helped scientists interpret Martian rock formations observed in 2004, contributing evidence for water in Mars' past.
Two facts sit uneasily together. In spring 2026, more than 150 scientists from 32 states signed a letter calling the monument “one of the most important living laboratories in North America” and a “global scientific asset.” In January 2026, the monument's sole in-house paleontologist position was lost; budget and staffing have shrunk substantially since the monument's early years.
The July 2026 proclamation retains an 8,900-acre “Kaiparowits Horizon Unit” specifically for a recently discovered bonebed containing what it calls “one of the most complete tyrannosaurid specimens in the region,” describing it as “a globally important paleontological resource.” How much of the monument's documented fossil record now falls outside the boundary has not, as far as we can find, been published. After the smaller 2017 reduction, a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology witness testified that more than 1,100 scientifically important paleontological sites were excluded, roughly 31 percent of those discovered at that time.
Sources: Proclamation 6920 (1996) · Titus et al., Parks Stewardship Forum 41(3), 2025 · Proclamation 10286 (2021) · Scientists’ letter, spring 2026 · SVP testimony, 2019 · High Country News, 2026
Grand Staircase Escalante Partners is the only conservation organization headquartered in monument communities. Its stated mission is “honoring the past and safeguarding the future of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and its connected landscapes and watersheds through science, conservation, and education.” Four programs do that work.
A hands-on volunteer program: graffiti remediation, trash removal, campsite cleanup and trail work, plus Trail Ambassadors who promote sustainable visitation using Leave No Trace and Visit With Respect principles.
The core project is removing Russian olive, an invasive tree, from riparian habitat along the Escalante River. Coordinated through the Escalante River Watershed Partnership since 2009 and leveraging $11 million across more than 8,000 acres of river habitat, it has grown into the largest riparian restoration effort of its kind in the Southwest.
Seed crews, tribal partners and volunteers collect and clean native plant seed for conservation, research and restoration — never more than 20 percent from any one population, to keep it viable. Partners include the Colorado Plateau Native Plant Program, the BLM, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah and the Dixie National Forest.
Curricula for public schools, activities for out-of-school youth programs, events for adults, and professional development for educators — aimed at audiences that vary by age, geography, cultural background and previous connection to the monument.
The BLM lists GSEP as the monument's official partner group and points volunteers to it, alongside seasonal internships through the Intergovernmental Internship Cooperative, Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps and American Conservation Experience, citizen science projects, and an occasional artist-in-residence program.
Sources: GSEP mission · Stewardship · Conservation · Native plants · Education · BLM — get involved
This is where the argument actually lives for people who live here, so it is worth being precise about what the record shows and where it runs out.
The 1996 proclamation stated that “nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to affect existing permits or leases for, or levels of, livestock grazing.” The BLM's own figures bear that out: at designation the monument carried 106,645 total animal unit months with 77,400 active; today it is 106,202 total with 76,957 active — a decline of about four-tenths of one percent, attributed to a 1999 modification addressing riparian conflicts rather than to the designation. The 2025 management plan closed roughly seven percent of the monument to grazing, mostly riparian. The July 2026 proclamations leave grazing authorizations untouched.
No coal has been produced inside the monument since September 1996. The Kaiparowits Plateau deposit holds projected original resources on the order of 62 billion tons, and a Dutch-owned company had spent six years planning a fifty-year project there when the monument was declared. That is the specific loss the 1996 grievance is about, and it is a real one.
Both of those things can be true at once, and mostly are. Growth in aggregate is not the same as security for a particular household, and a county can gain jobs while losing the kind of jobs it had.
Sources: KUER on monument economies · BLM grazing factsheet · Headwaters Economics, 2017 · 2017 Interior analysis · Outdoor industry letter
The Antiquities Act of 1906 lets a president declare national monuments and requires that a reservation be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” It says nothing at all about reducing or revoking one. That silence is the entire fight, and no court has ever ruled on the merits of whether a president may shrink a monument.
Squillace, Biber, Bryner & Hecht, 103 Va. L. Rev. Online (2017)
The administration's own framing sidesteps that question entirely. It does not claim a power to revoke. It claims it is applying the statute: that the prior boundaries exceeded “the smallest area compatible,” so drawing them smaller is compliance rather than repeal. That is why the 2026 proclamations spend so many words arguing that cliffs, canyons and plateaus are not “objects of historic or scientific interest.”
And that is why the Tenth Circuit's June 2026 ruling matters to everyone. Utah won a holding that the Act's limits are judicially reviewable — which is exactly the hook a challenger to the 2026 proclamations needs, and also exactly the ground on which the administration wants to defend them. Neither side has a clean precedent here.
