Ch31 — Parks & Monuments

31.1 A County of Protected Landscapes

Emery County, Utah, holds one of the most remarkable concentrations of publicly protected land in the American West. Roughly eighty percent of its total area — approximately 4.5 million acres — is managed by the federal government, primarily the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service. Within this vast public estate, a succession of formal designations has set apart the most scientifically significant, scenically spectacular, and culturally irreplaceable sites for permanent protection and managed public access.

The county’s protected landscape includes four state parks, a BLM-administered national monument, a 217,000-acre BLM recreation area, and multiple BLM-designated scenic, cultural, and recreation areas. Together they represent a century of evolving conservation philosophy — from the first tentative state reserve established to protect a valley of mushroom-shaped sandstone formations, to the sweeping multi-use designations of the 2019 Emery County Public Land Management Act. Understanding these parks and monuments means understanding not just where visitors go, but why those places were deemed worth protecting in the first place.

This chapter profiles each major formal designation, traces its origin story, and describes what it offers the visitor today. The chapter should be read alongside Chapter 30 (Landscapes of Adventure), which covers the broader informal recreation landscape of the San Rafael Swell, canyon country, and river corridors. Many of the most spectacular experiences in Emery County occur in areas that are neither named parks nor monuments but simply BLM multiple-use land — a reminder that in Emery County, the extraordinary is not confined to the designated.

31.2 Goblin Valley State Park: From Mushroom Valley to Monument

The story of Goblin Valley begins with a man looking for a road. In the late 1920s, Arthur Chaffin — owner and operator of the Hite Ferry on the Colorado River — and two companions set out to scout an alternative route between Green River and Cainsville. Crossing the broken terrain southwest of the San Rafael Swell, the party crested a rise and looked down into a basin they had not anticipated: a valley floor littered with thousands of freestanding sandstone formations, each one eroded into a bulbous, mushroom-like shape by millennia of differential weathering in the Entrada Sandstone. Chaffin called it the “Valley of the Mushrooms” and moved on, but he did not forget what he had seen.

Two decades later, in 1949, Chaffin returned to the valley with an explorer named Philip Tompkins. It was Tompkins who gave the place its enduring name. The formations struck him not as mushrooms but as grotesque figures — goblins, he decided, and the name stuck. The two men held a press conference, and in 1950 the Deseret News Magazine published the first photographs and descriptions of Goblin Valley to reach a wide public audience. Tourist traffic began almost immediately, and with it came Tompkins’s anxiety: visitors with no particular reason to be careful were scrambling over and occasionally breaking the delicate formations. To get ahead of the damage, Tompkins urged state protection.

Utah responded. In 1954 the state established Goblin Valley State Preserve, the first formal protection for the area. A decade later, on August 24, 1964, the preserve was elevated to full state park status as Goblin Valley State Park. The original park protected the core goblin basin and a surrounding buffer — approximately 3,654 acres in its original configuration.

Expansion came in waves. The 2019 John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act (universally shortened to “the Dingell Act”) authorized a transfer of 6,261 acres of adjacent BLM land to the park, enlarging it significantly. Then, on June 17, 2022, BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning signed over an additional 6,300 acres to Utah State Parks and Emery County in a ceremony at the park. The land was conveyed at no cost. The transaction roughly tripled the park’s total footprint and brought in terrain that connects the core goblin basin to adjacent slot canyons — the very canyons that had been the site of high-profile search-and-rescue operations, including a 2004 flash flood incident that claimed three lives. The expanded land transfer included a designated site for a new Emery County Sheriff’s Office substation, an acknowledgment that visitor safety in the park’s remote canyon country required a permanent emergency response capacity.

Today Goblin Valley State Park receives more than 500,000 visitors per year — an extraordinary number for a remote site in the Utah high desert with a single access road. The park offers three distinct campgrounds, a day-use area adjacent to the main goblin basin, and, following the 2022 expansion, a growing trail network that extends into the surrounding canyon country. The goblins themselves — technically called hoodoos, formed where a resistant caprock overlies softer, more erodible material — cover an area of perhaps 3 square miles in the main basin, with smaller concentrations scattered throughout the expanded park boundaries.

The park’s geological story is inseparable from the San Rafael Swell’s broader narrative. The formations belong to the Entrada Sandstone, a Jurassic-age deposit laid down in a near-shore marine and tidal-flat environment approximately 160 million years ago. The distinctive mushroom shape emerges when a more resistant layer in the upper Entrada protects underlying softer rock from direct rainfall while the exposed sides are carved by a combination of moisture absorption, freeze-thaw cycling, and wind abrasion — a process operating at geological timescales but visible to any visitor who returns after a decade and notices that the goblins have, almost imperceptibly, changed.

