MOAB, Utah — Richard Mick grew up in Moab, rock-crawling up and down the treacherous Hey Joe Canyon to see the old uranium mine in his dad’s Jeep.
“There's a lot of really cool equipment, old mine carts and, like, old bulldozers and stuff like that that I used to play on all the time as a kid,” he said. “My family would come out here for a nice picnic, and you could just imagine little Richard just bouncing around all the old mining equipment, and it was so cool.
Mick now manages ‘Dan Mick’s Guided Jeep Tours’ in Moab with his father.
“It's not just about getting out and seeing the stuff,” he said. “It's about the challenge of getting the vehicle there as well that I personally and our family has built our legacy on.”
Today, the Hey Joe Canyon Trail ends abruptly with a big gate and barbed wire fencing. It’s one of the many trails in the Labyrinth Rims Gemini Bridges area that are now closed, as part of the Bureau of Land Management’s new travel management plan.
The Utah Public Lands Alliance is supporting a lawsuit led by the Blue Ribbon Coalition challenging the agency to keep these trails open, said Kevin Keller, CEO and Board Chairman for UPLA.
“I guess I'm as proud of American, as most Americans are, and I regard this land as my land,” he said. “It's stuff that you can't see on a TV screen or a computer or on a tablet. There's nothing like being out here and seeing what's actually here.”
Amid the ongoing litigation, the trails will remain closed. The BLM is in the process of putting up more signs so people know where they can and can’t go, said David Pals, Field Manager for the Moab BLM Field Office.
“We did close 317 miles of routes in this area, but we still have 3,600 miles open to off-highway travel,” he said.
This plan was born out of the demand to protect wildlife and natural resources and improve public safety, said Pals.
“We apparently at the time did not take look at the resource concerns, and so we were looking at each route in depth,” he said.
Labyrinth Rims Gemini Bridges serves multiple uses: cattle grazing, dispersed camping, oil and gas pipelines, and of course, recreation.
“As recreation increases, this area sees about three million visitors per year, the area of wildlife habitat has been decreasing,” said Pals.
Closures aren’t the answer, said Keller, when there are opportunities to educate the public on recreating responsibly on some of the best off-roading in the country.
“We have to be able to have access to our land,” he said. “It's our land.”
Recently, Utah Representative John Curtis introduced the Historic Roadways Protection Act, which would prohibit the Secretary of the Interior from finalizing or implementing new travel management plans in the State of Utah until pending litigation over historic roads is complete. Senator Mike Lee introduced companion legislation in the Senate.
