Utah's latest wilds area not just about scenery

SKULL VALLEY — The dry, rounded ridges of the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area stretch north-south for about 55 miles, framing this barren valley with its sagebrush and parched grass.

The Cedar range opens to the west on desolate salt flats, where the Air Force has sprayed nerve gas and drops ordnance on a Rhode Island-sized bombing range, and where much of the nation's industrial waste gets entombed for disposal.

Of all the spectacular and wild places in Utah worthy of protection as wilderness, the Cedars never ranked high on anyone's list. Yet, after rejecting wilderness proposals for more than two decades, Utah's congressional delegation united behind this site.

"Whether it's the most pristine or spectacular wilderness — well, it doesn't rank up there," admitted U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the prime sponsor of the wilderness measure signed by President Bush on Jan. 6.

But more than scenery was on the mind of Utah's congressional delegation. The restrictions of the Wilderness Act of 1964, intended to forever preserve virgin wilderness in a natural state, will make it impractical for a tribe of 121 Goshute Indians to accept nuclear waste for storage on their tiny patch of Skull Valley.

The Wilderness Act forbids development, and the new wilderness cuts off the only practical route for a rail spur delivering heavy steel casks of spent fuel rods to the Goshute reservation.

"We're just a small Indian tribe that makes Utah cringe," said tribal Chief Leon Bear, who professed no opinion about the state's new wilderness area.

Bear in 1996 signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear-powered utilities looking to unload 40,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods with a half-life of 10,000 years on his reservation.

Now, Bear shrugs off the wilderness as the consortium's problem, not his.

If the designation wasn't strictly about wilderness preservation, advocates don't care, said Kevin Mueller, executive director of the Utah Wilderness Congress.

While it was not the top priority of preservationists, it was on their wish list — and they didn't even have to fight for it. In fact, they got more than they wanted — a 100,000-acre wilderness instead of 62,100 acres in their original proposal for the Cedar mountain range.

"Obscurity doesn't discredit the place. It's wild," Ray Bloxham, a field inventory specialist for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said on a tour of the Cedar Mountains, just an hour's drive west of Salt Lake City.