Environment and Energy Daily reports:

One flier advertises an open hunting season on southeast Utah backpackers, with no harvest limits and all weapons permitted.

Another carries a fake news release from Interior Secretary Sally Jewell: The federal government plans to seize more than 4 million acres of the Navajo Nation’s land.

A third flier advertises a July 17 party in Blanding, Utah, to celebrate President Obama’s designation of a Bears Ears National Monument that would supposedly happen that day. But Utah Navajos aren’t invited, the flier states. They can kiss access to their sacred lands goodbye.

“Utah Navajos, stay away from our party,” it reads. “Everyone else come and celebrate with us.”

The postings discovered in the past month at trailheads, campgrounds, a post office and gas stations in San Juan County show that the debate surrounding the proposed 1.9-million-acre national monument is getting nasty.

Dirty tricks department – but nobody knows who created and distributed the fliers.

Few in San Juan disagree that enhanced protections are needed for the Bears Ears region, which includes Cedar Mesa, a scenic expanse of juniper and pinyon forests, winding sandstone canyons, and an estimated 100,000 archaeological sites, including Native American cliff dwellings, rock art and burial pits.

But there’s a deep divide over how much of the landscape to preserve and whether those protections should come from Congress or from Obama using the Antiquities Act. A draft bill by House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) would designate a 1.1-million-acre Bears Ears National Conservation Area, leaving far more acreage available to multiple uses like drilling, mining and motorized recreation.

Well they’re Republicans.

Use of the Antiquities Act touches raw nerves in southern Utah, where elected officials still fume over President Clinton’s surprise 1996 election-year decision to designate the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move that quashed a proposed coal mine and drew accusations of federal overreach.

In subsequent years, elected officials and ranchers openly flouted new Bureau of Land Management restrictions. Kane County erected dozens of road signs allowing motorized travel on monument lands that BLM had closed to protect sensitive desert resources.

That’s nice. Let’s not protect anything, let’s just stomp it all into dust.

Fliers calling for the shooting of backpackers have heightened tensions.

Why yes, I daresay they have.

Meanwhile in Idaho –

The trap could have decapitated an unsuspecting mountain biker or runner.

A piece of barb wire was suspended about four feet off the ground, and it stretched across a downhill section of a road that was popular with motorcyclists, OHV users and mountain bikers in Custer County, Idaho.

…

Luckily, the sinister trap was taken down before anybody was hurt. But officials across the western and northeastern states have been advising trail enthusiasts, such as mountain bikers, hikers and campers, to be on the lookout for a variety of dangerous threats, ranging from booby traps to assassins.

Last month, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation issued a warning because wire cables were found stretching across trails in four state forests. According to a spokesman with the agency, the intent of these cables was to cause harm to bikers and hikers.

I guess we should all just stay home forever.