How many times in the last few days have you heard that Bears Ears National Monument never actually restricted recreation — that it just protected the land?
It's a good line, and the people repeating it have a lot invested in you believing it. But we read the actual signed 2025 management plan, cover to cover, provision by provision. It tells almost the exact opposite story, and it tells it in its own carefully numbered paragraphs.
Take the walk yourself
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether you can walk in Bears Ears, so let’s take a walk through Bears Ears as it was envisioned by the Monument Management Plan, and you tell us if this sounds like “no restrictions.”
Start with wheels. Ride a mountain bike? The plan carved out a "Remote Zone" of about 775,000 acres and set it aside for travel that's non-motorized and non-mechanized. Read that second word again. Non-mechanized means your bike — not limited, not permitted with a pass, zoned out entirely, with no path to ever be reconsidered. Stack the hundreds of thousands of acres closed to OHVs on top, add a flat ban on new mechanized routes, and the trail network you knew could only ever shrink.
And it could never grow back for the reason you'd actually want. Under TM-4, a new motorized route can only be added when it's "necessary for public safety or protection of BENM objects." Recreational value is not a permissible basis. Read that plainly: no matter how many people want to use a new route, wanting to use it is never a reason the plan will let the agency build it.
Want to organize a race? The plan will let a bicycle race run on a designated open road while prohibiting a motorized race on that same road (REC-26). Same road, same day, same dust — one is "competitive motorized" and banned outright, the other is "non-motorized competitive" and "may be considered." That arbitrary asymmetry isn't an accident of drafting. It's written into one sentence, and it tells you exactly whose recreation the plan was built to phase out.
If you still want to ride together, count heads first. REC-23 caps motorized groups at "two groups of 12 vehicles per route per day" — and organized club runs and guided tours are often bigger than twelve rigs. REC-19 sets a Special Recreation Permit trigger at just 25 people in the Outback Zone, 542,361 acres holding nearly all of the backcountry four-wheel-drive roads and dispersed camping. At two or three people a vehicle, that's nine to twelve trucks before you need a federal permit to go for a drive or have a family gathering.
Want a concrete, hard-coded restriction? Take Arch Canyon, the one route the plan singles out by name. Appendix G describes who uses it in the plan's own words: "side-by-sides, Jeeps, and modified vehicles on the designated road." Under TM-14, every one of them now needs an individual Special Recreation Permit for any motorized travel, use is subject to allocation, commercial and organized group events are prohibited, and the final half mile before the Forest boundary closes seasonally from March 1 to August 31. That's not a zone on a map. That's a specific road, and a specific community of users, told the terms have changed.
Two places don't even get the courtesy of a permit path. REC-20 prohibits all motorized and mechanized Special Recreation and Special Use Permits in the Peavine corridor — the only route named this way in the entire plan — and across every one of the 205,594 acres managed as Lands with Wilderness Characteristics. No commercial trip, no organized event, no exceptions.
Now let's look at the sections the "nothing changed" crowd never mentions, because they really wanted to hide this. If you hunt, the plan says it three different ways: "There are no exceptions that allow for cross-country OHV travel for game retrieval or antler gathering" (TM-19, TM-20). Drop an elk a quarter mile off the road and you are not driving out to get it. If you cut firewood, FOR-17 says the same thing about wood gathering — no cross-country OHV, no exceptions.
And you don't have to do anything at all to lose a road. Under SSP-11, a raptor nesting closure can include "the temporary or permanent closure of any OHV route access to nesting areas." One nest can permanently close a road.
Now lace up those hiking boots and go for a real walk. Surely walking's safe? Not quite. The plan reserved the authority to close areas to "non-motorized, non-mechanized cross-country travel." This is a bureaucrat's way of saying you, on your own two feet, off the trail. Normal people call this hiking. In several spots the plan already limited it to designated trails only. The default was a polite "please stay on the trail," but the power to make that mandatory across the whole 1.3-million-acre map was written right in to the plan. The call on which areas to close to hiking was routed to a future process for the Bears Ears Commission to advise the agency, with no seat at that table reserved for the people who actually hike it.
Planning to sleep out there? Dispersed camping — the free, pull-off-and-pitch-a-tent kind — got limited to designated sites only, with hard no-camping buffers around every water source and developed area, and "unapproved" existing spots slated to be "reclaimed." How many sites survive is left to the Bears Ears Commission and the BLM, with no built-in way for the people who camp there to defend a single one.
Bringing the dog? Don't forget the leash. Everywhere, all the time. Your dog runs off-leash only if it's hunting, herding, assisting search-and-rescue, or a service animal. A family's hiking dog has no off-leash option anywhere in 1.36 million acres, and dogs are banned outright from a whole list of places on top of that.
Do you like to climb? Every existing route is on the table for closure, and you can't place a single new bolt or anchor without an approval process to be defined later and run through the Bears Ears Commission and the BLM. Check out Cave Rock or Massacre Rocks to see how this story ends.
Rockhound? Casual mineral collecting is banned outright.
Then there's the stuff that reads like a parody, until you see the sentence sitting on top of it. Before the plan gets to its list of banned activities, it lays down REC-14: any activity "inconsistent with the protection of BENM objects and the Bears Ears cultural landscape," as determined in collaboration with the Commission, "will be prohibited." Will be. That's the actual blank check. Everything after it is just examples the drafters happened to think of. And the BENM objects to be protected are the entire 1.3 million acre landscape.
