- Garfield County has begun chip-sealing Hole-in-the-Rock Road amid ongoing legal battle.
- The county cited road safety as the reason for the project.
- The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed a lawsuit challenging the project, claiming improperly analyzed environmental impacts and no public involvement.
ESCALANTE, Garfield County — A road project inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is moving forward, even as a legal battle over it continues.
Garfield County has begun chip-sealing the first 10 miles of Hole-in-the-Rock Road, a popular backcountry route that has seen a surge in tourism in recent years.
County leaders said the change is needed to keep up with the growing number of visitors.
"We're really excited about it," said Dave Dodds, Garfield County's public works director. "What we've seen over the last few years, especially, is just a steady increase of visitation. And what we're trying to do is just respond to that."
Dodds said traffic on the road has reached levels that make it difficult to maintain in its current dirt condition.
"What we've seen is, on average, during our busy season, we get about 600 vehicles per day," he said. "Some weekends we have 1500 vehicle passes per day, and we really just can't keep up with the maintenance on this road. We were spending $150,000 a year on this road."
He said crews have struggled to keep up with maintenance of the dirt road, especially during the dry months when grading work doesn't last.
"We have a lot of washboards and a lot of potholes. We're on a grader, but it only lasts a day or two because the ground is so dry and the traffic is so high," Dodds said.
Garfield County leaders said the project is focused on safety.
"We're not trying to go out and pave everything," Dodds said. "I want to reassure people that we don't want that responsibility. That's a lot of cost and expense to us. But people are there. We see minivans, we see Priuses, we see Ford Mustangs and a lot of rental cars that are going down there. It's just not safe for them to do that."
The work follows a 2025 court ruling granting Garfield County title to the road under a Civil War-era law known as RS 2477, which recognizes certain historic rights-of-way across federal land, though questions about how the road can be managed remain contested in court.
Environmental groups argue the county is going too far.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the project, alleging that the county failed to properly analyze environmental impacts or involve the public before proceeding.
"Garfield County made the decision to move forward with chip sealing Hole-in-the-Rock Road fully aware of SUWA's active litigation, which challenges approval of the project for failing to analyze its environmental impacts to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument or providing an opportunity to involve the public, as required by law," said Hanna Larsen, staff attorney for the group.
"By racing ahead, the county is attempting to evade judicial review before the court acts on our request for an injunction. This brazen disregard for the judicial process is altering this scenic, rugged and remote landscape; it will lead to increased traffic, speed and noise on the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, diminishing the serene backcountry experience the monument was created to protect."
The project is expected to cover about 10 miles for now, based on available funding, with the work focusing on the stretch closest to Scenic Byway 12.
Even as construction moves forward, the legal fight over the road's future and how it should be managed is still playing out in federal court.
"This fight has been going on for a long time. We have been in litigation since 2010, which is really weird because we have been maintaining this road since the 1950s," Dodds said. "We have documentation that we have been maintaining it since then. It's not until recently that we've been challenged by these environmental groups on how we maintain it, which is really frustrating because we've been doing it for so long."
