DEEP DIVIDE

Monday, Feb. 10, 1997 By JEFFREY KLUGER

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But many Utahns have no interest in cohabiting with the Federal Government, and for them the most effective means of protesting the monument remains road building. The more dirt lanes that vein the area, the more probable it becomes that at least those minimally developed patches will no longer qualify as wilderness. Though mining would still be forbidden everywhere, these nonwilderness tracts would be subject to reduced government scrutiny. Counties and towns, aware that development on the land is already restricted, insist they are not building new roads but "brightening up" existing ones--a murky term at best.

Environmentalists have been trying to block this rash of public works since September, and in November they won a victory when a federal judge ordered counties to give the Bureau of Land Management in Washington 48 hours' notice of any scheduled roadwork before the land-grading equipment actually rolls. In theory this would buy officials time to assess whether the planned development falls within the law. In practice, however, no one pretends that federal agents can effectively police 1.7 million acres of wilderness, and many suspect that the court ruling is being flouted.

For now, no easy solutions are in sight. If the House and Senate remain as partisan as they've been in recent years, no congressional compromise is likely. Unless the courts follow up with a final injunction--a ruling environmentalists are pursuing--the fate of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument may be determined not by legal action but by a group of ad hoc highway crews, tying up a package of land twice the size of Rhode Island with ribbons of roadway.

--Reported by Dick Thompson/Kanab

With reporting by DICK THOMPSON/KANAB