As They Are: Exploring the National Parks

Tag: Bears Ears

  • Canyonlands National Park: Snow Amid The Needles

    It was approaching 3pm on Thursday, February 16, 2023 when Sean and I drove into the snow-laden Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. Down below the canyon rims, but still above the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers, The Needles District is known for its many miles of hiking and backpacking trails amid a wonderland of red rock formations. That afternoon, as we continued our snowy driving tour to points south of Moab, we were lucky to see the red rock country blanketed white beneath a beautiful blue sky. While snow is fairly rare in The Needles (the higher Island in the Sky District gets more), they had received over a foot of snow in the same storm that had merely dusted Moab.

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  • Detour: Bears Ears National Monument

    Bears Ears Buttes

    Bears Ears National Monument protects 1.36 million acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Barack Obama established the National Monument at 1.35 million acres in December 2016, during the final weeks of his presidency, using the powers granted to presidents by the Antiquities Act of 1906. In December 2017, Donald Trump and his corrupt first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unlawfully reduced Bears Ears by 85% to just over 201,000 acres. In October 2021, President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American Secretary of the Interior—restored Bears Ears, retaining an additional 11,000 acres actually added under Trump.

    Newspaper Rock: Archaic, Hisatsinom, Ancestral Puebloan, and Ute Petroglyphs

    The entire Bears Ears landscape contains some 100,000 sacred sites. In a historic first, Bears Ears National Monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Department of the Interior, the USDA Forest Service, and a coalition of five Native American tribes, the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.

    Early afternoon of Thursday, February 16, 2023 found Sean and me gazing out at the heart of Bears Ears—the Bears Ears Buttes themselves—from Natural Bridges National Monument.

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  • Detour: Natural Bridges National Monument (surrounded by Bears Ears National Monument)

    Sipapu Bridge

    Natural Bridges National Monument protects just over 7,600 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Theodore Roosevelt used his powers under the Antiquities Act to establish the National Monument (Utah’s first National Park site) in 1908. The Park’s raison d’être is the presence of three sandstone bridges of varying age, height, and span near the intersections of White and Armstrong canyons. This tiny National Monument is entirely surrounded by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) portion of Bears Ears National Monument.

    On Thursday, February 16, 2023, Sean and I set our sights on Parks and Monuments south of Moab, including Natural Bridges and Bears Ears, along with The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.

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  • Return to Moab: Planning

    Junction Butte and Grand View Point, Island in the Sky, from The Needles District, Canyonlands National Park

    In February 2023, Sean and I returned to Moab, Utah, almost exactly a year after we’d first visited. In 2022, we had gone to the storied outdoor adventure town for a long weekend visit to Arches National Park. We had enjoyed the hotel we’d stayed in—The Radcliffe—so much that, while we were checking out in 2022, I had gone ahead and booked us the same lovely room at The Radcliffe for ten days in 2023. That 2022 trip had focused on diminutive Arches, but the 2023 trip would incorporate its massive companion Parks, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, completing our visits to the National Parks of Utah.

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