In the bottom half of Utah, rising from a jigsaw of cayenne-hued sandstone bluffs, lies a land that is as contentious as it is an indelible part of the American identity.

Few landscapes evoke the promise, self-reliance, and hardship of the American frontier as immediately as this region’s red rock buttes and canyons. Some of these places—Canyonlands, Arches, Bryce, Zion—are already mythic, immortalized by the likes of John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner, and, most famously, Edward Abbey.

Then there’s Bears Ears National Monument, a Delaware-size swath of wilderness that has become an infamous flashpoint over resource management, conservation, and the fate of public lands. It’s the sort of country you can pedal through all day for days on end, as I did this past October, where you hardly see other people, and the views at almost every turn—soaring vermilion buttes, watercolor badlands, and shaggy ponderosa—make you exclaim out loud. “It’s amazing, right?” says Kurt Refsnider, as we pedal from Green River to Moab. Refsnider is one of the winningest endurance mountain bike racers in the country, as well as a retired professor of geology. Where I see dusty yellow hummocks before a backdrop of periwinkle cliffs, he sees time and history and the insignificance of humans within it. He explains that these shale deposits date to the late Cretaceous period and slot in, stratigraphically speaking, between the Dakota and Mesaverde formations.

Refsnider’s passion for the landscape, combined with his love of the bike, is the reason we’re here. In 2017, he and his close friend and Pivot Cycles teammate, Kaitlyn Boyle, founded a not-for-profit called Bikepacking Roots. The organization was born of the pair’s shared interests: Not only do they both excel at self-support endurance mountain bike racing, but, in a previous life, they conceived and taught bikepacking geology classes together at Prescott College in Arizona. Dedicated to increasing awareness of and access for bikepacking, as well as educating cyclists about conservation issues affecting them, Bikepacking Roots has steadily crafted and released a small portfolio of routes aimed at helping riders get out on public lands.

Riding on Lockhart Basin Road below the Needles Overlook on BLM land that used to be part of Bears Ears. Jen Judge

In April, the organization unveiled its flagship achievement, the 2,700-mile Wild West Route, a mostly dirt-road cycling course that bisects the United States from the Canadian border just outside of Eureka, Montana, to the Mexican border near Sierra Vista, Arizona. Passing through four states, 18 national forests, six national parks and monuments, four areas designated as Bureau of Land Management (BLM) national conservation lands, and two tribal parks, some 70 percent of the riding sits on public lands. “I know how transformative a ride like this can be, and I also believe that helping people have such an experience on public lands is one of the best ways to get them invested in these resources,” Kurt says. “The WWR is a giant way to showcase public lands and help keep wild places wild.”

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To date, only a handful of people have pedaled the entire Wild West Route, which Bikepacking Roots estimates takes 40 days or more. But the course is divided into nine 300-ish-mile segments. Kurt knows of some 100 riders who have pedaled at least one of these. “These big iconic adventures are the things that really inspire people,” he says. “But even spending just a week on the Wild West Route feels more challenging and rewarding than your typical one-week bike trip to some mountain town.”

It can feel almost impossible to grasp what’s at stake in debates such as the one over Bears Ears.

To that end, Bikepacking Roots is also working on connectors to the 3,084-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which bisects the U.S. farther to the east, as well as side spur loops. One of these is the forthcoming Bears Ears Alternate, set to open in time for the 2020 spring riding season. It will diverge from the main route smack dab in the center of Utah and rejoin it on the west flank of the Henry Mountains, after passing through Moab and the hotly contested Bears Ears National Monument to its south.

The story of Bears Ears is short but tumultuous. Following the failure of an almost four-year effort by conservative Utah congressman Rob Bishop to facilitate a compromise that would have preserved parts of the land in question, President Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016. Environmentalists and Native American tribes, who initiated the idea for Bears Ears, hailed the action, while conservative politicians and mining industry execs decried it as overreach. After President Donald Trump took office, he slashed the size of Bears Ears by 84 percent on December 4, 2017. The decision came after, and in spite of, a public comment period that saw more than 685,000 responses, 98 percent of which were in favor of preserving it.