And the examples are something. The prohibited list includes BASE jumping, hang gliding, paragliding, and wing-suit flying — niche, sure. But the same list bans highlining, geocaching, and — we promise we're not making this up — stacking rocks. Drones are gone for the public. Commercial and organized filming gets capped hard and pushed into a permit system, banned outright anywhere it might cause a disturbance or touch a sacred site (again that's the entire 1.3 million acre landscape). Even a hot-air balloon needs a permit to touch down. If you bring too many friends, you need a permit for that too.
But don't get lost in the wing suits. They're a distraction from REC-14's first sentence, which needs no list at all. If an activity can be called "inconsistent with the protection of objects," it's prohibited — and, as we'll see, the plan defines the object as everything.
So walk us back through “the monument didn’t restrict recreation.” Which form of recreation did it not restrict?
The one weird trick that would have led to even more restrictions...
The people making that argument that the monument didn't restrict recreation are also dishonestly neglecting to tell you about how the plan they created set the stage for even more restrictions. They’ve got a technicality on their side, that’s worth understanding.
Federal land plans get built in tiers. First comes the big programmatic plan like the one signed in 2025, which sets the zones and hands out the authority. Then, later, come the implementation plans: the travel plans and area plans that actually decide, route by route, activity by activity, object by 1.3-million-acre-object what closes and what stays open. Two layers. And the restrictions were carefully sorted between them.
At the programmatic layer, the plan mostly drew zones and reserved powers. Barely any specific trails were closed on paper the day it was signed. The plan only formally closed a couple dozen miles in a monument the size of a small state. So if you showed up to object, the answer was reassuring: we’re not closing your trail; that’s a question for the travel plan, and there’ll be a whole public process when we get there.
What that reassurance left out is the catch. Once the programmatic plan zones an area closed, the later travel plan isn’t allowed to put a route back. The outcome was already locked in upstream; it just hadn’t been announced. So when the travel plan is finally introduced, years later, the answer flips: We’re not making a new decision here; we’re just carrying out the plan. The plan being carried out required the starting point of closing ~637,000 acres to motorized access.
Follow any single restriction and it falls straight through the crack between the two tiers. Up top, it’s “not decided yet.” Down below, it’s “already decided.” The hard look, the real public fight, the day you get to stand up and say "no," never quite happens, because each layer points at the other. The closures don’t arrive as one act you can rally against. They come in waves, over years, each one dressed up as routine paperwork. We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Monument closures are a process, not an event.
That’s how someone can look you in the eye and say the monument didn’t restrict recreation. On the day it was signed, most of the restrictions technically hadn’t happened yet. You can still go out and make a social media reel with you and your unleashed dog walking through the monument with that Mumford and Sons song about your swelling rage in the background. But that’s because the closures and fines and the restrictions were never enforced... yet. The plan was signed during the final days of the Biden Administration, and the Trump Administration hasn’t enforced any of the closures that are required or contemplated by the plan. The plan didn’t slam the doors; it wired the building and walked away.
One detail sets that timer to apply to everywhere: the plan declared the entire 1.36-million-acre landscape itself an “object” situated upon the landscape that has to be protected, and every restriction in it is triggered by the need to “protect the monument’s objects.” If the object is the whole landscape, there’s no acre the closure and restriction authority can’t reach. That’s not a limit on the restrictions. It’s a blank check.
So… Why is BRC happy about this?
Which brings us to the accusation that keeps showing up in our feeds: How dare a recreation group support the reduction?
The answer is simple. We’re the only group fighting for recreation access that is telling you the truth about all the restrictions that were drafted to shut down access to all forms of recreation (including walking) across 1.3 million acres. Turn it around. How dare a group, or a list of “brave” businesses, or impressionable influencers that claim to speak for recreation defend a plan engineered, tier by tier, to close recreation down slowly, quietly, on a delay, with a legal trigger that reached every square foot? Supporting the reduction of the Bears Ears monument boundaries isn’t a betrayal of recreation users. It’s the only position that takes recreation users of all kinds seriously.
If you’re not burning your Patagonia jacket in protest yet, go back to the start and read this all one more time.
...
Ok. If you got through this a second time, and you're still not burning that Patagonia jacket, can we at least have a word with your dog?
The real protections are still intact
None of that means the people who loved Bears Ears were wrong to love it. The cliff dwellings, the rock art, the dirt roads, the scenery — those are real, they’re sacred, and they matter. But you never had to close a million-plus acres to hikers and wing suit aviators to protect them. Wrecking or looting an archaeological site is already a federal crime on every acre of public land, monument or not. The remaining monument boundary is still a National-Park-sized area that includes the Shash Jáa and Indian Creek cultural sites.
And yes, there is an honest tradeoff: the excluded land reopens to mineral leasing. This is worth watching, and we’re watching. But a lease isn’t a mine, and every real proposal runs the environmental-review gauntlet. Weigh a slow, heavily regulated impact that may affect a few hundred acres against the certain and imminent loss of access for an ever-growing list of users to 1.3 million acres, and the recreation math isn’t close.
And one thing that keeps getting muddled: the reduction didn’t sell anything or fence anything off. The 1.24 million acres that came out of the monument are still public land managed by the BLM and Forest Service, still yours to hike, camp, ride, and hunt. What changed wasn’t who owns it. It was the rulebook hanging over it.
Watch the plans, not the headlines
The reduction isn’t the last word. It’ll be fought over in court and in Congress, and the plans that decide your actual routes could still be updated. That’s where this is really won or lost in the plans and the courtroom. So read the plan. Watch the lawsuits. And the next time someone says a recreation group has no business backing a monument boundary reduction, ask them one question: Did you read what the monument was about to do to recreation? We did. That’s exactly why we’re here celebrating the decision to leave these lands open for everyone to enjoy.
