Free Weekends at National Parks
Just in time for Summer, The National Parks Service announced three fee-free weekends at more than 100 National Parks. Fins, reefs, goblins, natural bridges and river narrows await you in a land like no other, the great Colorado Plateau. Epitomized by picturesque buttes and mesas, high mountains gashed by river canyons or dry with gullies and washes, the Colorado Plateau extends across southwestern United States, encompassing parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
The complex geological processes that created the rugged canyons, towering cliffs and winding rivers led to the greatest concentration of national parks in the United States. Among them are Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Bryce, Arches and Capitol Reef.
Other topographic features include sunken deserts and shallow structural basins called synclines. The Uintah Basin, also spelled Uinta, in eastern Utah, is the most northerly section of the Colorado Plateau and home of the Northern Ute Tribe. The basin is east of the Wasatch Range and south of the Uinta Mountains. The Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River, flows southward out of the Uinta’s, crossing the basin, flowing into the deep gorge of Desolation Canyon. The confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers is located in Canyonlands National Park. The Green River watershed know as the Green River Basin, covers parts of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado beginning in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, flowing through some of the most spectacular canyons in the United States.
Those same varied and complex geologic processes also endowed eastern Utah with economic energy resources, including coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas. Shale gas has been a growing source of attention due to the use of advanced technologies in hydraulic fracturing. Utah holds approximately 2.5 percent of the country’s proven natural gas reserves and according to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), an insignificant impact on the price of oil and gas nationally.
In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) directed the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) to inventory and designate roadless areas of the US as suitable for Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs). Utah’s BLM designated only 2.5 million out of 23 million acres of roadless land in Utah as WSAs. After appeals, the acreage was increased to 3.2 million acres.
America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act is reintroduced every two years, with each new Congress, and seeks to permanently protect more than 9 million acres of wilderness quality land in Utah.
The Department of Interior (DOI) cancelled leasing of 77 parcels for exploration and development. Ken Salazar, US Interior Secretary, said, “only when the light of public scrutiny was shed on the situation did they reconsider,” and “many of the 77 parcels auctioned off are close to national park units and even closer to other sensitive, world-class landscapes, including Desolation Canyon.”
The American Petroleum Institute voiced concerns that the report will be used to justify not acting to develop energy resources on public lands in the Intermountain regions. Utah’s state overview of some of our favorite Public Lands!