31.3 Jurassic National Monument: The Bones Beneath Cleveland

Twenty-two miles east of Huntington, on a bench of dry scrubland near the small town of Cleveland, lies the densest known concentration of Jurassic-age dinosaur bones on Earth. The site has been known to outsiders since at least the late nineteenth century — cowboys herding cattle through the region regularly encountered the exposed fossils — but it took decades of organized scientific attention to reveal the extraordinary scale of what lay underground.

The first formal scientific excavations were conducted by geologists from the University of Utah in 1928–29. That team recovered approximately 500 bones, enough to confirm the site’s paleontological significance but barely scratching the surface. The decisive work began in 1939, when William Lee Stokes — a Utah native then studying at Princeton University — led a group of colleagues to the quarry with funding provided by a benefactor named Malcolm Lloyd, Jr. Over three field seasons (1939–1941), the team extracted 1,200 bones and gave the locality its permanent name: the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, combining the name of the nearest town with that of its primary financial sponsor. Intermittent professional excavations continued from 1960 through 1990 and again in 2001–2002 under the auspices of various Utah institutions.

By the early twenty-first century, researchers had documented more than 12,000 individual fossils representing at least 74 animals. What makes Cleveland-Lloyd scientifically unusual is not simply its size but its composition: more than 75 percent of the recovered bones belong to carnivorous dinosaurs, with Allosaurus fragilis alone accounting for at least 46 individuals. In nearly every other well-documented dinosaur assemblage, predators are the rarest animals — as the laws of ecological pyramids predict — and herbivores dominate the bone bed. Cleveland-Lloyd’s predator surplus has generated decades of competing hypotheses: a predator trap, like the La Brea Tar Pits; an attritional bone accumulation over a long period; or some other paleoecological dynamic not yet fully understood. The mystery is part of the site’s scientific appeal.

The federal government recognized the site early. In October 1965 it was designated a National Natural Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Three years later, in 1968, the BLM opened a visitor center at the quarry — the agency’s first-ever visitor center anywhere in the country. The facility allowed visitors to observe the quarry floor under a protective roof and view interpreted exhibits on the site’s paleontology and excavation history.

A half-century after that visitor center opened, the quarry received its most significant administrative upgrade. The Dingell Act of 2019 designated Jurassic National Monument, an 850-acre protective zone centered on the quarry, formally placing it within the National Conservation Lands system. The monument name reflected a rebranding effort: “Cleveland-Lloyd” had never adequately communicated the site’s scale of significance to a public unfamiliar with the two proper names in its title.

In 2024, the BLM initiated a building replacement project at the monument — proposing to demolish the existing pair of aging metal quarry buildings and replace them with a single new structure addressing drainage problems that threatened fossil preservation. During the construction phase, the active quarry floor was temporarily closed, though the surrounding trail network — the Jurassic Journey and Cretaceous Climb interpretive trails — remained accessible via a bypass route. The visitor center, with its more than 2,000 square feet of interactive exhibits featuring an Allosaurus skeleton mount, replica skulls, bone bed maps, and excavation history, remained open throughout. Construction was expected to be substantially complete by late 2024 or early 2025.

For the visitor, Jurassic National Monument offers a combination found almost nowhere else: a genuine active paleontological dig site where visitors can observe real fossils in the context where they were deposited, staffed by BLM paleontologists who can speak to the ongoing scientific work. Children who peer through the windows at the quarry floor are looking at the same bones that puzzled researchers in 1939 and continue to challenge them today.

31.4 San Rafael Swell Recreation Area: The Dingell Act Landscape

The San Rafael Swell is one of the defining geological features of the Colorado Plateau — a vast anticlinal dome roughly 75 miles long and 40 miles wide, uplifted approximately 60 to 65 million years ago during the Laramide Orogeny and since carved by erosion into a labyrinth of canyons, mesas, buttes, and slot canyons. Most of it lies within Emery County. For most of the twentieth century it was administered as general BLM multiple-use land with no special protective designation, a status that allowed mining, grazing, OHV use, and other activities to proceed alongside recreation without systematic management.

Efforts to give the Swell a formal protective status stretched across four decades. Various proposals circulated from the 1970s onward — a National Recreation Area, a monument designation under the Antiquities Act, a National Conservation Area. The difficulty was political: Emery County’s elected officials and a majority of its residents consistently opposed monument designations, fearing that enhanced federal control would restrict grazing, OHV use, and economic activities that mattered deeply to the county’s ranching communities. The resulting legislative impasse persisted until a bipartisan compromise emerged in 2018–19.

The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed into law by President Trump on March 12, 2019, broke the logjam. The Emery County provisions of the Dingell Act were the product of years of negotiation among the county commission, Utah’s congressional delegation (led by Representative John Curtis and Senators Mitt Romney and Mike Lee), conservation organizations, and BLM. The resulting deal was a genuine compromise: conservationists got wilderness and monument designations; ranchers and recreationists got explicit protections for existing uses and a “recreation area” framework rather than a “national monument,” a designation widely seen in rural Utah as a restriction of local access.

