Proclamations 11043 & 11044 · effective September 11, 2026
Three million acres, gone
Not gone from the map — gone from protection to be sold to the highest bidder. On July 13, 2026, two proclamations cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante down to 9% and 10% of their size. What was signed away comes to 2,927,363 acres, released in an afternoon.
- Removed from the monument
- Still monument after 11 Sept
- Boundary as it stood 2021–2026
What sits in the red
Every marker represents somewhere in the national monuments that will no longer be protected on the morning of September 11th. Over 380 named places sit inside the red — canyons and gulches, basins, mesas, springs, arches, cliff bands and overlooks — and that is only what somebody has already bothered to put on a map.
Where a marker has no photograph, nobody has yet published one anyone is free to reuse — the link goes to an image search instead. Aerial basemap: USGS National Map (public domain). Drag or use two fingers to move the map; scroll or pinch to zoom.
The math they think you won't check
The Antiquities Act says a monument must be confined to “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Read that again. Then look at what they call compatible. 8.9% of Bears Ears survives. 9.7% of Grand Staircase-Escalante survives. Ninety percent of what a nation agreed was worth protecting, gone, dressed up in the language of careful stewardship as if erasure were just tidiness.
They don't hide what this is for. Proclamation 11043 reads like a mining company's wish list, not a president's: silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, zinc. Every acre they cut loose opens to leasing and claims. Rock that took millions of years to become sacred becomes inventory in one stroke of a pen.
Stop picturing a document and start picturing a place, canyons, cliff dwellings, petroglyphs older than the country that just sold naming rights to their disappearance. That's an area just shy of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined, both of them, swallowed. Not a policy adjustment. A nation deciding its past is worth less than what's underneath it.
| Monument | Before | After | Removed | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bears Ears | 1,360,000 | 121,096 | 1,238,904 | 91.1% |
| Grand Staircase-Escalante | 1,870,000 | 181,541 | 1,688,459 | 90.3% |
| Both | 3,230,000 | 302,637 | 2,927,363 | 90.6% |
2,927,363 acres gone from protection, an area just short of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. Conservation groups, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Patagonia moved on September 1 to reopen the 2017 litigation, on the argument that the Antiquities Act empowers a president to create monuments and says nothing about dismantling them. Absent a court, the proclamations take effect on schedule—September 11, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. sharp.
What survives
Bears Ears · Proclamation 11043
- Shash Jáa Unit106,816 ac
- Doll House Ruin157 ac
- Scorup Cabin314 ac
- Rig Canyon Mining Exploration Site693 ac
- Moon House complex318 ac
- The Citadel88 ac
- Indian Creek Unit14,279 ac
The five indented parcels are not part of anything. Each is a fence drawn tight around a single ruin — 88 acres for the Citadel, 157 for Doll House Ruin, 318 for the Moon House complex. The canyons they stand in, the routes used to reach them and the archaeology in between all fall outside the line. They are the specks scattered across the Bears Ears panel above.
Grand Staircase-Escalante · Proclamation 11044
- Canyons of the Escalante Unit172,641 ac
- Kaiparowits Horizon Unit8,900 ac
The Kaiparowits Horizon Unit is 8,900 acres in two pieces, drawn around a bonebed that produced one of the most complete tyrannosaurid specimens found in the region. The plateau that bonebed came out of — and the coal seams beneath it — are not included.
Boundaries: BLM Utah State Office (pre-2026) and the Utah Division of Public Lands (2026), whose acreages match the proclamation text to the acre. Text: Proclamations 11043 and 11044, 91 FR 45169 and 45179. Aerial basemap: USGS National Map. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, public domain or Creative Commons, credited individually on each card. Acreages on the maps are gross boundary areas and run above the federal-acre figures above, which exclude state and private inholdings.