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ESCALANTE, Utah (AP) -- The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument attracts hardy tourists and draws diverse reactions, a decade after it was created in the heat of a presidential campaign.
President Clinton locked up 1.9 million acres with a stroke of a pen, preventing tons of coal from being mined. With no public hearings, he used authority under a 1906 law to create the monument in southern Utah near the Arizona border.
"Every time there has been a bold conservation decision, there has also been a lot of controversy," said Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
"Then, with the passage of time, it becomes appreciated," he told The Salt Lake Tribune. "That's certainly true in Utah. ... It proves it's a wise decision to protect the beauty of the state."
A government Web site describes the remote monument's landscape as "vast and austere" with a "spectacular array of scientific and historic resources." It was the last place in the continental United States to be mapped.
There were 88,000 visitors last year at visitor centers in Big Water, Boulder, Cannonville, Escalante and Kanab. But the number of people who pass through the monument was 613,000, down from nearly 700,000 in 2002-03, according to the government.
"It's not like a national park where you walk on paved trails and go on a nice four-mile hike where there are water fountains along the way. It is wilderness," Mike Satter, president of Partners for Grand Staircase-Escalante, told the Deseret Morning News.
State Sen. Tom Hatch, R-Panguitch, said there's no doubt the monument has created economic activity. But he and others wonder about what was lost.
"It was the size of the monument and the way it was done that left a bad taste," Hatch said.
The monument had a role in the defeat of then-U.S. Rep. Bill Orton, D-Utah, who said Clinton administration officials lied to him in the days leading to the announcement.
"The reality is the world is going to be using coal for the next 50 or 100 years," he said. "Are we going to use the dirtiest coal in the world, creating acid rain and air pollution? Or are we going to use the cleanest-burning coal that could have been developed with the least environmental impact?
"That's what we're leaving in the ground" in southern Utah, Orton said.
Ten years ago, Kanab store owner Dennis Judd flew the U.S. flag upside down in protest. A hotel hung Clinton in effigy.
Now, however, Judd is a board member of Partners for Grand Staircase-Escalante, a group that promotes the monument.
"I wanted to turn it around to where the monument would be beneficial for the local people," he said. The monument "still needs to be discovered, really."
Utah author Terry Tempest Williams was at Clinton's side when he signed the proclamation at the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
The monument "provides breathing space," she said. "It's a sanctuary of stillness in what are deeply turbulent times. That's what I appreciate the most about it."
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On the Net: http://www.ut.blm.gov/monument/
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