The San Rafael Swell Recreation Area, established by the Dingell Act, encompasses approximately 217,000 acres of BLM-managed land at the core of the Swell. (The statute specifies 216,995 acres of federal land.) Alongside it, the Act designated multiple new wilderness areas and formally established Jurassic National Monument (see §31.3), along with 54 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers and a National Conservation Area covering the Western Heritage and Historic Mining landscape. Together these designations transformed how the Swell is managed without — by design — radically altering what activities are permitted within it.

On-the-ground management under the Recreation Area designation is evolving. In June 2024, the BLM Price Field Office released a Draft Environmental Assessment for the San Rafael Swell Travel Management Plan, addressing how the OHV route network should be organized and formalized. Public comment closed on July 22, 2024. The plan represents the first systematic effort to rationalize the hundreds of informal routes and roads that have accumulated across the Swell over decades of uncoordinated use — a necessary step in managing a landscape that now draws visitors in numbers its original informal-use framework was never designed to accommodate.

For the visitor, the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area is less a place with an entrance station and a fee kiosk than a vast open landscape with a cluster of managed trailheads, campgrounds, and information boards. Its character is closer to the informal recreation of Ch30 than to the structured park experience of Goblin Valley. The designation matters primarily as a management framework — and as a promise that this landscape, in its essential character, is protected.

31.5 Huntington State Park: A Desert Oasis Built on Three Brothers’ Names

Huntington Reservoir sits in the scrubland north of Huntington, Utah, impounded on Huntington Creek where it exits the Wasatch Plateau. It is warm by Utah high-desert standards, ringed by cinnamon-colored sandstone buttes, and popular with the kind of visitors who want to swim, water-ski, or simply sit at the water’s edge in a landscape that otherwise offers very little of either water or shade.

The name of the reservoir — and of the adjacent state park, and of the town itself — honors three brothers who were among the first Americans to see this valley. In 1855, Oliver B. Huntington, William Huntington, and Dimick Baker Huntington traveled through the area as part of the Elk Mountain Mission, an ill-fated attempt by early Latter-day Saint settlers to establish a colony near what is now Moab. Oliver served as the mission’s official recorder; William was already well known as a scout and frontiersman; Dimick, perhaps the most remarkable of the three, had become fluent in the languages of several Ute bands and served as an interpreter in dealings between LDS church leaders and Native peoples across the Intermountain West. The mission itself failed within months, but the Huntington name persisted in the landscape.

The town of Huntington was founded twenty-two years later, in 1877, by settlers moving south from the established communities of Sanpete County. It grew into one of the county’s larger communities, sustained first by agriculture and later — dramatically — by coal mining in the surrounding canyons.

Huntington State Park opened in 1966, established when the Bureau of Reclamation completed the reservoir and the state acquired land around it for public recreation. At the time, Emery County had few formal recreation facilities, and the park provided a gathering place for families from across the county — a function it still serves today. Facilities include campgrounds with electrical hookups, boat ramps, a fish-cleaning station, a day-use beach, and picnic areas shaded by the limited but cherished cottonwood canopy that has grown up along the reservoir shoreline over the decades. The park is also noted for birdwatching: its position along a riparian corridor in an otherwise xeric landscape makes it a reliable stop for migratory waterfowl and shorebirds during spring and fall migrations.

31.6 Millsite State Park: Golf at 6,000 Feet in Ferron Canyon

Most Utah state parks are built around a geological spectacle or a historical site. Millsite is built around a golf course — which says something revealing about the practical ambitions of the communities that created it.

Millsite State Park occupies the shores of Millsite Reservoir in Ferron Canyon, roughly two miles west of Ferron at an elevation near 6,000 feet. The reservoir itself — 440 surface acres — is part of the Ferron Watershed Project, a multipurpose water containment project whose dam was completed in 1970 through the combined efforts of several state and federal agencies. Like many of the small reservoirs built across Utah’s rural communities in the postwar decades, Millsite Reservoir served the dual purpose of irrigation water storage and recreation. The state acquired the surrounding land and formally established Millsite State Park in 1971, as the federal cost-sharing agreements for the new reservoir matured.

The park’s nine-hole golf course was designed as an economic amenity in an era when rural communities across the West were learning that recreation could serve as a development anchor. Millsite and Green River State Park (§31.7) are among the few state parks in Utah to include a regulation golf course, a distinction that reflects both the ambitions of mid-century rural development planning and the unusual beauty of their settings — Millsite’s fairways are framed by the sandstone walls of Ferron Canyon, a setting that tends to produce either exceptional golf or exceptional distraction, depending on the player.

