Just months after the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) shut down 665 miles of motorized routes in the San Rafael Swell through its travel management plan, many of which led to popular dispersed camping sites, it is now seeking public input on a plan that will close dozens of the most popular primitive, free, dispersed campsites in the area of the Wedge Overlook.
The stated purpose of the closures is to address the “proliferation of dispersed campsites” in the Wedge Recreation Area, and instead of simply designating and signing the existing sites, the BLM is proposing to close them and create developed campground which will create a pad-style campground with 125 sites concentrated into one area away from the overlooks that have made this an iconic camping destination for generations.
You read that right.
After eliminating hundreds of miles of trails that connected the public to their favorite remote campsites, the BLM is now scrambling to manage camping impacts… because users are camping where they still have access.
This is all because they have seem to adopted the recommendations from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s commissioned study that was conducted to manufacture a crisis around the impacts of non-motorized recreation in the Colorado Plateau Region.
According to this “study,” where SUWA bought and paid for the researcher to find a specific outcome in alignment with their political agenda to lock up 8 million acres of public lands in Utah through wilderness designations, there is an “oft repeated but wrong-headed belief at the federal and state levels that the solution to increased public land use is to disperse users across a larger landscape.”
Their solution: “The overarching recommendation for the BLM and other federal land managers is that concentrating visitor use in previously impacted or hardened sites and trails will likely be a successful management strategy, while dispersal strategies may result in a proliferation of recreation disturbance.”
We have heard those who want to apply this solution to camping actually use the phrase “Concentration Camping.”
The part that is left unsaid is that when we can force users to “concentrate visitor use” it inevitably leads to the “hardened sites” becoming new assets in the Recreation.gov system, where the Canadian defense contractor and new landlord of our public lands, Booz Allen Hamilton, gets to gatekeep access to our public lands and force us to pay for experiences that used to be free.
SUWA’s study, Outdoor Recreation and Ecological Disturbance, A Review of Research and Implications for Management of the Colorado Plateau Province, is being used to advance a pernicious tactic for privatizing our public lands.
The BLM has no legal requirement to be adopting SUWA’s biased study as their official management strategy for dispersed camping on public lands, and we should all work to resist this trend, which is affecting dispersed camping everywhere.
What’s Being Proposed?
Under the new Wedge Recreation Area Sustainable Campgrounds and Developments proposal, the BLM wants to:
- Build 2 new campgrounds and enhance group campsites
- Construct up to 7 miles of new bike trails
- Improve motorized access (though with no detail on what that means)
- Add bathrooms, kiosks, parking areas, and overlook upgrades
All of this is happening within the same Recreation Area where BLM just removed massive amounts of motorized access, trails that supported not only recreation, but also dispersed camping, hunting, and family use for decades.
Here’s what’s so frustrating:
- The BLM shut down hundreds of miles of trails, many of which existed solely to access campsites.
- Now the BLM says dispersed camping is causing problems and wants to formalize and limit it.
This is exactly what we warned would happen when you reduce access: use becomes concentrated, impacts increase, and agencies respond with more restrictions.
This is the textbook government mismanagement cycle: restrict access, create a problem, then restrict access even further to “solve” it.
BRC has already filed a legal challenge to the San Rafael Swell Travel Management Plan because of its extreme and unjustified closure of 665 miles of routes. These routes were essential for reaching low-impact, primitive dispersed camping sites that dispersed users and allowed them to enjoy more of our public lands.
This Wedge proposal proves our point: when you eliminate trails, you don’t eliminate demand, you just concentrate it and pretend that building more infrastructure to be managed by profiteering corporations is the solution.
We don’t oppose the construction of developed campgrounds, since there are a lot of users who prefer that experience. However, many users also want more access to primitive, free, low-impact, primitive campsites.
What You Can Do
The BLM is currently taking public comment until June 25, 2025 on this latest Wedge development plan. You can submit your input here:
The Swell is not a place where you need curated campgrounds, kiosks, and bike parks. It’s a wild, remote area where Americans have responsibly recreated for generations. If the BLM wants to manage increased use, they should start by reopening the trails that spread that use out, instead of blaming campers for the consequences of their own closures.
BRC will continue to fight for your right to access and enjoy public lands—and we’re not done yet.
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