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11 Most Endangered
Nine Mile Canyon
Year Listed: 2004
Location: , Utah
Current Status: Endangered
Threat: Development
Latest News
For the most current information on Nine Mile Canyon visit our Public Lands page.
Central Utah's Nine Mile Canyon is frequently called "the world's longest art gallery."
Credit: National Trust for Historic Preservation Mountains-Plains Office.
Significance
Located in a remote part of Utah, Nine Mile Canyon is often called "the world's longest art gallery" as it contains more than 10,000 images carved and painted onto canyon walls by Native Americans. It also is home to numerous archeological sites including pit houses, granaries and village locations. The canyon also contains many historic sites – such as stagecoach stations, settlers' cabins, ranches, and iron telegraph poles installed by the famed 19th-century Buffalo Soldiers - that stand as reminders of the area's pioneer history.
Updates
Early 2009: BLM granted the National Trust and several other preservation and conservation groups consulting party status for the Section 106 process for the West Tavaputs Natural Gas Full Field Development Plan – a proposal by the Bill Barrett Corporation to drill 807 new wells from up to 494 well pad locations in and adjacent to Nine Mile Canyon. Negotiations to resolve the project’s adverse effects to historic properties in Nine Mile Canyon through a programmatic agreement are ongoing.
December 2008: BLM announced that it would sell new oil and gas leases on the plateau above Nine Mile Canyon. As Nine Mile Canyon provides the principal access route to the areas covered by the leases, truck traffic in the canyon would have increased as the oil and gas companies developed the leases, thus causing additional harm to the canyon's rock art sites. In response, the National Trust, along with other partners, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and asked the court to reverse BLM's decision to issue the leases above Nine Mile Canyon and in other areas of Utah with sensitive natural resources. In January 2009, the court granted the parties' request and issued an order that prohibited BLM from issuing the leases. A few weeks later, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar formally cancelled each of the leases at issue in the lawsuit, thus sparing Nine Mile Canyon from the additional harmful effects of truck traffic.
September 2008: A new engineering study conducted by KPFF Consulting Engineers and released today by the National Trust for Historic Preservation offers a win-win solution for dealing with the damage an oil and gas company's heavy truck traffic is having on an estimated 10,000 ancient rock art images and cultural artifacts in Utah's Nine Mile Canyon. The study concludes that new alternate access routes would allow the Bill Barrett Corporation (BBC) full access to the natural gas reserves on the West Tavaputs Plateau (WTP) while minimizing the grave harm BBC's heavy-truck traffic is inflicting on the Canyon, a site known as the "World's Longest Art Gallery."
This historic canyon is under increasing pressure from tourism, recreation, and energy development that threaten its significant prehistoric and historic resources. In particular, the truck traffic associated with natural gas development on the plateau above the canyon is causing dust and potentially corrosive chemicals to settle on the canyon's rock art sites. A sustainable balance between these competing uses must be found or these irreplaceable cultural and historic resources will be lost forever.
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