Where: Utah, United States

What's at stake: Largest completely unprotected wilderness in the western U.S.

Threatened by: Oil and gas development, off-road vehicles, coal mining, logging, grazing

Animals include: Pronghorn antelope, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, Gila monster, bald eagle, peregrine falcon, mountain lion

	No wilderness area in the lower 48 states has as much unprotected public land as southern Utah's redrock country, which is surrounded by eight national parks and monuments.
	The redrock lands in Utah proposed for wilderness designation (and protection) are home to more than two dozen endangered or sensitive animal species, including the Gila monster, chuckwalla, desert tortoise, bald eagle, and peregrine falcon.
	The beautiful pink and black Gila monster, one of only two venomous lizards in the world, grows up to two feet long and in the spring and summer builds up fat to store in its tail, which it then uses in the winter.
	Cryptobiotic soil -- a living crust of lichens, mosses, and especially cyanobacterial filaments (formerly called blue-green algae, and one of the oldest known forms of life on earth) -- tops much of the Colorado Plateau's redrock desert. These crusts are the desert's natural protection against wind and water erosion, but are so fragile that even footprints do them irreversible damage.
	Some of the juniper trees in redrock country are 1,000 years old; the bristlecone pines at higher altitudes can be 3,000 years old.
	Human occupation of the Colorado Plateau stretches back at least 12,000 years, to the end of the Pleistocene Epoch; the first human visitors -- Paleoindians -- are believed to have hunted big game in the region.
	The Anasazi civilization, which disappeared for unknown reasons around 1300 A.D., left thousands of prehistoric stone structures on the Colorado Plateau -- whole cities of stone.
	Nine Mile Canyon -- located in the largest block of undeveloped land in Utah, the Bookcliffs region -- holds the greatest concentration of rock art sites in the United States, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
	Utah's wildlands are home to countless remarkable fossils: in the area of the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, researchers have found evidence of some of the earliest marsupial mammals in the world; while in he San Rafael Swell, important dinosaur fossils have been located. One million acres of the San Rafael Swell would be protected by America's Redrock Wilderness Act.
	Livestock grazing is a major threat to the natural resources of redrock country. In 1997, for instance, the Bureau of Land Management bulldozed 55,000 acreas of archaeologically rich lands in Utah to increase forage area for livestock.
	One coal mine already proposed for the redrock region will, if approved, bring 550 coal trucks to and from the mine every day, through wilderness that is now pristine.
	If passed, the Redrock Wilderness Act wouldn't entirely ban off-road vehicles from Utah's spectacular canyons. Roughly 104,000 miles of existing dirt roads, trails and routes in the state would remain open to off-road use, although vehicles would be barred from designated wilderness areas.

Photo credits: Fisher Towers, © www.robertglennketchum.com. Cougar, © AnimalsAnimals.