If dirt roads in southern Utah suddenly seem free of
ruts, washboards and washouts, you can thank Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt.
Environmentalists believe
Babbitt’s recent announcement of a new BLM inventory of wilderness
led to a flurry of illegal road work by county crews. For if roads
exist, the Bureau of Land Management can’t include those lands as
potential wilderness. “This is malicious and mean-spirited and damn
illegal and should stop,” says Ken Rait of the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance.
Babbitt ordered the
reinventory this summer after Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, challenged
the secretary to find 5 million acres of BLM land in Utah that
qualify as wilderness (HCN, 9/2/96). An earlier BLM inventory found
3.2 million acres.
Rait says he will be
patrolling BLM lands looking for freshly graded roads that once
were two-track routes or long-abandoned mining roads. Kate
Kitchell, Moab district manager for the BLM, has also asked her
staff to pay special attention to road work in Grand and San Juan
counties.
When asked about the road-grading, San
Juan County Commissioner Ty Lewis offered no details, other than
saying, “Let’s put it this way: They (the BLM crews) will be able
to identify our roads.” Kane County Commissioner Norm Carroll also
conceded that the wilderness reinventory is “in the back of our
minds.”
*Jim
Woolf
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Will counties de(grade) wilderness?.
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