On July 13, President Trump signed proclamations cutting Bears Ears National Monument by 91 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 90 percent, removing protections from nearly 3 million acres of southern Utah. The land is still public, and you can still hike it. Here is what actually changes, and what you can do about it.
If you have hiked in southern Utah in the last decade, you have watched the same ground change names four times. Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated in 1996, Bears Ears in 2016. President Trump cut both in 2017. President Biden restored both in 2021. And on July 13, 2026, President Trump signed two new proclamations that cut deeper than the first time.
The canyons have not moved. The cliff dwellings and pictograph panels have not moved. But the rules around them are about to, and if you visit this country, that puts more responsibility on you than it did last month.
What happened
The Bears Ears proclamation shrinks the monument from 1.36 million acres to about 121,096 acres, a 91 percent reduction. The Grand Staircase-Escalante proclamation shrinks that monument from 1.87 million acres to about 181,541 acres, roughly 90 percent. Together, nearly 3 million acres lose monument protection.
Both cuts go further than the 2017 reductions, which left Bears Ears at about 202,000 acres and Grand Staircase at about 1 million. President Trump, signing the orders with Utah officials present, said the move restored fairness to the state. Utah Governor Spencer Cox backed the decision, noting that “this does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas.”
Conservation groups and Tribal Nations see it differently, and the fight is headed to court. More on that below.
What’s left inside Bears Ears National Monument, and what’s out
At Bears Ears, the new boundaries keep two units: the Shash Jáa unit (about 106,816 acres), which includes the Bears Ears buttes themselves, Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon, and part of Comb Ridge, and the Indian Creek unit (about 14,279 acres), home to the Newspaper Rock petroglyph panel. A handful of small detached parcels protect specific sites like Moon House and the Citadel.
What falls outside: nearly all of Cedar Mesa, including Grand Gulch, plus Valley of the Gods, White Canyon, and Dark Canyon, according to boundary analysis from the Land Desk and new maps published by the Salt Lake Tribune. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition estimates the landscape holds more than 100,000 cultural and archaeological sites, and archaeologists writing in the Society for American Archaeology’s journal note that only about 5 to 7 percent of the area has ever been intensively surveyed. The original 2016 designation called it “one of the densest and most significant cultural landscapes in the United States.”
At Grand Staircase-Escalante, the retained land sits almost entirely in one unit, the Canyons of the Escalante (about 172,641 acres), which keeps Calf Creek Canyon, the Escalante Natural Bridge, the Hundred Hands pictograph panel, and the Boulder Mail Trail. A small Kaiparowits Horizon unit preserves about 8,900 acres of the plateau’s fossil beds. The Grand Staircase itself, the sweeping geologic formation the monument is named for, is no longer inside the monument at all.
Not sure which 14er to climb next?
Answer 7 quick questions and my free matcher ranks your best-fit Colorado 14ers from all 58, with a photo, the key stats, and a route guide for each.
Find My Peak →What monument status actually does, and doesn’t
Here is the part that gets lost in every headline about monuments: the excluded land does not stop being public land. It stays federal land, managed mostly by the Bureau of Land Management, and you can still hike, camp, and climb on it. Nobody is fencing off Cedar Mesa.
What changes is what else can happen there. Under both proclamations, 60 days after signing, the excluded lands reopen to new mining claims and to mineral and geothermal leasing. Existing laws like the Archaeological Resources Protection Act still apply to individual sites, but the blanket, landscape-level protection that monument status provides is gone.
The Bears Ears proclamation also disbands the Bears Ears Commission, the body through which the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni co-managed the monument, effectively undoing the co-management plan those five Tribes finalized with federal agencies in 2025.
“Today’s action threatens to destroy precious cultural places that are part of our histories and identities as Native peoples,” Hopi tribal leader Georgie Pongyesva said in response. “These places are not abandoned, nor are they ruined. These are living landscapes for which Tribes are the original stewards.”
The legal question underneath all of this has never been fully settled: the Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the power to create monuments, but it says nothing about shrinking them, and many legal scholars argue that power belongs to Congress alone. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance has announced it will challenge the reductions in federal court, and tribal litigation is widely expected. The 2017 lawsuits never reached a ruling because the 2021 restoration made them moot. This round may finally force an answer.
What you can do about it
Whatever happens in court, the next few years put more weight on the people who actually visit this country. A few concrete things:
- Visit like the protection never left. The cliff dwellings, granaries, and rock art panels outside the new boundaries are as fragile as they were in June. Do not touch rock art or enter structures, leave artifacts exactly where they lie, and camp away from sites.
- Skip the geotag. Sensitive sites that lose monument-level oversight rely even more on obscurity. Share the landscape, not the pin.
- Know whose land you are on. These are the ancestral homelands of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Paiute, and Zuni peoples, and they remain living cultural landscapes, not outdoor museums.
- Use your voice. Boundary changes of this scale generate management plans, and management plans require public comment. If you want a say, my guide on how to be a public lands advocate walks through exactly how to weigh in, whoever you want to weigh in for.
- Follow the litigation. The court fight will decide whether any president can redraw any monument. That precedent will reach far beyond Utah.
I started The Next Summit to help people explore public lands safely and sustainably, and moments like this are why the “sustainably” part matters. The rocks do not care about boundary lines. The people who love them have to.
Know before you go, and tread lightly. The land is counting on it.
Reporting from the Federal Register, KUER, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Land Desk, and KNAU. For current access and conditions, check the BLM’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monument pages before you visit.
