On July 13, 2026, presidential proclamations cut Bears Ears National Monument from about 1.36 million acres to about 121,000 and Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.87 million acres to about 182,000. Roughly ninety percent of two of America's most significant protected landscapes lost protection in an afternoon. The legal fight over those lands will run for years. This page exists so that fight has a public record: the boundaries on a map, every case, every official action, every voice, updated as it happens.
Where the boundaries come from
The 1996, 2016, 2017, and 2021 boundary layers come from official sources: the Utah Geospatial Resource Center's historic monuments dataset, the BLM's National Landscape Conservation System feature service, and the published 2017 unit boundaries. The July 2026 boundaries are approximate: no official GIS had been published when this tracker launched, so the 2026 layers are digitized from the BLM-sourced boundary map published by The Wilderness Society and labeled approximate on the map. The day official shapefiles publish, we swap them in. Acreage figures shown are the officially cited numbers, not our geometry math; where press-reported figures vary, we say so.
How the wire works
Automated monitoring checks the federal courts (CourtListener), the Federal Register, agency newsrooms, and the pressrooms of the organizations in the fight, every six hours. A drafting system turns what it finds into timeline entries under hard rules: an entry publishes only if its source is on a fixed allowlist of courts, agencies, named outlets, and named organizations, and only if the source link actually resolves. Anything uncertain is held for human review. No source, no entry. Every published entry keeps its provenance, and corrections are one email away.
What we are not
This is not a neutral-voice wire service, and it does not pretend to be. More Than Just Parks believes these monuments should be whole, and says so plainly. The discipline is in the record: facts are sourced, quotes are verbatim, boundaries carry their provenance, and the voices cheering the cuts get quoted accurately alongside the voices fighting them. Advocacy and accuracy are not in tension; the record is strongest when it is right.
Who builds this
More Than Just Parks is a conservation media company built by the Pattiz brothers: filmmakers and photographers who have documented America's public lands for over a decade, including the red rock country these monuments protect. This tracker runs on Public Lands Intelligence, the platform we built to connect money, votes, rules, courts, and extraction across the public lands fight. The tracker is free and stays free.
Corrections
Found an error, a dead link, or a boundary problem? Email ask@morethanjustparks.com. Corrections ship fast and we note material ones in the record.
Grand Staircase-Escalante · filmed by More Than Just Parks