At stake is control of public lands in Western states, and conservationists fear increased efforts to roll back protections under the next Trump administration.

Redge Johnson stood at the fork in a rutted dirt road, gazing across an empty desert at a mammoth red rock butte. To the right curved a route that travelers in 4x4s or off-road vehicles could drive to reach one end of the formation. To the left was an alternate route, now blocked by a small sign: “Restoration Area No Vehicles.”

“This really torques me,” said Johnson, who leads the office that coordinates Utah’s public lands policy. “Why can’t we have both?”

The two tracks account for a few of the 317 miles of rugged roads that the federal Bureau of Land Management closed last year in this iconic landscape. But the anger underpinning Johnson’s question, shared by ranchers and off-road enthusiasts, is likely to fuel a lengthy battle over control of public lands in the American West.

Though the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a lawsuit filed by Utah that challenged the federal government’s ownership of one-third of the state’s terrain, public lands advocates are bracing themselves. They say the litigation — launched with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign — was merely the opening salvo in an assertive new effort to roll back public lands protections at a time when federal courts, Congress and the White House may be friendlier than ever to the idea.

“The core of this land grab lawsuit is Utah wanting to rewrite history to have the authority to do more on lands within our state,” said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “They’ve moved the ball down the field.”

The federal government owns nearly half the land in 11 Western states, using it for recreation, grazing, mining, and oil and gas drilling. It owns an even greater proportion of land within Utah’s borders, a reality that leaders here have long complained deprives them of tax revenue and sovereignty. They contend the government has no right to indefinitely hold on to BLM land “unappropriated” for national parks, forests, monuments or other designations. Elected officials in several other Western states agree.

“It’s been a tragedy to see what this administration and past administrations have done on our land,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said in August as he announced the lawsuit, which Idaho, Wyoming and Alaska vociferously backed.

In a statement following the high court’s decision, Cox and other Utah officials noted that the state could still pursue its case through lower courts. They also addressed the changing political landscape, saying they were “heartened to know the incoming administration shares our commitments to the principle of ‘multiple use’ for these federal lands and is committed to working with us to improve land management.”

Public lands experts call Utah’s theory preposterous given that the state’s own constitution disavows any right to federal lands and that the U.S. Constitution affirms Congress’s authority over them — as upheld in the past by the Supreme Court. Conservation groups dismiss it as a publicity-seeking land grab, a renewed Sagebrush Rebellion gussied up in legal briefs and slick advertisements exhorting Utahns to “stand for our land.”

Yet environmentalists took the lawsuit seriously, both as a specific threat and a possible harbinger of sweeping changes to public lands policy under the next Trump administration and a Republican-majority Congress supportive of fossil fuels and development.

The conservative blueprint Project 2025 calls for opening more public lands to drilling and mining and for repeal of the Antiquities Act, which gives the president power to create national monuments on historic and scientifically important sites. (As a candidate last fall, Donald Trump distanced himself from the manifesto; since his election, he has picked several of its architects for his second term.)

Just Thursday, a House bill was introduced to strip that presidential power from the 1906 law. During his first term in office, Trump dramatically shrank two famed national monuments in Utah; President Joe Biden restored them.

Hints of changes are already bubbling. This month, the House passed a rule that would make it easier for Congress to cede control of public lands. Doug Burgum, the president-elect’s nominee for interior secretary, emphasized at his confirmation hearing last week that public lands should have multiple uses. As governor of North Dakota, he supported Utah’s Supreme Court lawsuit.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who chairs the Senate’s energy and natural resources committee and has long argued for state management of BLM lands, posted on social media last month after a meeting with Burgum that it was great “planning the return of American lands to the American people.”

Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director at the Wilderness Society, predicts "this is going to be the public lands-slash-environmental issue of the next two years.”

Utah’s unusual lawsuit reflects a long-standing battle over control of much of the West — acreage the government acquired, by force or purchase, from foreign countries or Indigenous tribes before Utah became a state in 1896. State and county officials decry the federal agencies in their midst as imperious East Coast landlords that ignore locals’ concerns and expertise.

At times the resentment has turned theatrical or violent. In 1980, hundreds of “Sagebrush rebels” gathered outside Moab, cheering as Grand County politicians bulldozed a road into a BLM Wilderness Study Area. In 2016, an armed militia protested federal control by seizing a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for 41 days.

The discontent runs deepest in red states such as Utah and Wyoming. But even some blue state leaders express frustrations. In an interview last week, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) said he did not support the widespread transfer of federal land but shared the view that states are not adequately compensated for local law enforcement and road maintenance on federal land.

