The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Cedar City Field Office is preparing the Indian Peak Range Watershed Restoration Plan, which will determine where and what types of vegetation treatments the agency will conduct across 550,000 acres in Utah’s West Desert. Your voice is once again needed to help prevent inappropriate and potentially harmful vegetation removal on Utah’s public lands.
The plan’s boundary extends from the Needles Range in the north to the Indian Peak Range in the south, and east across the Hamlin and Pine Valleys to the Wah Wah Mountains and Blue Mountain. Included are tens of thousands of acres proposed for wilderness designation in America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, much of which the BLM has also identified as wilderness-caliber.
The agency is accepting preliminary input on the plan (known as scoping comments) through March 5th, 2025. Please take a moment to submit comments through our action page.
While we’re encouraged that the plan will include restoring riparian areas, re-establishing native plant species, and re-introducing fire into these fire-dependent ecosystems, we’re alarmed by the long list of heavy-handed mechanical treatments it allows.
According to the BLM’s notice, the Indian Peak Plan would authorize potentially harmful vegetation removal methods such as mastication, harrowing, chaining, rangeland aeration, mechanical ripping, and herbicides under the guise of improving watershed conditions and reducing the threat of wildfire. Vegetation communities identified for treatments include ponderosa pine, mixed conifer, pinyon-juniper woodlands, quaking aspen, grasslands, riparian areas, mountain brush, sagebrush, and scrublands.
It’s important that the BLM hear from people like you who care about Utah’s wild lands. Please submit comments asking the agency to prepare a full environmental impact statement; implement the least intensive, lowest impact methods first; prohibit mechanical treatments on wilderness-quality lands; use only native seeds; and address the impacts of livestock grazing.
Personalized comments carry the greatest weight, so please tell the BLM what is important to you.
Click here to submit your comments by March 5th.
Thank you for everything you do to protect the redrock!