Beyond golf, Millsite offers camping, a sandy beach, year-round fishing (primarily for rainbow trout), boating, and access to the surrounding canyon country for OHV and mountain bike riders. The park’s position at the mouth of Ferron Canyon makes it a gateway to the upper reaches of the Wasatch Plateau, where summer temperatures are dramatically lower and aspen groves provide a landscape entirely unlike the desert terrain that surrounds the town. In winter, the park sees ice fishing on the reservoir and serves as a staging area for snowmobile trips into the plateau.

31.7 Green River State Park: Cottonwood Shade at the River’s Edge

The city of Green River sits at the point where U.S. Highway 6/50 crosses the river of the same name — a natural stopping point that has been used for that purpose since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the same ford that made the crossing easy enough for wagons became a source of constant friction as settlers, travelers, and outlaw bands moved through the canyon country to the south.

Green River State Park, established in 1965, occupies a narrow strip of cottonwood forest on the river’s west bank, adjacent to the city. Its facilities are modest in footprint but significant in function: a nine-hole golf course whose fairways are lined with mature cottonwood trees and whose hazards include the Green River itself; a campground that offers some of the only reliable shade for miles in any direction; and a concrete boat ramp that doubles as one of the most consequential launch points in Utah river running.

The park’s boat ramp marks the standard beginning of the Labyrinth Canyon float, a multi-day journey through a section of the Green River corridor that John Wesley Powell navigated in his 1869 and 1871 expeditions (see Chapter 15). Labyrinth Canyon is a non-technical, flatwater float through desert canyon scenery of the highest order — red-rock walls rising 1,000 feet above the river, zero whitewater, minimal motorized boat traffic, and the kind of silence that is difficult to find anywhere else in the American West. The trip typically takes three to five days to complete and ends at the Mineral Bottom boat ramp in Canyonlands National Park territory. The park’s campground fills every spring and early summer with river runners packing their gear and inflating their crafts before the put-in.

The golf course, like Millsite’s (§31.6), serves a community function that transcends recreation: it represents the county’s effort to provide amenities that keep residents and visitors choosing Emery County as a destination rather than simply a passage. Green River has historically been a thoroughfare — people pass through on the way to Moab, to Capitol Reef, to the canyon country south — and the state park gives them a reason to pause, to stay a night, to spend a morning on the course or an afternoon at the campfire before moving on.

31.8 The Wedge Overlook: A Little Grand Canyon

West of Castle Dale, a web of dirt roads leads out across the sagebrush flats toward the northern escarpment of the San Rafael Swell. The roads are passable by most passenger vehicles in dry weather, and they lead, after twenty miles or so, to one of the more surprising vistas in a county full of them.

The Wedge Overlook sits at the rim of the San Rafael River canyon — a slot in the plateau floor so deep and narrow that it barely registers on the approach until you walk to the edge and find yourself looking 1,200 feet straight down to the river. Local usage has long called this stretch of canyon the “Little Grand Canyon of the San Rafael,” a comparison that flatters neither river but captures something true: the vertical relief, the layered stratigraphy, and the serpentine water at the bottom bear a genuine family resemblance to the Colorado River’s more famous gorge to the south.

The cliff faces visible from the overlook expose a nearly continuous sequence of the Triassic and Jurassic sedimentary formations that dominate the Colorado Plateau: Moenkopi Formation at the river level, overlain by Chinle Formation, Wingate Sandstone, Kayenta Formation, Navajo Sandstone, and Carmel Formation approaching the rim. Each layer records a different ancient environment — shallow marine, river delta, aeolian desert, shallow marine again — laid down across a span of roughly 80 million years and now stacked in the cliff like the pages of a book. Geologists and students make the trip specifically to study the exposure; most visitors come simply to look.

The BLM manages the Wedge Overlook as a free dispersed recreation site within the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area. There are no entrance fees, no reservations, and no visitor center — just the overlook, a few interpretive signs, and a network of primitive campsites at the rim and at the Swinging Bridge crossing in Buckhorn Draw below. The informal character of the site is part of its appeal: the Wedge is for visitors who want their grand vistas without the crowd management.

The San Rafael River canyon below the overlook has a long history of human use. Butch Cassidy and the associated outlaw networks that moved through southeast Utah in the 1880s and 1890s used the canyons and alcoves of the Swell as hideouts and route corridors. The broken terrain that made the area impractical for conventional agriculture or law enforcement made it ideal for people who needed to disappear. The canyon walls still hold initials, petroglyphs, and occasional carved dates from those years, alongside the far older rock art of the Fremont people who preceded them by a thousand years.

31.9 Buckhorn Wash: Rock Art, the Old Spanish Trail, and a Community’s Effort to Preserve It

Buckhorn Wash cuts southward through the northern San Rafael Swell, carrying seasonal flow down from the elevated Buckhorn Draw toward the San Rafael River. The wash is unremarkable by the standards of canyon-country drainages — moderately wide, moderately scenic — until it reaches a sandstone cliff on the western wall where, for more than 130 feet of unbroken rock face, someone painted figures in red ochre sometime between 1,500 and 4,000 years ago.