States usually have pushed back through lawsuits and legislation, though neither has gotten much traction. In 2017, then-Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced a bill to transfer 3.3 million acres of Western federal lands to states. He withdrew the measure amid a backlash from constituents who feared it would limit access to public hunting and fishing areas — evidence, conservationists say, of the popularity of public lands.

Cox said in August that Utah’s lawsuit followed “decades of legal analysis” but was acted on now because of actions of the Biden administration that the state considered egregiously restrictive. Those included the road closures on BLM property and a rule putting conservation, recreation and renewable energy on equal footing with resource extraction on bureau land. A bureau plan to open millions of its acres to solar projects also antagonized the state, which prefers geothermal plans and has maintained that solar would limit livestock grazing.

As Johnson puts it, from his vantage overseeing the state’s public lands policies, “there’s big w and little w” to wilderness. Utah favors “small w” wilderness, he says, which would allow more use but still keep an area “in a natural state.”

During a day-long aerial and ground tour of some of that expanse, he and local officials outlined their beefs with Washington. Heading south from Salt Lake City, the tiny state plane flew over thick pine forests, red rock country and sun-soaked desert.

Near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, the officials pointed to pinyon and juniper woodlands they said were recklessly overgrown and a wildfire threat. Federal managers “see this and think it shouldn’t change,” said Taylor Glover, the public lands director for nearby Kane County. “We call it the museum mindset.”

Another stop was outside Moab in the Labyrinth Canyon area, a tableau of imperial spires and sheer orange cliffs. Johnson looked down to the calm waters of the Green River and the Hey Joe trail running along its banks. Originally a dirt road to a former uranium mine, the trail more recently had been used by vehicles and sightseers. It was closed as part of the bureau’s updated “travel management plans” for several regions, a move that incensed off-roading groups. They, along with the state, appealed.

“This is our final, hard line in the sand,” Johnson said. “No more closures.”

River rafting companies and the county commission supported the Hey Joe closure, saying loud vehicle traffic and dust spoiled a wilderness experience sought by visitors from around the world.

“That’s a perfect example of user conflict,” which the BLM’s management plan aims to reduce while protecting natural resources, said Laura Peterson, a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. While more than 300 miles of routes in the area were indeed closed to vehicles, more than 800 were left open, according to the organization.

“Riparian areas make up less than one percent of the desert lands,” Peterson said. “Certainly that is more important than a few people driving that route.”

Johnson acknowledged that Utah would also use the closed roads and federal lands for extractive projects — free from Washington’s environmental regulations and legal battles surrounding them. Yet he insisted that is not the state’s main goal.

“This landscape, it’s just unique — I have a love for it like no other,” said Johnson, who grew up in a southern Utah ranching family. “We absolutely never want these lands sold.”

Public lands advocates don’t believe such declarations. Utah is a booster of the fossil fuel industry, and with a Republican supermajority in power, they say state policies can change quickly. Utah’s lawsuit argued that the U.S. Constitution requires Washington to “dispose” of “unappropriated” BLM land, not give it to Utah. The advocates fear that could mean forcing its sale to the highest bidder.

On a blue-sky December morning, Peterson and Bloch walked with local activists through the sandy trails of Nine Mile Canyon, an example of the “unappropriated” public land Utah contests. Three hours south of Salt Lake City, its sandstone walls are so decorated with ancient petroglyphs and pictographs that it is known as the world’s longest outdoor art gallery. Above it sits the West Tavaputs Plateau, rich with gas reserves that conservationists worry could open up to more drilling.

Pam Miller, a retired anthropologist and college professor who has long advocated for protections for the canyon, stood at the shallow Rasmussen Cave and pointed to a petroglyph worn smooth by hand after hand touching it in hopes it would lead to fertility.

“For thousands of years, people lived here — people with different ways of life, hunter-gatherers and then farmers and then hunter-gathers again — and they just kept coming back and adding their own rock art and renewing the magic of the existing stuff,” Miller said. “I feel that when I come to the canyon.”

The wilderness alliance is no fan of the federal government’s land management. But its regulatory processes, requiring environmental reviews and extensive public comment, do not exist at the state level, Bloch said.

Dennis Willis, who worked for 35 years in rangeland health and recreation at the local BLM office, echoed the point. After a career that afforded him opportunities to discover ancient wooden tools and Indigenous rock art, he also is a canyon advocate.

“I don’t want to replace open public processes and rules that everybody plays by and the opportunity to appeal things,” Willis said as he hiked toward a cliff carved with images of humans, horses and mountain sheep. And while he’s “frequently disappointed” by the way the bureau carries out its mission, “the state is worse.”