BY STEPHEN NASH
This week, we visit three national monuments (more than two dozen are under review by the Trump administration and could be made smaller and opened to logging and mining): Bears Ears in Utah (below), Gold Butte in Nevada and Berryessa Snow Mountain in California.
My entourage and I blew into Bears Ears National Monument in Utah just as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his entourage departed.
Actually, I had brought only one companion to this enormous high-desert landscape of rust-red and clay-gray cliffs, pinnacles, mesas and ravines. It is all national public land, roughly 90 times bigger than Manhattan and a third again as large as Grand Canyon National Park.
It shelters what former President Barack Obama called “some of our country’s most important cultural treasures, including abundant rock art, archaeological sites, and lands considered sacred by Native American tribes” when he ordered increased protection for them all by creating the national monument last December...