Opinion: Great Rides Don't Always Have Happy Endings

I was recently invited to ride in Moab, Utah. The folks at Patagonia were going to demo some of their 2018 mountain bike range and, “Oh, by the way, we’d like to take you on a tour of Bears Ears National Monument while you are there.”

I’ll rarely pass up a chance to revisit Moab. I was more excited, though, to experience Bears Ears and the Lockhart Basin. I’ve studied the place from the air and from distant vantage points, but I had never been on the ground there. This was an easy decision.

I’d ridden bikes with the Patagonia crew before. It’s a different experience. Everyone, it seems, crosses between sports, so you may be following a Bikram Yoga instructor up a sandy climb, or the guy who gave you a fist bump for cleaning a dicey boulder drop could have recently returned from a first ascent in the Himalaya. I’ve listened to a lot of hubris about “living the adventure.” It turns out that those who actually do, are a humble group – and many of them can shred.



We caravaned fifty miles South, down Highway 191 to Montecello, where we bunked up at Four Corners School of Outdoor Education. Patagonia has been a staunch supporter of National Monuments in the Southwest, so we would spend the second half of our trip exploring Bears Ears National Moment - and
learn why it has fallen into the cross-hairs of this country’s current President. If you're curious, I’ve since done a fair bit of research on the subject and found this article to be the best assessment of the conflict as it stands.


Again, the climbers were up and gone before we had our bikes loaded in the trucks. Bears Ears is too large to see in a month, much less in a day. We descended into the canyons to sample the North end of the Monument above the Indian Creek climbing zone, where the landscape abruptly opens wide with 40-mile vistas to the North and West.

the route used to be traveled by trucks hauling uranium during Moab’s mining boom. Lindberg pointed to a thin green layer mid-way up the cliffs. “That’s where it all is. The dinosaurs are in that layer too.”


Dismantling Bears Ears, and nearby Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monuments was the result of a pissing match between past and present presidential administrations, and it was a trophy, ceremoniously delivered to the country's Western Sates, which contend that the Federal government should not own or control lands with their boundaries.

While that may look great on paper, the reality is that this country's leaders didn't figure out that setting aside large tracts of common land may have been a wise idea until the Western half was being occupied. Federally owned lands in western states are hugely disproportional to those in the East, but the benefits cannot be argued. The West has a proliferation of National Parks, unparalleled recreational freedom, and abundant habitat protections. Pull up Google maps and compare those opportunities in states east of the Mississippi, where, from their inception, almost every acre of land was parceled to private ownership and municipal governments.


Every state has archaeological and natural wonders that exist nowhere else, and every state has been guilty of trashing one or more of them at some point - most often to exploit resources. Ironic then, that it was the States (Congress) that created the Antiquities Act, which Teddy Roosevelt then employed to proclaim the first National Monument as a means to federally protect ancient Native American dwellings from wholesale looting, because the State of Colorado did not.

Anasazi didn't erect their dwellings in the alcoves of North Carolina. There are no manatees swimming in Utah's Great Salt Lake. No redwood forests grow in Texas, and there is nothing like Bears Ears where I live in San Diego - which makes me glad that fifteen out of the sixteen presidents who have wielded the power of the Antiquities Act, did so as a quick and decisive method to place such treasures in trust for our entire nation. One president did not, and I'm certain that if Teddy Roosevelt were here to comment, he would call him a looter, not a leader.