Speaking of Trump’s assertive racism, and Bears Ears / Escalante, wait there’s more –

While the Ancestral Puebloan people of the Southwest were building citadels like Chaco Canyon, the Fremont people were carving mysterious petroglyphs depicting horned, broad-shouldered triangular men and sweeping carvings of desert snakes. Nowhere is their legacy more apparent than in eastern Utah’s Molen Reef. Fremont artifacts dominate this cultural heritage site, but its rock art ranges from 3,000-year-old panels from the Barrier Canyon tradition to etchings by Mormon pioneers crossing the Utah desert.

They aren’t easy to see, but that’s not a bad thing. You won’t find these cultural treasures on a map, and Jonathan Bailey, a Ferron, Utah-based photographer and author of Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape, thinks it should stay that way. “There are hundreds of rock art panels in the Molen Reef, and maybe a dozen are known,” he says. “They are mostly pristine, unexcavated sites that have very little vandalism.”

So far.

Bailey worries about the resources being compromised by human activity before they can be cataloged and protected. But the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has different plans for the area. In January 2018, the agency approved the leasing of 32,000 acres for mineral exploration between the San Rafael Swell and Molen Reef—just as it has in many other places in Utah.

Because which is more important – some old cave art? Or the ability to drive the SUV to Costco and back?

In the past, Orr, Bailey, and other rock art enthusiasts have been able to persuade the BLM to defer leasing while they conduct field work to document petroglyphs, habitation sites, and geoglyphs that might be impacted by development. But in 2018, guided by the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, the BLM’s Price field office has overruled URARA’s protests.

“This is the first year we have not been able to withdraw these leases,” says Bailey.

The BLM this time says it won’t be a problem.

Federal law obligates the BLM to analyze lands nominated for leasing and offer them at auction if it determines that leasing will not harm non-energy resources. Despite the determination of his two predecessors that leasing could damage the rock art, current BLM state director Ed Roberson concluded it would not.

“BLM conducts additional site specific analysis before any surface disturbing activities can occur,” maintains Heather O’Hanlon, BLM’s Utah information officer, in an email. “Strong stipulations . . . give us confidence that we can protect the cultural resources entrusted under our care.”

The rock art army is not reassured. Though O’Hanlon claims that “the BLM-Utah completed the most intensive pre-lease inventory survey that we have ever done,” Bailey says that the agency has yet to inventory many rock art sites around Molen Reef. “They have not inventoried a good chunk of this land, so they can’t judge the impacts,” he says.

But they have very good instincts, just like Trump.