Rhetoric from county official "is taking away our ability to mitigate the impacts that the energy industry poses to Nine Mile Canyon and its prehistorical and historical cultural resources," he said.

ACEC planning included public input and archaeological research, he said.

"Nine Mile Canyon has one of the highest concentrations of ancient rock art in North America," said Hansen, reached by telephone in Holiday. It amounts to a museum of human habitation dating back 10,000 years, he said.

Dust kicked up by industry has been "settling on the pictographs and petroglyphs," added Hansen, who has property in the canyon. He is concerned the dust may be harming the rock art, and worried about action on the panels by salt-like chemicals spread on the road to reduce the dust.

"The coalition does not oppose energy exploration in the region, but we are trying to work with different entities to mitigate any impacts to Nine Mile Canyon," Hansen said. He added that he personally doesn't like surface occupancy in the canyon by the extraction industry.

Milovich, reached by telephone in Price, said the ACEC designation would be part of a resource management plan the BLM has been preparing.

Until recently, the county believed it had come to an understanding with the BLM concerning Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, he said.

The agreement was that individual archaeological sites throughout the canyon would be protected by separate ACECs, he said. That would apply to everything from ancient fire pits to pictographs, and additional ACECs would be designated whenever new sites are discovered.

But county officials learned that the BLM decided to designate "the whole canyon . . . as an ACEC," he said.

"Well, the problem with that is the whole canyon has rights-of-way and private property," he said. BLM officials discussed the ACEC with the county about four or five weeks ago, he said.

"We had to put in comments that we weren't in agreement with the whole canyon" designation, Milovich added.

The road through the canyon is a county road, which he is worried would become problematic for maintenance projects if the canyon receives ACEC designation.

The county's letter says the ACEC would cover 26,215 acres of federal land and 5,226 acres of private and private land in Carbon County. Including additional land in Duchesne and Uintah Counties, the Nine Mile Canyon ACEC would total 60,539 acres, according to the letter.

BLM officials in the Price office were not available to comment Wednesday afternoon.

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