Some Utah environmentalists, when they want a dose of activism, hike into the remote red canyons in the southern part of the state to look at roads that they say are not really there.
The quest, seeming like something out of ''
Some Utah environmentalists, when they want a dose of activism, hike into the remote red canyons in the southern part of the state to look at roads that they say are not really there.
The quest, seeming like something out of ''Don Quixote,'' is their tactic in a growing fight over millions of acres in the state, the latest battle in the decades-long struggle over control of Federal lands in the West.
Conservation groups have sought to set aside as much as 5.7 million acres in the state as wilderness, and President Clinton took a step in that direction last year by designating 1.7 million acres as a protected national monument.
But state and local officials are vehemently resisting possible wilderness designations, which by law are limited to places without roads. To fight the plan, they are affirming that thousands of little-known trails are established roads and that the Federal Government cannot legally block the right of way along them.
The counties have claimed about 5,000 such roads in Utah. They crisscross maps of the canyonlands like crows' tracks. On the ground, though, some of the actual tracks were left by cattle, or by off-road vehicles, or recently by county bulldozers.
Volunteers from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance have set out to visit and document these byways, mile by mile, as a step toward legally challenging the claims and preserving the wilderness potential.
Earlier this month in Arch Canyon, near the town of Blanding, one such road lay invisible, if indeed it could be said to exist at all, beneath two feet of snow. The trailhead was two miles beyond the paved highway, an hour's hike up a graded but unplowed road that rose through pinon and juniper and big cottonwood trees. Where the graded road ended, a slender, rough track continued, crossing a frozen stream and disappearing around a bend, beyond the remnants of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings and up the rugged canyon.
The Wilderness Alliance, which for years has been pressing an ambitious proposal to preserve the canyons, wants thousands of acres in these parts to be set aside. But in the summer, this canyon is a playground for four-wheel-drive and all-terrain vehicles that can penetrate for miles up the canyon.
And if the definition of a road includes anyplace an off-road vehicle has left its mark, then, the local government says, this canyon's rough-hewn bottom is a bona fide county right of way and its existence precludes making Arch Canyon and its surroundings part of a wilderness, where machines would be forbidden.
Even more striking was another trail that off-road vehicles sometimes climb, up a steep gorge carved by the Colorado River in Moab, just outside Arches National Park. The only things that marked this perilous hard-rock track were the scars from spinning rubber and the stains of oil that had bled from the lacerated underbellies of the vehicles.
''If this is a road, then the only wilderness we would be left with would have to be surrounded entirely by cliffs,'' said Scott Groene, issues director for the wilderness group.
But his view seems to be held 