Environmental Group Seeks to Halt Road Paving in Utah Monument

An environmental group claims a Utah county is illegally paving a road through the state’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed suit against Garfield County, Utah, and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, claiming the county illegally failed to consult with the BLM before improving a stretch of the rugged, unpaved 62-mile Hole in the Rock Road across Grand Staircase-Escalante.

The group’s lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Utah comes after a court last year gave the county control over the formerly federal road.

SUWA filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and an emergency injunction against the road work. The group also claims the BLM violated the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA, for failing to prevent undue degradation of public land after the county began road construction.

The lawsuit is the latest twist in a decades-long fight over federal control of public lands in the West and local efforts to control paths and roadways crossing those lands. Garfield County and neighboring Kane County won the right to control Hole in the Rock Road last year after a 15-year legal battle.

The suit is also another turn in the fight over the fate of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which the state and counties are separately trying to abolish in court.

When President Donald Trump shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante in 2017, Hole in the Rock Road was removed from the monument, but President Joe Biden later included it within the monument again after he restored its original boundaries.

Repealed Law

The road fight centers on an 1866 federal law Congress repealed in 1976—RS 2477—which gave local governments the right to build highways across federal lands. FLPMA recognizes highway right-of-way claims that predate 1976, allowing Western counties and states to claim obscure paths and roadways across federal lands as highways they can control—a move critics such as SUWA say gives counties undue control over federal land.

Utah is litigating about a dozen RS 2477 claims in federal court, and its counties are litigating even more.

Kane County in 2010 filed an RS 2477 claim for Hole in the Rock Road in the US District Court for the District of Utah, saying it’s a “pioneer-era” road deserving repair and greater public access. After 15 years of litigation, Judge Clark Waddoups in July granted Garfield and Kane counties quiet title to the road across the monument.

In its lawsuit, SUWA says Garfield County is paving, grading, and reshaping parts of the road. The county failed to follow Tenth Circuit precedent, which requires a road right-of-way holder to consult with the BLM when improving the roadway beyond routine maintenance, the group says.

SUWA also claims the BLM is aware of the improvements and has failed to stop them, violating FLPMA.

“The County’s ‘bulldoze first, talk later’ road improvements are in direct violation of Tenth Circuit precedent, and BLM’s failure to order the County to halt all road improvements and initiate pre-work consultation regarding those improvements violates its duties” under the law, SUWA said in its complaint.

Access Needed

The BLM declined to comment Friday, referring questions to a July Utah attorney general’s office statement saying local management of federal roads lead to “better access and safety.”

“Without local management, these roads have become damaged, and counties cannot step in to repair them,” the Utah Attorney General’s Office said in the statement. “This not only threatens public access to recreational areas, but it can also complicate essential services, including wildfire management and search and rescue operations.”

Garfield County didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

The state, which unsuccessfully petitioned the US Supreme Court in 2023 to declare federal land holdings in the state unconstitutional, wants to ensure local residents have access to those roads, Redge Johnson, director of the Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, said in an interview last year.

Utah spends money on RS 2477 claims so “our citizens can continue to use those roads,” he said. “We do have a vested title right in those roads.”

But the state’s goal is to use RS 2477 as a tool “to tie the hands of the federal government,” Chris Winter, a law professor and executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and Environment at the University of Colorado Law School, said last year.

“Utah has been openly hostile to federal management of public lands, and RS 2477 is one of many tools it is using to tie the hands of the federal government,” he said.

The fight over roads on federal lands overlaps with the fight over Grand Staircase-Escalante itself because Kane and Garfield counties and Utah are seeking greater access to federal lands with the monument, which harbors coal and other mineral deposits.

The counties and Utah say Grand Staircase-Escalante and nearby Bears Ears national monuments, which together span more than 3 million acres, are too large to merit protection under the Antiquities Act and block access to minerals and other resources.

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit could rule in the case, Garfield County v. Biden, anytime.

SUWA is represented by in-house counsel.

The case is Southern Utah Wilderness All. v. Garfield Cnty., D. Utah, No. 2:26-cv-00096, 2/5/26.