10th Circuit Dumps Utah Claim To Riverbed As "Established Highway" Under 1866 Mining Law [View all]

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A federal appeals court yesterday denied a request by Utah and one of its counties to rehear their case to reopen a 9-mile road along a riverbed in Canyonlands National Park to motor vehicles, a decision that could threaten Utah's bid to claim thousands of miles of additional roads crisscrossing federal lands. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it would not revisit an April decision by three of its judges to uphold a lower court's rejection of San Juan County's claimed right of way over the Salt Creek Road.

According to the 10th Circuit judges' 28-page opinion, San Juan had failed to prove the road had been in "continuous" use in the decade prior to Canyonlands' founding in 1964 (Greenwire, April 28). That was the burden of proof San Juan and Utah had to meet to prove Salt Creek was an established "highway" under an 1866 mining law known as R.S. 2477.

Yesterday's decision is a blow for Utah, which has filed roughly 20 other similar cases claiming R.S. 2477 rights of way over 36,000 miles of roads crossing public lands, many of them also in national parks, wilderness study areas or other lands conservationists have targeted for roadless protection (Greenwire, Sept. 3, 2013).

"It should be the end of the line for the state of Utah and San Juan County's claim that the stream bottom of Salt Creek Canyon is a state highway," said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which was joined by the Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust, National Parks Conservation Association and the Wilderness Society in the case opposing San Juan's claim.

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