Within days of Trump’s action, a host of conservation groups and Native American tribes sued the U.S. government on grounds that the Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president the right to create monuments but not modify existing ones. The litigation is ongoing, leaving the size and fate of Bears Ears up in the air. (Similar lawsuits are pending over Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, which Trump cut nearly in half.) That hasn’t stopped the Trump Administration from printing maps with the new boundaries and opening the rescinded land to new mining claims.

Left: Bikepacking Roots cofounders Kurt Refsnider and Kaitlyn Boyle fuel up for another day on the bike. Right: When you’re bikepacking, there’s always time for a snack and photos at a scenic overlook like The Causeway, a gaping view over a rib cage of bleached sandstone in the Abajos. Jen Judge

It can feel almost impossible to grasp what’s at stake in debates such as the one over Bears Ears. These policy decisions are, for most of us, theoretical arguments over places on the map that we may never visit. So when I learned of Bikepacking Roots’ Bears Ears Alternate, I persuaded Kurt and Kaitlyn to join me on a tour. Not only would the trip serve as a sampling of the country’s newest bikepacking epic, but, for once, I would get to see firsthand the canyons and junipers and dusty mountains and disputed wilderness over which the fight is raging.

As murky tentacles of departing storm clouds wind their way east, we meet on a crisp October Friday morning in Green River, Utah, a tidy but meager stop on Interstate 70. With only four days to spare, riding the entire Bears Ears Alternate isn’t an option. Instead, we’ve settled on a 270-mile southbound stretch out of Green River that will take in all of Bears Ears and then some—plus offer easy shuttling. From the highway, we’ll cross badlands eastward to Moab, the de facto capital of Utah mountain biking, skirt the fringe of Canyonlands National Park as we head south through red rock country and Indian Creek, climb above 10,000 feet over the little-known Abajo Mountains, and finally turn west to descend back to the northernmost finger of Lake Powell, in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Under the original Bears Ears designation, 200 miles of our route would be afforded National Monument protection; given the current proposed boundaries, less than 25 miles would be preserved.



Leaving Green River, I’m thinking less about land protections and more about keeping up. Signing up for a cycling adventure with these two feels like shooting a game of HORSE with Lebron James and Michael Jordan. Kurt is an old friend and racing nemesis who edged me out at the 2014 edition of the Arizona Trail Race 300. He’s racked up victories or fastest known times at the full 800-mile AZT, the Colorado Trail Race, the Kokopelli Trail, and the Tour Divide, among others. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn capped off 2018 with victory at the 24-Hour World Championships in Scotland in October. Then on Christmas Eve, she lost control of her truck on icy roads and was T-boned by an oncoming vehicle. The crash left her with a broken fibula and sacrum, quadruple fractures in her pelvis, and a torn bladder. She’s still clawing her way back to fitness almost a year later. Slated to ride her first 12-hour race less than two weeks after our Bears Ears trip, she’s obviously on the upswing.

Bikepacking, however, is the great equalizer: that rare time in cycling where everyone happily pedals out for the collective experience. The pace is swift but relaxed as the three of us plow eastward. Truth be told, there was no good reason to start in Green River other than its easy access, especially since I assumed the riding would match the town’s unappealing I-70 setting. But rolling toward Moab on the broken ribbon of the old highway, now crumbling at the edges, I’m overwhelmed as the pastels of the Mancos Badlands open before us. Interstate 70 is a just few miles to the south and yet few will ever witness this timeless landscape. “A man on foot, on horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles,” wrote Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire.

Camping along Lockhart Basin Road a few miles north of Hamburger Rock Campground. Jen Judge

After four hours of spinning through open desert and badlands, riding into Moab is jarring. Cars queue at the entrance to Arches National Park, and scrums of mountain bikers jostle in the bike lanes. In town, we fill bottles and stuff supplies into our packs, then pedal out Kane Creek Boulevard, where Ledge Campgrounds A through E teem with weekenders.

