A conservation group has sued the Interior Department, the state of Utah and a county over the Bureau of Land Management’s failure to block a road improvement project through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The lawsuit filed last week by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said Garfield County’s road project amounts to “trespass on public lands.”
The lawsuit is part of a broader, complicated legal battle involving ownership of thousands of miles of dirt roads crisscrossing federal lands in Utah and across the West that were authorized under a 19th-century mining law.
Specifically, the SUWA lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah involves a 57-mile section of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road — described in the legal complaint as a “rugged, scenic dirt/gravel road that traverses through the heart” of the national monument in southwest Utah.
