The Bureau of Land Management said Monday it plans to request that the U.S. Park Service put about 800 sites within Nine Mile Canyon on the National Register of Historic Places.

The BLM will submit the request by the first of next year and expects a decision in early 2009, said Byron Loosle, a state archaeologist for the BLM.

"A lot of people love that canyon, and they've worked with the BLM and other individuals to push this thing forward," he said.

Nine Mile Canyon, located in central Utah's Book Cliffs northeast of Price, is prized for its extensive collection of American Indian rock art panels of petroglyphs.

Some residents have opposed the plan because they worry the designation would result in increased visitor traffic on their property. Loosle said that his agency would ask the Park Service to remove those particular sites from the list if those property owners continued to object.

If approved, the Nine Mile Canyon sites would join approximately 16,000 other sites in Utah that are currently listed on the national registry.

"People really want to recognize these sites as being pretty spectacular," he said. "Frankly, these are more worthy than a lot of things that have been put on the registry."

Watchdog groups including the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition and the National Trust for Historic Preservation have voiced concern over proposed natural-gas drilling in the area near the canyon, because they believe traffic from the heavy industrial trucks used in the drilling operations is damaging the rock-art panels.

Colorado-based Bill Barrett Corp. currently has a proposal before the BLM to significantly expand its gas drilling on the West Tavaputs Plateau above Nine Mile Canyon. The extra 800 wells would increase the present heavy truck traffic in Nine Mile Canyon on the way to the plateau.

The watchdog organizations contend that dust from current truck traffic and efforts to control that dust are already ruining the rock art panels.

According to Loosle, being listed on the national register is largely an honorary designation that offers no additional legal protection under the federal Historic Preservation Act.

But Nine Mile Canyon Coalition board member Diane Gorman said the groups wanted the designation, regardless of whether it offered any legal protections for the petroglyphs.

"It's a special place. Eight thousand years of history should count as special," she said. "It's an absolutely exquisite canyon."

---

E-mail: jlee@desnews.com