The Buckhorn Wash Pictograph Panel is one of the finest examples of Barrier Canyon style rock art in Utah and one of the most accessible major rock art sites on the Colorado Plateau. Barrier Canyon style — named for Barrier Canyon, now Horseshoe Canyon, in Canyonlands National Park — is characterized by elongated, tapering anthropomorphic figures, often ghostly in appearance, sometimes adorned with dots, lines, and abstract attachments. The figures at Buckhorn range from a few feet tall to nearly life-size. Several appear to carry objects; others seem to float or to lack legs entirely. Interspersed among the Barrier Canyon panels are later Fremont images — the triangular-bodied figures and bighorn sheep silhouettes characteristic of the Fremont people who occupied the region from roughly 600 to 1300 CE.

The panel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That designation reflects its cultural significance; it does not, unfortunately, reflect its historical treatment. The Old Spanish Trail — the trade route connecting Santa Fe to Los Angeles that passed through much of southern Utah — ran through Buckhorn Draw, and the traffic it brought across two centuries left the panel in damaged condition by the late twentieth century. Some harm came from deliberate vandalism; some from visitors chalking over pictographs to make them more visible in photographs, a practice now understood to cause severe long-term damage to the mineral patina that preserves the images.

In 1996, as part of Utah’s centennial celebration, a coalition of Emery County citizens, the BLM, the Utah Division of State History, and county government initiated a restoration of the Buckhorn Panel. The project involved careful consolidation of flaking sections, removal of modern graffiti and chalk residues where possible, and installation of interpretive signage at a paved pullout with barrier railing to direct visitor movement away from the base of the cliff. The restoration was a locally driven effort — the initiative came from citizens, not from federal mandate — and it stands as an example of a rural community taking ownership of its cultural heritage.

The BLM maintains the pullout and signage today. The site is free and open year-round. Buckhorn Draw also hosts the Buckhorn Information Center, a small BLM facility that was expanded in 2022 as part of the same land transfer that tripled Goblin Valley State Park — the transfer included 3 additional acres adjacent to the center, providing room for improved interpretive exhibits on the archaeology, geology, and cultural history of the San Rafael Swell.

31.10 Temple Mountain and the Uranium Legacy

At the southern end of the San Rafael Reef — the dramatic monocline that forms the Swell’s eastern edge — stands Temple Mountain, an isolated butte whose silhouette looks not unlike its namesake from a distance and whose story is inseparable from one of the more unusual chapters in American industrial history.

Temple Mountain was the center of the San Rafael Swell’s vanadium and uranium mining boom, a period that ran from 1918 through the early 1980s. Mining claims were first staked in 1898, and by 1918 commercial extraction had begun, focused initially on radium and vanadium. Vanadium, extracted from carnotite ore deposits hosted in the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation (Moss Back Sandstone Member), was in demand as a steel hardener long before uranium became economically significant; the same ore bodies that yielded vanadium also contained uranium in smaller concentrations. Beginning in the late 1940s, when the federal Atomic Energy Commission began paying bonuses for uranium ore and establishing processing mills, the economics inverted: uranium became the primary target and vanadium the byproduct.

Dozens of small mining operations worked the Temple Mountain area and the surrounding reef country during the uranium boom years. The mines were predominantly family-scale operations or small partnerships — the kind of entrepreneurial mining that Emery County had supported in its coal fields for decades, now transposed to a different commodity and a different corner of the county. The ore was trucked to mills in Moab and elsewhere for processing. Most of the mines were shallow and short-lived; few of the men who worked them grew wealthy from the venture. By the 1960s, as federal uranium procurement contracted, most activity had ceased.

What remains at Temple Mountain is a landscape of abandoned structures — mill foundations, waste piles, and tunnel portals that are gradually being reclaimed by the BLM through its Legacy Reclamation Program. The structures are historically significant, representing a distinct phase of Emery County’s economic history, but many are also safety hazards: open shafts, unstable tunnels, and in some cases residual radiation from unprocessed ore piles. The BLM has conducted ongoing environmental remediation at several sites in the Temple Mountain area, balancing the goals of hazard removal and historical interpretation.

The landscape around Temple Mountain is accessible by OHV and high-clearance vehicle from the southern San Rafael Swell Travel Management Area. Several interpretive sites have been developed along the approach roads, framing the mining history within the broader context of twentieth-century energy extraction in the Colorado Plateau — a story that connects to the coal, copper, and uranium chapter (Ch17) and to the energy transition narrative of Ch21.

