Trial Over What Constitutes a "Road" In Canyonlands National

There long have been pockets of disgust over federal land ownership in the West, and perhaps nowhere is that stronger than in Utah, where roughly two-thirds of the landscape is federally managed. While the "Sagebrush Rebellion" mightily reared its head some three decades ago, its waning vestiges are on trial this week over whether a creek bed constitutes a road in Canyonlands National Park. The poster child of the rebellion rose up on July 4, 1980, when several hundred people gathered in Moab, Utah, on the doorstep of both Canyonlands and Arches national parks, to celebrate the nation's birthday...and decry federal land-management policies. From atop a Caterpillar bulldozer, one carrying a few "Sagebrush Rebel" stickers and spouting a U.S. flag from its smokestack, county officials complained about federal land managers. After firing up the crowd, the politicians fired up the bulldozer and, while following the scant traces of an abandoned mining road, worked to scrape a path into a nearby Wilderness Study Area on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands. Litigation, not bulldozers, has littered the landscape in Canyonlands these past 11 years over whether Salt Creek should be open to off-road vehicles. The case returns to a U.S. District Courthouse in Salt Lake City on Monday, September 14, when the government squares off against the state of Utah and one of its counties over the question of whether Salt Creek is a road...ParksTraveler