Bears Ears National Monument — Public Lands Institute

Geology

Permian290-270 Mya

~290-270 Mya Early Permian Cedar Mesa Sandstone (Cutler Group), a wind- and shoreline-deposited sandstone that forms the slickrock of Comb Ridge and the Cedar Mesa canyons; the strata were later buckled into the Comb Ridge monocline, a roughly 80-mile fold raised during the Laramide orogeny about 70 to 50 million years ago, whose west-facing teeth shed the washes that hold the cliff dwellings

Epoch

Early Permian (Cedar Mesa Sandstone)

Native lands

Homeland and living sacred ground of the five nations of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition: Hopi (Hopisinom), Navajo (Diné), Ute Mountain Ute and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray (Núuchi-u), and Zuni (A:shiwi), with Apache and Southern Paiute ties as well; Ancestral Puebloan and Basketmaker peoples farmed Cedar Mesa for millennia, and the Butler Wash cliff dwelling overlooked by the interpretive trail, with its habitation rooms, granaries, and four kivas, was built and occupied around AD 1200; the twin buttes (Hoon'Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe in the coalition's four languages) are the birthplace of the Diné leader Manuelito, who signed the Navajo Treaty of 1868; the land is still used for prayer, firewood, and the gathering of medicine and ceremonial plants

Displacement & Tenure

No ratified cession extinguished Native title to most of the Bears Ears country of San Juan County. After the 1864 Long Walk and internment at Bosque Redondo, the Navajo Treaty of 1868 returned the Diné to a reservation south of the San Juan River that was a fraction of their homeland, leaving the higher, better-watered Bears Ears uplands outside it; Ute and Paiute bands were likewise pushed onto distant reservations as Mormon settlement and cattle and mining interests took San Juan County in the 1880s. Federal protection came only after the coalition's petition: President Obama proclaimed Bears Ears National Monument (about 1.35 million acres) on December 28, 2016; President Trump cut it roughly 85 percent to two units totaling about 201,876 acres on December 4, 2017; and President Biden restored the full 1.36 million acres on October 8, 2021. A 2022 cooperative agreement made the five tribes co-managers with the BLM and Forest Service through the Bears Ears Commission.

Shadow History

The interpretive-trail framing of "Anasazi ruins" softens a long history of archaeological extraction and grave robbing centered on this stretch of Cedar Mesa. In June 2009 the largest federal investigation of Native artifact theft in U.S. history, the two-year undercover Operation Cerberus Action run by the BLM and FBI, indicted roughly two dozen people in and around Blanding for looting and trafficking objects taken from burials and dwellings on tribal and federal land; the case ended in three suicides, including the prominent Blanding physician James Redd, and exposed how openly grave goods had been collected in San Juan County for generations. The region also carries the Cold War uranium legacy that still threatens it: the Daneros Mine in White Canyon, three miles from the monument, and the White Mesa Mill, the last operating conventional uranium mill in the country, sit beside the Ute Mountain Ute community of White Mesa, part of a Four Corners mining boom that left the Navajo Nation with hundreds of abandoned mines and ongoing contamination.

Ecology

A high cold-desert mosaic of pinyon-juniper woodland and sagebrush steppe on the mesa tops, with understories of Indian ricegrass, galleta, blue grama, four-wing saltbush, and winterfat, and cliffrose, yucca, and prickly pear on the slickrock; canyon seeps support hanging gardens and cottonwood. Wildlife includes mule deer, elk, mountain lion, black bear, and desert bighorn, with pinyon jay and greater sage-grouse among the birds of conservation concern and Mexican spotted owl in the deeper canyons.

Hydrology

Drains to the San Juan River, a major tributary of the Colorado. Cedar Mesa sheds eastward into Comb Wash and the narrow Butler Wash, the paired valleys that flank Comb Ridge, and these largely ephemeral washes carry runoff south to the San Juan; perennial water is limited to scattered springs and alcove seeps, the same sources that sustained the Ancestral Puebloan dwellings.

Acreage

1,360,000

GPS

37.5221° N, 109.6325° W

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