The Messengers

Running between Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.

By JOHNIE GALL

Sounds carries in the dark. Even at 2AM, we could tell the runner was approaching our outpost on the side of a winding canyon road by the distant thud of sneakers hitting dirt.

It was early January, 2018, and we were cold, tired, and halfway through a two-day, 250-mile run bridging Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Writer Andy Cochrane, filmmaker Greg Balkin, and I had gathered 17 of our friends from all over the country to run six-mile legs, relay style, across both tracts of land in Southeastern Utah. We were there because of President Trump’s December 2017 order to shrink both national monuments in the largest elimination of federally protected land in American history. He’d made his decision without ever stepping foot in either place, so we decided we’d go for ourselves and see what would be left unprotected.

The Navajo people– they've long called the area home before its national monument status—have traditionally used runners as conduits for communication for thousands of years. Known as “messengers,” these individuals would sometimes cover hundreds of miles by foot to share a message. We would do just that, and despite our varied level of interest in running, our group did have one thing in common: a connection to public lands. And those public lands were being threatened.

For less than a year, Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument was a 1.3-million-acre expanse of land set aside by President Barack Obama at the urging of the five indigenous tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. Filled with crumbling purple canyons, conifer forests, windswept mesas, and the highest density of ancient native artifacts in the country, it’s a place as defined by its cultural significance as it is by natural beauty. Last December, by order of President Donald Trump on the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the area was replaced by two new monuments a combined 85 percent smaller than the original designation. The remaining area reverted to BLM land or U.S. Forest Service land, making it eligible for extractive industry and road development. Nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was reduced by about half its size.

Trump’s rollback is unprecedented and faces some serious legal challenges, but as of early February, the land was officially open for business. The debate over Trump’s hastily-made decision is heated, in part because the National Monument status never changed the land’s existing grazing, logging, hunting, drilling, mining, or off-road vehicle use. Instead, it protected against future development, demanded stronger punishments for looters destroying native archaeological sites, and encouraged the development of a local tourism industry.

While public lands have enjoyed a long history of bipartisan support, what makes National Monuments so controversial is their range. Since national monuments came into actuality under the Antiquities Act of 1906, Western lawmakers have argued for more local control and for limiting federal jurisdiction to much smaller areas of “specific cultural importance.” They want tighter boundaries around what land can actually be federally protected.

When President Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon National Monument, he was berated with the same congressional grousing about the potential hit Arizona’s economy would take due to the loss of mining opportunities. But here’s the catch with the whole “hit to the American economy” argument: 90 percent of BLM land is already open for energy development—not to mention that in 2016, Congress recognized for the first time the outdoor industry’s $887 billion contribution to the GDP as part of the REC Act.

THE MESSENGERS Magda Boulet, Len Necefer, Jorge Moreno, Katie Boué, Alice Baker, Craig Prendergast, Keith Madia, Wyatt Roscoe, Sheyenne Lewis, Clare Gallagher, Gil Levy, Carolyn Morse, Lenny Strnad, Brianna Madia, Maggie George, Daniel McLaughlin, Greg Balkin, Johnie Gall, Andy Cochrane, Dagwood, Bucket, Bea, Chaco, and Gizmo.

Faced with lawsuits from native groups and private industry, the courts will decide if Trump's changes to the national monuments will stand, and thereby set a precedent for the power of the sitting president to undo land protections enacted by his predecessors. While lawmakers split hairs on the issue, one thing has become abundantly clear: The majority of Americans don't want to lose their publicly-owned land, showing overwhelming support when nearly three million people spoke up in favor of keeping the monuments intact during a public commenting period. Those comments– in addition to massive rallies, protests and petitions– went largely ignored by the President and Zinke.

It's this part of this puzzle which spurred our own grassroots project: How could we raise a cacophony in support of public lands? We took audit of the tools at our disposal: We were well connected in the outdoor industry, we knew how to make films, and we were adept at organizing relay-style runs (Andy had previously helmed these types of just-for-fun, hundred-plus mile relays in California and Hawaii). Within hours of sketching a rough plan, we’d convinced friends from all corners of the country to meet us at Indian Creek campground in early January. It was to be an experiment in using something as simple and accessible as running as a form of advocacy for something bigger.

Just before dawn on the first morning of our run, Natives Outdoors founder Len Necefer (whose family originated in the area and whose parents would later join us to run a leg) led us in a traditional Navajo prayer as we stood in reverent silence behind the petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock. Some of us were friends and others still strangers, some sponsored athletes and others running for the first time in years. Public lands advocate Katie Boué and Latino Outdoors volunteer Jorge Moreno stood next to Olympic athlete Magda Boulet and Patagonia runner Clare Gallagher. Navajo runner Sheyenne Lewis passed her eagle-feather-and-sage “baton” to writer Brianna Madia and her husband Keith—eagles are messengers between humans and Diyin Dine’é (Navajo Holy People).

“I’ve been very active in the federal assaults on our public lands in the past year, so running a relay in the ground zero of this fight was a no brainer,” says Patagonia trail runner Clare Gallagher. “But the experience was way more moving than I anticipated. I learned more about the Native history of this land than I could ever have from a book or class. This land is Native land and we’re lucky to be able to share it as outdoor enthusiasts.”

We spent the next two days passing this ceremonial baton to one another over snowy roads and mud-caked trails, eating soup from cans and keeping each other motivated in the stark cold of the desert, slowly chipping away at 250 miles together. It became apparent then and as we edited our short documentary film later that the run was never really about running at all. It was about slowing down, understanding the importance of a place by exploring it with our own feet, and, above all, finding commonalities in the midst of this divisive political landscape. It was about standing in coalescence—athletes, tribal members, activists, rock climbers fresh out of Goodwill with $5 sneakers—and finding a stronger collective voice than any one of us had on our own. “It was about taking the time to slow things down,” says Lewis, who also participated in a 1,400-mile relay run to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota last October. “We must accept a shared responsibility and understanding.”

Part of that shared responsibility is voting in the upcoming midterm election this November, as the decisions made there will affect the future of our public lands and planet. Encouraged by the response to our first run and resulting short film, “Messengers,” we’re hoping to take our idea right to the steps of the White House, running from Bears Ears to Washington, D.C. over the course of two weeks this October to raise awareness about the fight for our public lands. We run because it’s what we know how to do, and because even in the darkest of times, the sound of even a single footstep still carries.