Conservation Groups Urge BLM to Protect Old Spanish Trail From Utah Lease Sale

Seven oil and gas parcels in southeastern Utah could edge up to, or cut through, the country that gives the Old Spanish National Historic Trail its pull: open desert, long sightlines and the feeling that the route still moves through a living historic landscape. A coalition of conservation and public-interest groups filed comments on April 16 asking the Bureau of Land Management to remove parcels 1805, 1806, 1809, 7935, 7937, 7941 and 7947 from Utah’s Third Quarter Competitive Oil and Gas Lease Sale.

The sale is moving through BLM’s environmental review as DOI-BLM-UT-0000-2026-0005-EA. The agency listed Uintah, Emery and Grand counties as affected and opened public scoping from March 16 through April 15 at 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time. BLM says Utah lease sales are held quarterly under the Mineral Leasing Act, with parcels nominated by the public and screened through the land-use planning process. In this case, the Moab Field Office area is where the trail and the lease map collide.

The coalition’s central argument is blunt: the Old Spanish Trail is not just scenery near the parcels, it is a congressionally designated historic trail whose route, setting and public values deserve protection. Congress designated it on December 4, 2002, through Public Law 107-325, and described it as an approximately 2,700-mile route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, California. The Bureau of Land Management describes the trail as about 700 miles long in Utah, and the full corridor passes through Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. For travelers, that matters because the trail experience depends on more than a line on a map. It depends on the quiet, the distance and the intact landscape that still makes a drive or detour feel like a crossing of country, not a pass through industrial sprawl.

The filing says six of the seven parcels are crossed by one or more trail alignments, while the seventh sits within one-tenth of a mile of an alignment. It also says all seven parcels are within 3.69 miles of every relevant alignment considered. The groups argue BLM has not met its trail-protection duty because, in their view, the required trailwide Comprehensive Management Plan has not been completed, the trail right-of-way has not been formally selected and published, and needed management corridors and inventories are still incomplete.

That fight has been building for years. NPS and BLM began scoping for a Comprehensive Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement in 2006, held 21 public scoping meetings across the trail states and completed a draft CMP/EIS by 2011. The agencies later completed a Comprehensive Administrative Strategy, which NPS says is now complete and implemented, but the coalition says that still does not replace the management plan required by law. The filing was signed by John W. Hiscock of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Chandra Rosenthal of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Landon Newell of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Laura Welp of Western Watersheds Project and Kevin Emmerich of Basin and Range Watch. For the Old Spanish Trail, the real decision point comes before any rig is built: whether the landscape stays legible as a historic route, or gets chipped away parcel by parcel.