31.11 Managing Emery County’s Parks: Federal-State-County Cooperation

The parks and monuments of Emery County are not managed by a single agency or under a single philosophy. They represent four distinct administrative frameworks — Utah State Parks, BLM National Conservation Lands, BLM Recreation Areas, and BLM dispersed recreation — operating across overlapping geographies with different mandates, different funding streams, and sometimes different constituencies.

Utah State Parks manages Goblin Valley, Huntington, Millsite, and Green River through a fee-based model in which day-use fees and campsite reservations fund operations. The parks are connected to the Utah State Parks system’s central reservation infrastructure, which allows advance booking of campsites — a practical necessity at Goblin Valley, where the campgrounds can fill months in advance during peak season. Park rangers at Goblin Valley conduct interpretive programs and manage the growing challenge of visitor impact in an environment where the irreplaceable resource — the goblins themselves — can be damaged by climbing, touching, or erosion from off-trail foot traffic.

The BLM’s Price Field Office manages the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area, Jurassic National Monument, the Wedge Overlook, and the Buckhorn Panel within the larger context of BLM multiple-use management across Emery County’s federal lands. The BLM operates under a mandate to balance recreation, grazing, energy development, and conservation — a balance that can generate tension in a county where ranching families have grazed public lands for generations and where OHV use is embedded in the culture of both residents and visitors.

The relationship between these management frameworks and Emery County government is collaborative but not without friction. The county commission historically has resisted any federal action perceived as reducing access to public lands or constraining grazing rights. The Dingell Act compromise — which gave conservationists their wilderness designations while preserving existing uses and rejecting the monument designation that Emery County’s officials most opposed — represented a genuine legislative accommodation of those concerns. The San Rafael Swell Travel Management Plan (2024 draft) represents the next chapter in that ongoing negotiation: how to provide the trail infrastructure and visitor management systems that growing visitation demands while preserving the open character that makes the landscape valuable in the first place.

County involvement in parks management extends beyond politics. The 2022 land transfer that tripled Goblin Valley also conveyed several parcels directly to Emery County — including the Sheriff’s Office substation site and expanded land at the Buckhorn Information Center — recognizing that effective management of these sites requires county-level presence and investment. The Emery County Sheriff’s Office plays a direct role in search and rescue operations throughout the slot canyons adjacent to Goblin Valley; the new substation gives those operations a forward base in an area where cellular communication is unreliable and response times from Castle Dale can be significant.

31.12 Future Designations and the Conservation-Recreation Balance

Emery County’s protected landscape is not static. The Dingell Act of 2019 represented the most comprehensive single act of public lands management in the county’s history, but it did not — and was not intended to — resolve every question about how the county’s federal lands should be used. Several areas remain under informal or partial protection, and the conversation about their long-term status continues.

The BLM’s San Rafael Swell Travel Management Plan, when finalized, will determine the formal OHV route network for a landscape that has accumulated informal trails over decades of unregulated use. The plan’s outcome will likely satisfy no constituency completely — recreational vehicle users who want maximum route access and conservationists who want reduced motorized use in sensitive areas will both have objections — but it will provide a legal and administrative framework where none previously existed. The process itself has value: it requires the BLM to inventory what routes exist, assess their ecological and archaeological impacts, and make defensible decisions about which routes to formalize, which to close, and where new infrastructure should be developed.

Beyond travel management, there are ongoing discussions about the long-term status of several culturally and ecologically significant areas within the county. The Head of Sinbad — a remote BLM site near the center of the Swell where a panel of Fremont pictographs includes one of the most striking depictions of the horned shaman figure known in Utah rock art — lacks the formal interpretive infrastructure and visitor management of the Buckhorn Panel, yet draws increasing attention as knowledge of the site spreads. The fate of several uranium legacy sites at Temple Mountain awaits the completion of environmental assessments that have been underway for years.

More broadly, Emery County is navigating the tension that faces many public lands counties across the rural West: visitation is rising — in some cases sharply, as post-pandemic recreation patterns extended the reach of people seeking uncrowded landscapes — but the infrastructure to manage it has not kept pace. Goblin Valley’s 500,000-plus annual visitors would have been unimaginable when the park was established in 1964 for a state population a third of its current size. The parks and monuments profiled in this chapter will absorb increasing pressure in the years ahead. How that pressure is managed — whether through reservation systems, permit requirements, infrastructure investment, or some combination — will shape what these places mean to the next generation of visitors, and to the communities that live among them.

What does not change is the landscape itself. The goblins in Goblin Valley will continue their slow erosion across centuries. The Allosaurus bones at Cleveland-Lloyd will remain in the matrix where they were deposited 150 million years ago, yielding their secrets one field season at a time. The pictographs at Buckhorn Wash will continue to speak, imperfectly and across a distance of thousands of years, to anyone patient enough to stand before them and look. The parks and monuments of Emery County protect these things — the bones, the images, the formations, the river at the canyon’s floor. They protect them for a future that will be grateful.

