Washington, D.C. (Jul. 15, 2026) — President Trump has signed proclamations dramatically reducing the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, stripping protections from nearly three million acres of America’s public lands. These proclamations are more dramatic than the administration’s 2017 monument reductions and reopen a fight that millions of outdoor enthusiasts believed was settled when the monuments were restored in 2021.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are world-renowned landscapes that offer exceptional opportunities for hiking, climbing, mountain biking, camping, paddling, and exploring Utah’s spectacular canyon country. National monument protections have helped conserve intact backcountry that make these landscapes extraordinary places to recreate and support the recreation economies of surrounding communities. Rolling back these protections to open up these areas for development and extraction puts conservation values and the outdoor experiences they support at risk.
Outdoor Alliance and our member organizations, particularly Access Fund, have spent nearly a decade advocating for these extraordinary public lands. We stood behind Access Fund in supporting the original designation of Bears Ears and fought alongside Tribal Nations and partners across the outdoor community after the monuments were dramatically reduced in 2017.
Outdoor Alliance is particularly concerned by the proclamations’ treatment of Tribal Nations. The proclamations describe Tribes as “stakeholders,” which fails to recognize the relationship between Tribal Nations and the federal government or the groundbreaking Tribal co-stewardship frameworks that guide the management of these landscapes. Those partnerships have strengthened the stewardship of these places while ensuring they remain places where all Americans can connect with history, culture, and the outdoors.
“National monuments reflect what we choose to protect as a nation,” said Adam Cramer, CEO of Outdoor Alliance. “Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante tell a story of remarkable landscapes, living cultures, and unforgettable outdoor experiences. Shrinking them by more than 90 percent sends exactly the wrong message about the future of America’s public lands.”
The proclamations leave little doubt about their purpose: to remove monument protections so these landscapes can be opened to mining, drilling, and other industrial development. The Grand Staircase-Escalante proclamation argues that shrinking the monument will “better align the use of these public lands with the public interest.” The Bears Ears proclamation goes even further, directing that much of the land removed from the monument be reopened within 60 days to new mining claims and other forms of development. Outdoor Alliance rejects the notion that this serves the public interest.
The public interest is served by protecting the world-class public lands that millions of Americans hike, climb, camp, hunt, paddle, and explore every year—not by sacrificing them to short-term industrial development.
The outdoor community has a key role to play right now. Outdoor Alliance has provided a tool that helps the public tell lawmakers what they think of these rollbacks. Use this link to write your members of Congress.
To learn more about Outdoor Alliance and their work, visit www.outdooralliance.org.
About Outdoor Alliance
Outdoor Alliance is a nonprofit coalition of organizations that includes American Whitewater, American Canoe Association, Access Fund, International Mountain Bicycling Association, Winter Wildlands Alliance, The Mountaineers, American Alpine Club, Colorado Mountain Club, and Surfrider Foundation. For more than ten years, Outdoor Alliance has united the human-powered outdoor recreation community to achieve lasting conservation victories. Our work has helped to permanently protect 40 million acres of public land, secure $5.1 billion in funding for the outdoors, and convert more than 350,000 outdoor enthusiasts into outdoor advocates. For more information, visit www.outdooralliance.org
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