Sources: Antiquities Act — CRS overview · Tenth Circuit, June 23, 2026 · Harvard EELP · Deseret News explainer
Every link below was checked. We have grouped them by what they argue, not by whether we agree with them. If you came here already sure, start with the group you disagree with — that is the point of the list.
Officials, trade associations and commentators making the case for smaller boundaries, local control, and Antiquities Act reform.
The state's official response. Cox: “The question has never been whether to protect them, but how to protect them best.” Attorney General Derek Brown argues the Antiquities Act was never meant to lock up millions of acres by the stroke of a pen.
The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee argues the proclamations respect the limits Congress placed on the Antiquities Act.
The fullest statement of the delegation's position in one place. Notably includes Sen. John Curtis calling it “a step in the right direction” while arguing Congress still needs to build a durable solution with stakeholders.
The administration's own argument, including its contention that “objects of historic or scientific interest” was improperly stretched to cover viewsheds, biodiversity and remoteness.
Argues the Antiquities Act has become a partisan instrument and that Congress, not the executive, should be setting these boundaries. Criticizes the mechanism rather than only the direction.
The Public Lands Council's response: the action “allows special areas to remain protected while restoring multiple use management for ranchers and other land users.”
Explicitly pro-reduction commentary framing the cuts as centering local livelihoods. Acknowledges tribal concerns but argues they should not be decisive.
Tribal nations, conservation organizations, scientists and businesses making the case against.
A joint statement from all five nations on the termination of the Bears Ears Commission and the absence of government-to-government consultation.
Documents the consultation dispute directly, with the governor's response included.
Focused reporting on what the Bears Ears Commission was and what its elimination means for co-management as a model.
The organization most likely to lead litigation, stating its legal theory and its intent to sue.
Response from a national conservation organization, framed around cultural heritage and public access.
Useful as a single-page roundup of opposition voices from both inter-tribal coalitions and multiple conservation groups.
The outdoor industry letter, coordinated by The Conservation Alliance and signed by Patagonia, REI, Black Diamond, Osprey and Backcountry among others.
Scientists from 32 states on the monument's research value. Note the date: this responds to the congressional effort against the management plan, not to the July proclamations.
A profile of SUWA's legal director laying out the legal theory, written for a hunting and angling audience rather than a conservation one.
Reporting rather than argument — including the two best pieces we found on how divided this place actually is.
The single best piece on the local divide. Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock on the record calling the reduction “a blessing for us,” set directly against Grand Staircase Escalante Partners and The Wilderness Society.
Ground-level reporting from the communities themselves, including local business owners who do not fit either script.
Day-of Utah public radio coverage quoting the president, the governor, GSEP and the Southern Paiute coordinator of the Inter-Tribal Coalition.
National summary covering the extraction rationale alongside tribal and conservation opposition.
The clearest single statement of the acreage numbers and the September 11 effective date.
Before-and-after mapping, including the detail that the Grand Staircase itself is no longer inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Itemizes specific features now outside the boundary — Grosvenor Arch, Metate Arch, Devil's Garden, the Paria River corridor — and which remain.
Downloadable maps for each monument plus a 1996–2026 boundary timeline. An advocacy organization, but the most reusable free visual resource we found.
The best legal explainer we found, with scholars on opposing sides of both live questions.
The documents themselves. If you only read one thing on this page, make it one of these.
The founding document, including the grazing language and the description of the monument's scientific value.
Includes the creation of the Bears Ears Commission.
The first reduction, for comparison with 2026.
The restoration, and the most detailed official inventory of what the monument contains.
The current reduction, with the critical-minerals rationale and the “generic features” argument in full.
Includes the disbanding of the Bears Ears Commission and the composition of the advisory committee replacing it.
The opinion that made the Antiquities Act's limits judicially reviewable in this circuit, with a partial dissent worth reading.
Some things circulating about this story did not hold up when we checked, and we would rather say so than repeat them. As of mid-August 2026 we could find no verified record of a lawsuit filed against the July 2026 proclamations, despite several organizations announcing they intend to file — at least one outlet reported otherwise, and appears to be wrong. We also could not find any published figure for how much of the monument's documented fossil record now falls outside the boundary. Where a number here comes from an advocacy organization rather than an agency or a journal, we have said so.
This page was compiled on August 18, 2026. Facts change; check the primary sources.
That was the record. This is the response — a collective, community-authored testimony of what this place means, drawn by our own hands.
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