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Engagement Features

Did You Know?

• The goblins are disappearing — slowly. The hoodoos in Goblin Valley are eroding right now. Every rainstorm, freeze-thaw cycle, and gust of wind chips away at the Entrada Sandstone. The formations you see today look measurably different from photographs taken fifty years ago. In geological terms, these goblins have perhaps a few hundred thousand years left before they vanish entirely — replaced by new ones still forming beneath the desert floor.

• Goblin Valley nearly had 500,000 fewer visitors. When Arthur Chaffin first stumbled on the valley in the late 1920s, he filed away the memory and moved on. If Philip Tompkins hadn’t returned with Chaffin in 1949 and launched a press campaign to protect the area, the “Valley of the Mushrooms” might have remained a local secret for generations more.

• Cleveland-Lloyd solved a 150-million-year-old riddle — sort of. The quarry contains more Allosaurus individuals than any site on Earth: at least 46. In almost every other dinosaur fossil site, plant-eaters vastly outnumber meat-eaters. Why did so many top predators end up in one place? Researchers have debated for decades whether it was a predator trap, a drought-shrunk water hole, or something else entirely. The bones keep accumulating. The answer hasn’t.

Family Activity

Junior Ranger at Jurassic National Monument. The BLM offers a Junior Ranger program at Jurassic National Monument. Kids (roughly ages 5–12) complete an activity booklet, attend a ranger program, and earn an official Junior Ranger badge. The visitor center has cast skull replicas that children can handle, a quarry-floor viewing window, and short interpretive trails. Allow 2–3 hours to do the program properly. Bring water; the site has no food concessions.

Goblin Valley Free Roam. Unlike most parks, Goblin Valley allows visitors to wander freely among the hoodoos — no trails required in the main basin. Families can invent their own hoodoo-naming games, practice identifying the three informal “valleys” (Valley I, II, and III) in the main basin, or photograph the goblins from below to make them look the size of skyscrapers. Best light is early morning or the hour before sunset, when the Entrada turns deep orange.

Youth Challenge

Wedge Overlook Geology Scavenger Hunt. From the rim of the Wedge Overlook, try to identify each of the following rock layers in the cliff face below — use the color and texture differences between bands:

1. The dark, maroon band near river level (Moenkopi Formation)
2. The purplish-gray band with tree-like inclusions (Chinle Formation)
3. The tall, vertical-jointed brown cliff face (Wingate Sandstone)
4. The thin ledge-forming layer above Wingate (Kayenta Formation)
5. The massive cream-to-white rounded cliff above (Navajo Sandstone)

Bonus: Estimate the total vertical height of the canyon wall by counting how many “Greg-heights” tall each major band appears. (Each band is roughly 100–300 feet thick; the total drop is 1,200 feet.)

Field Trip

One-Day Circuit: Goblin Valley + Jurassic National Monument from Huntington

• Distance: ~70 miles round-trip
• Drive time: ~1.5 hours each way (Huntington → Goblin Valley via SR-10/SR-24; Huntington → Jurassic NM via SR-10 east toward Cleveland)
• Morning (8 a.m. – noon): Drive to Goblin Valley State Park (45 min from Huntington via SR-10 south, then SR-24 west, then Goblin Valley Road). Arrive early to beat midday heat. Spend 2–3 hours exploring the main basin on foot. Bring 2 liters of water per person minimum; shade is minimal.
• Early afternoon (noon – 2 p.m.): Drive back east to Huntington (45 min), stop for lunch in town.
• Afternoon (2 p.m. – 5 p.m.): Drive 22 miles east of Huntington on SR-155 to Jurassic National Monument near Cleveland (40 min). Visitor center closes at 5 p.m. (verify current hours before visiting). View the quarry floor, Allosaurus exhibits, and short interpretive trails.
• Evening: Return to Huntington or camp at Goblin Valley (reservations strongly recommended; book well in advance during peak season March–October).
• Fees: Goblin Valley day-use fee applies; Jurassic NM is free.

Photo Assignment

The Barrier Canyon Figures at Buckhorn Wash. Stand at the paved pullout at the Buckhorn Wash Pictograph Panel and photograph a single anthropomorphic figure — one of the tall, elongated “ghosts” painted in red ochre. Frame the figure so that the textured sandstone background fills the rest of the frame. Use early morning light (from the east) for the best contrast against the cliff face. Do not use flash — it creates harsh shadows and changes the apparent color of the paint. Do not approach or touch the cliff; photograph from behind the barrier railing.

Then: photograph the same stretch of cliff from far enough back that the full 130-foot length of the panel is visible in one frame. Compare the two images. What do you notice about scale?

