DEEP DIVIDE

Ken Rait is on a road to nowhere, and he's none too happy about it. Jouncing along in a Jeep Cherokee through the Southwest wilderness, he points with disgust at the freshly dug track he's following. It meanders into a streambed, emerges from the other side and then stops abruptly. In just one afternoon Rait, an environmentalist with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, will find several more such dead-end trails, ranging from a mere quarter mile to a few miles long. Not one of them goes anywhere at all. "They're cutting roads all over the place out here," he says wearily.

These desert detours may not look like much, but they pass through the brand-new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah--a 1.7 million-acre tract that many consider the most beautiful spot in the U.S. The trails that crisscross it are scars from the latest tactic in one of the region's most bitter land wars.

The battle began in earnest during the fall presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton headed west and ceremonially conferred monument status on this huge stretch of Utah real estate. Tourists and locals could continue to use the area for hunting, camping and grazing, he said. But he wanted disfiguring activities like mining forbidden.

Thanks for nothing, say many people in Utah. "This is the most arrogant gesture I have seen in my life," says Bill Howell, executive director of the Utah Association of Local Governments. In the town of Kanab, just outside the monument, shops and schools closed in protest, and residents released black balloons into the air. Local artists were more blunt: a popular cartoon circulating for a time pictured the President mutely mooning the state of Utah.

The problem, as the people of Utah see it, is that the unspoiled land being placed under the federal bell jar is not just any unspoiled land. Locked in its rocks are as much as 62 billion tons of coal, 2 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas and 2 billion bbl. of oil--resources that could be worth billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs. So Utah, which has been scrapping with the Federal Government since statehood, is fighting back. Lawmakers are contemplating various legislative counterattacks, including enacting laws that guarantee continued access to the land, reducing the boundaries of the disputed plot and, if all else fails, prohibiting the kind of unilateral action that allowed the President to sequester it in the first place.

Back home, Utahns have been trying to drive their road graders through a loophole that exempts land from some federal protection if there is sufficient development to indicate the land is being put to use. They are thus taking to the wilderness and cutting roads across the protected acres before the government completes its formal three-year assessment of how the monument should be managed. Every mile they mark could be a mile unfettered.

If there's one thing both sides agree on, it's that the land is worth fighting over. The Grand Staircase began forming 250 million years ago as colliding land masses lifted the Colorado Plateau while rivers carved into it. The result is a series of gigantic "steps," each more than 900 ft. tall and named after the characteristic color of its rocks: Pink Cliffs, Gray Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs. The monument's center is so remote that ambient noise can drop below the threshold of human hearing.

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