Fifteen miles from downtown Moab, we cross Hurrah Pass, just past which lies the original, Obama-era northern boundary of Bears Ears—under the current modifications, the boundary is still some two hours away. A vein of paprika-dust backroad that threads through sandstone blobs, Hurrah is neither tall nor remote, but the two-track on the other side deteriorates into a puzzle of broken sandstone plates. Three miles down the pass, where camping is allowed, the sites are empty. We lay out our sleeping pads and bags, and cook dinner under a spray of stars.

When Kaitlyn unfurls her Tyvek ground cloth, I notice a hand-scribbled diagram of the time periods and rock strata of Arizona from when she used it as an impromptu white board for the Grand Canyon to Mount Humphries (“Hole to Hump”) wilderness exploration class she taught with Kurt. “It feels like the accident changed everything for me, though I’m still coming to terms with what that means,” Kaitlyn says. “I guess it means that I’m grateful for every moment I get in places like this.” In this silent wilderness I’m grateful, too, for the still evening with friends, the absence of the chaos of modernity, and the light breeze that drifts red sandstone dust against my sleeping pad overnight.

Mobs of visitors line up each year for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks (in 2018, 1.7 million and 740,000, respectively), yet the views we wake to and ride through on day two are equal to anything in those national parks. We see maybe a dozen people all day. We pick our way along a road that alternates between red moon dust mined with helmet-size boulders and platforms of brick-hued sandstone as flat as runways. Rust-colored mesas tower like skyscrapers to the open blue sky. The big vistas make sense: We’re paralleling Canyonlands, less than a mile as the crow flies across the Colorado River. All morning, we can see trucks and bikes across the river on the renowned White Rim Road. (The ride gets its name from the eponymous sandstone layer it follows, Kurt tells me.) I’ve pedaled the White Rim numerous times, and the ride we’re doing is at least as scenic—and more interesting as we climb through the strata instead of just sitting on a single layer.

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As we drop into Lockhart Basin, a sandstone-capped, bowl-like amphitheater 1,700 football fields across, blooms of pea-green sediment appear in the strata. This is the Chinle layer, according to Kurt, and on the Colorado Plateau it can indicate the presence of uranium. It’s been widely reported that, prior to the decision to shrink Bears Ears, the Trump Administration was lobbied by numerous mining interests, including the Canadian-owned uranium producer Energy Fuels. Overlaying the original Bears Ears boundaries with a map of a bloom of likely uranium deposits makes it clear that Trump’s proposed reductions of the park align closely with mining interests.

We wake when the sun hits, break camp when we’re ready, pedal all day, and stop when the light fades. There’s no hurry.

Critics of the original Bears Ears designation cite federal overreach and poor oversight of lands in Utah as rationale for trimming the monument. It’s true that the U.S. government manages nearly two thirds of the state’s lands, the second-largest percentage of federal holdings in a state in the U.S. (after Nevada). It’s also true that the expanses that President Obama designated for the monument were already federal lands, a range of BLM, national forest, wilderness, and other special-use study areas. So Obama’s designation wasn’t a federal land grab, as many politicians tried to make it out to be. The biggest change the lands in Bears Ears saw under the designation was a prohibition on future extraction and grazing. Under the Trump Administration boundaries, 84 percent of the original monument was opened to mining and energy speculation. Meanwhile, in late October, the nonprofit World Monuments Fund named Bears Ears to its biennial list of cultural heritage sites in urgent need of conservation.

Left: The group rolls off Elk Ridge between the Colorado River and San Juan River basins. Right: Kaitlyn shows off the groundcloth on which she plotted a history of her trips and the geology of the American West. Jen Judge

As we move through the desert, I’m struck by the absence of development. On some of my favorite National Forest and BLM lands that have been opened to extraction back home in New Mexico, gas wells and fracking pad sites have become grotesque blemishes. “People, when they go to camp at a BLM campsite and instead find an oil rig there or a large bulldozer for a mining operation, then they may finally wake up to what’s happened in the last 18 months,” Pat Shea, the director of the BLM under the Clinton Administration, recently said in an NPR interview. He was commenting on the BLM under the Trump Administration’s acting director of the organization, William Perry Pendley, an energy-sector stalwart and champion of privatizing federal lands.