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Sources

• Bureau of Land Management. “BLM Utah Conveys Land to Utah State Parks and Emery County.” July 21, 2022. https://www.blm.gov/blog/2022-07-21/blm-utah-conveys-land-utah-state-parks-and-emery-county
• Bureau of Land Management. “Jurassic National Monument and Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.” https://www.blm.gov/programs/national-conservation-lands/utah/jurassic-national-monument
• Bureau of Land Management. “San Rafael Swell Recreation Area.” https://www.blm.gov/visit/san-rafael-swell-recreation-area
• Bureau of Land Management. “The Buckhorn Panel.” https://www.blm.gov/visit/buckhorn-panel
• Bureau of Land Management. “The Wedge.” https://www.blm.gov/visit/wedge
• Bureau of Land Management. Draft Environmental Assessment: San Rafael Swell Travel Management Plan. June 2024. https://eplanning.blm.gov/public_projects/1500146/200323703/20113253/251013244/Draft_EA_SanRafaelSwell_TMP_June2024.pdf
• Goblin Valley State Park. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin_Valley_State_Park
• Huntington State Park. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_State_Park
• Jurassic National Monument. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_National_Monument
• Mindat.org. “Temple Mountain Mining District, Emery County, Utah, USA.” https://www.mindat.org/loc-19321.html
• Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “The Emery County Public Land Management Act Passes Congress.” https://suwa.org/emery_county/
• Utah State Parks. “Goblin Valley State Park Triples in Size.” June 24, 2022. https://stateparks.utah.gov/2022/06/24/goblin-valley-state-park-grows/
• Utah State Parks. “Huntington State Park.” https://stateparks.utah.gov/parks/huntington/
• Utah State Parks. “Millsite State Park.” https://stateparks.utah.gov/parks/millsite/
• Utah State Parks. “Green River State Park.” https://stateparks.utah.gov/parks/green-river/
• Utah Geological Survey. “GeoSights: Little Grand Canyon, Wedge Overlook, and Buckhorn Draw Scenic Backway.” https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/little-grand-canyon/
• Utah Geological Survey. “San Rafael Swell Proposed as New National Monument.” https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/san-rafael-swell-proposed-as-new-national-monument/
• Visit Utah. “The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.” https://www.visitutah.com/articles/cleveland-lloyd-dinosaur-quarry
• Wikipedia. “Buckhorn Draw Pictograph Panel.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhorn_Draw_Pictograph_Panel
• Wikipedia. “Temple Mountain (Utah).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mountain_(Utah)
• Action Tour Guide. “Why Was Goblin Valley State Park Founded?” https://actiontourguide.com/why-was-goblin-valley-state-park-founded/
• Action Tour Guide. “Where Did the Name Goblin Valley Come From?” https://actiontourguide.com/blog/where-did-the-name-goblin-valley-come-from/

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Proposed Maps and Figures

1. Emery County parks and monuments map — all formal designations overlaid on county boundary, with color-coding by managing agency (Utah State Parks, BLM NM, BLM Recreation Area, BLM dispersed). Custom, GIS-based. Priority: HIGH.
2. Goblin Valley hoodoo photograph — standard daytime image of goblin basin. Available from Utah State Parks public photo library.
3. Cleveland-Lloyd quarry floor photograph — showing exposed fossils in matrix. Available from BLM public domain photography.
4. Allosaurus skeleton at Jurassic NM visitor center — available from BLM.
5. Wedge Overlook panorama photograph — 1,200-ft canyon drop. Multiple open-source options.
6. Buckhorn Wash Pictograph Panel photograph — key panel segment. BLM and Wikimedia Commons sources; verify reproduction rights.
7. Chronological timeline graphic — Designation history: 1954 (Goblin Valley Preserve), 1964 (State Park), 1965 (Cleveland-Lloyd NNL; Green River SP), 1966 (Huntington SP), 1968 (First BLM visitor center), 1971 (Millsite SP), 2019 (Dingell Act: Jurassic NM + San Rafael Swell RA), 2022 (Goblin Valley tripling). Custom infographic.
8. Temple Mountain / uranium era photograph — historical BLM or Utah State Archives image preferred.

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Proposed Tables

Table 31.1 — Formal Designations in Emery County

Name	Type	Managing Agency	Year Designated	Size
Goblin Valley State Park	State Park	Utah State Parks	1964 (expanded 2019, 2022)	~10,000 acres (post-2022)
Huntington State Park	State Park	Utah State Parks	1966	~520 acres
Millsite State Park	State Park	Utah State Parks	1971	~435 acres
Green River State Park	State Park	Utah State Parks	1965	~63 acres
Jurassic National Monument	National Monument	BLM	2019	850 acres
San Rafael Swell Recreation Area	Recreation Area	BLM	2019	~217,000 acres
Buckhorn Panel	BLM Cultural Site	BLM	(NRHP listed)	[site area]
The Wedge Overlook	BLM Dispersed Recreation	BLM	(within Swell RA)	[area TBD]