BY HILLARY HOFFMANN
One of the first family vacations I can remember was a trip to Dinosaur National Monument in northwest Colorado, or just “Dinosaur,” as we called it. We packed up the family pickup truck, headed west on Highway 40 from our home in the mountains near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and drove for several hours toward the Utah border. I didn’t know anything about where we were going, but, judging by the name, I was expecting something big and exciting – maybe a giant plastic Tyrannosaurus rex waiting to greet us at the entrance, or a museum with looming dinosaur skeletons, an animated tour guide, and lots of fossils with complicated Latin names.
The grand entrance was a vast sea of sagebrush and a dirt road leading into the middle of nowhere. There was no store, no museum, and definitely no plastic dinosaurs.
For those who have visited the national monuments of the Colorado Plateau, this story might sound familiar. With a few exceptions, like Colorado National Monument, where you can see the reason for the monument’s existence even before you enter, you often don’t really know what’s there until you go in and starting looking around. And it might take some searching, by Jeep, on foot, or at the end of a rappel rope. In many parts of the plateau’s monuments, there are no footpaths, let alone roads. But the seeming emptiness belies a diversity of scientific and historic resources found nowhere else in the country.
From the eastern entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, it’s hard to see what I mean. Turning off of Highway 40, the road leading in unfolds on a sagebrush plain. Along the way, there is virtually nothing but desert – no parking lots, signs, or other indicators that you should stop to get out of the car. You might see pronghorn antelope, if you’re lucky. If you decide not to turn back though, and follow the road far enough, you will find that it eventually drops over the edge of a 1,000-foot cliff into a canyon where the Green River meets the Yampa. If you head down into the abyss, the road turns to dirt, switchbacks down the cliff, and leads to a little oasis called Echo Park.
Echo Park. TOM TILL
On your way down that dirt road, the monument’s diversity starts to appear, like what happens in the Grand Staircase on your way up the Kelly Grade to the top of the Kaiparowits Plateau. Passing over and through the alien topography of Dinosaur, you might see a fossil, a petroglyph, or maybe even an eagle. If you do some homework, you will learn that you are crossing unique geological formations holding the largest variety of paleontological resources in the nation, as well as petroglyphs carved by mysterious people who lived on the Colorado Plateau over a thousand years ago.
In this statute, Congress determined that some of the nation’s natural and cultural resources, along with its lands, were such an important part of the fabric of American identity that presidents should be able to protect them as national monuments. So Congress gave presidents the authority to set aside “objects of historic or scientific interest” and the lands (and waters) containing them. Sixteen presidents have exercised this authority to set aside certain places and declare them off-limits from certain forms of development.
Because of its name and its history, many people associate the Antiquities Act with protecting archaeological sites and ancient artifacts. This is certainly one purpose of the act, protecting places like Canyon de Chelly because they contain important archaeological ruins and objects. But the Antiquities Act is much broader than that. Natural features of the land itself, or places where significant cultural events have occurred, can be “objects of historic or scientific interest” too. This is the reason that our nation’s national monuments encompass everything from the marine biodiversity around the Hawaiian Islands, to Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, to places of vital cultural importance, such as the A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, which served as the headquarters for the civil rights campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the spring of 1963.
This is also the purpose for protecting the Colorado Plateau monuments, including the vast, dry desolation of Dinosaur. The primary value President Wilson saw there was the great paleontological wealth. Some of that had been unearthed in 1915, when the monument was established, but some of it had not, and those lands were threatened by potential coal and phosphate development. So, President Wilson declared that all of the fossil wealth of the monument would be protected forevermore, whether in situ or in the glass cases of the Quarry Museum. And that was enough for the Antiquities Act. It didn’t matter that the lands containing those fossils looked like nothing more than a dry sagebrush sea. Or that they contained vast coal and phosphate deposits. President Wilson saw value in the lands containing the fossils and preserved them under his Antiquities Act authority, and it was his vision that the Antiquities Act respects.
When President Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, both were challenged by private interest groups and counties who felt that Clinton’s designations were too large to protect the values enumerated in the proclamations. Yet, the courts evaluating these arguments ultimately dismissed them, concluding that Congress’s intent in the Antiquities Act was to give a president the authority to choose places and objects that, in the president’s opinion, merited protection, and to set boundaries around them that would ensure their protection. Congress gave the president a judgment call, in other words, so it was not for the courts to place their own judgments above those of the president.
And after more than a hundred years of presidential proclamations, there are now more than 20 national monuments protecting the myriad values of the Colorado Plateau. Thanks to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, the nation has Hovenweep, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Sunset Crater Volcano, Walnut Canyon, Bears Ears, and many other monuments. Like Dinosaur, these monuments are repositories of exceptional scientific value, from the 1,000-foot cinder cone of Sunset Crater, to rare desert natural areas holding strong since the Pleistocene.
Archaeologists tell us that the southern plateau is the American cradle of civilization, where the first villages, towns, and then cities of this nation were built. Vestiges of these first communities are visible in Canyon de Chelly, Grand Staircase, Bears Ears, and other monuments, and signs of these early inhabitants are still visible on many of the canyon walls. Tribes still maintain strong connections to places protected by monument designations, such as the Bears Ears buttes.
The Colorado Plateau monuments reflect a long span of American history, from the formation of the continent to the present day. They are living testaments to that history and continue to reveal their value with each passing year. In 2010, Dinosaur National Monument yielded its latest treasures in the form of two complete skulls of Abydosaurus mcintoshi, a previously unknown species of sauropod that roamed the swampy marshes near Echo Park during the latter stages of the Cretaceous Period. Thanks to President Wilson’s foresight in 1915, I can now take my kids out there to see them.
Hillary Hoffmann is a native of northwest Colorado and a professor at Vermont Law School, where she teaches courses on public lands and federal Indian law. Letson Douglass contributed valuable research to this article.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
Also in this issue:
John Leshy on how Utah “land grabbers” misread history, as well as the dictionary. Read now ›