Though studies have tried to estimate the economic impact of long-term sustainable adventure tourism, it’s impossible to put a value on having wild lands where you can pedal day after empty day as an antidote to the clutter and stress of modern life. Says Kurt, “To ride the length of Bears Ears and see how remote and quiet it is for the duration makes it clear how different this is from other places.”

We climb through low slopes of Gambel oak and scraggly juniper into the Abajo Mountains, and the trickle of vehicles recedes. Beneath a crown of ponderosa, the roads under our tires are so smoky with baby powder–fine dust that we just hold on and steer. Still, we ride three abreast all day because there’s zero oncoming traffic. On day three, we spot the Bears Ears, a surprisingly understated pair of buttes that Kurt says you can see from hundreds of miles in every direction. The formation is considered sacred by Navajos and other tribes, hence the coalition that aligned to lobby for the land’s preservation. Archaeologists estimate 100,000 artifacts, remains, and other cultural sites are scattered within the original boundaries of the monument.

Forest ranger Ben Chicken. Jen Judge

We barrel along the top of Elk Ridge, a rough fulcrum between the Colorado River basin to the north and the San Juan River basin to the south. We pass dilapidated forest cabins in the gleaming aspens, unearth water sources as we go, and occasionally whoop with glee. The “Old West” might be a thing of the past, but on our bikes, we’re rediscovering the promise of open land and the pleasures of self-reliance. “My experiences in these places are so positive that they outweigh all the politics and challenges and inspire me to want to preserve this for the future,” says Kaitlyn. “The first step in getting cyclists to care about a thing is to get them out into spaces like this, so they’re engaged in it.”

On evening three, at our route’s high point, we run into Ben Chicken, a bespectacled forest ranger who lives at the guard station watching over this stretch of Manti-La Sal National Forest. His job was created after President Obama designated Bears Ears. “Before me, we had some volunteers manning the guard station, and they’d give out maps and information and do some trail work,” he says. The regular visitors weren’t used to the increased Forest Service presence “so there has been an adjustment period,” he says. “We’re just trying to get everybody on the same page so this special area stays beautiful and enjoyable for years to come.” As we talk, three mule deer bucks filter through the pines 30 yards away. Chicken points out a campsite beneath golden aspens, and we build a fire and hunker down for the night. The tree’s withering leaves rattle like empty candy wrappers. Once we’ve nestled into our sleeping bags, conversation ebbs and the raspy wheeze of elk bugling a few hundred yards from camp fills the silence.

If the first day or two on the bikes was hard on the body, now the riding has become routine. We’re in the rhythm of the land around us. We wake when the sun hits, break camp when we’re ready, pedal all day, and stop when the light fades. There’s no hurry, just forward momentum. So deserted are these roads that our tires kick up chunks of petrified wood.

Blasted by time and the elements, Ute Cabin is still a glistening spot for lunch and a water refill. Jen Judge

On the descent to Lake Powell, we pass a marker for Hideout Canyon, said to have been a fully fortified backcountry recluse where Butch Cassidy and his gang sheltered from the law. Even today, there’s nothing and no one for hours and hours from this spot. I imagine those outlaws concocting a tale of their heavily armed fort in the mountains simply to protect this wilderness sanctuary from the outside. We stop for lunch at the Sundance Trailhead, where a faint path leads into the ominous-sounding Dark Canyon Wilderness. Kaitlyn has led college courses from the confluence of the canyon at the Colorado River up through the 3,000-foot chasm to this rim of milky sandstone. Dark Canyon, she says, is just as impressive as the Grand Canyon. It seems crazy that I’ve never heard of it. “Part of the magic of these places is how quiet they are, how empty,” says Kurt. “But that’s the conundrum: If too few people know about a place like this, it could be lost to bigger interests. Too many, and it’s spoiled.”

We have just 12 miles to go and two hours till sunset. But we linger on the slickrock, basking in the radiating heat and staring past lollipops of juniper. We decide to camp another night—no one wants the experience to end. For now, the three of us are exactly the right number of people in this wilderness.

