From the air, the landscape around Vernal changes quickly.
Green farmland gives way to red rock, canyons and open desert.
We’re flying over the John Wesley Powell National Conservation Area – or NCA – in northeastern Utah. I’m flying alongside a small group of conservationists and outdoor professionals.
For Cody Perry, seeing the landscape from above gives a new meaning to the rugged terrain.
“When you're in the NCA, a sense of scale, of wilderness, of antiquity, of the age of the land, the biodiversity, it all jumps out at you,” Perry says from the cockpit of a small aircraft. “It's a very different experience.”
Perry is the associate director of Living Rivers, a nonprofit focused on protecting rivers and public lands across the Colorado Plateau.
He says the connections between different pieces of the landscape become easier to see from the plane.
“You get a really intimate view of the wilderness core of the monument itself,” Perry says, speaking through staticky airplane headsets. “Seeing how all these landscapes connect out, extend out, and how really fitting it together, how, wow, this is a really big place.”
The John Wesley Powell NCA covers about 30,000 acres surrounding Dinosaur National Monument.
National monuments are areas designated for the protection of objects of historic or scientific interest. The National Park Service says they can include places with significant archaeological, paleontological, ecological or cultural resources.
But the NCA is part of a much larger patchwork of public lands — and those lands can face competing demands.
“Every time we have a new presidential administration come in, you have a shifting set of priorities,” Perry explains from the airport tarmac. “Those priorities tend to place different types of land uses in conflict with one another.”
Perry says those conflicts include increased motorized access, oil and natural gas extraction, and human development.
Roads and resource extraction have become part of larger questions about how public lands should be managed.
And because protected areas don't exist in isolation, the lands around them can be just as important for maintaining connected habitat.
“It was just really obvious to me in the aircraft, looking at the river corridor being the lowlands and easily connecting up to the high Uintas, and how large ungulates move with the seasons,” Perry says. “They need that landscape space to move, and how the NCA provides, hopefully, a degree of protection that is for wildlife.”
NCA’s like John Wesley Powell provide the monument with critical buffer habitat — giving wildlife room to move, forage and find water as conditions change.
For species that travel across large areas, those surrounding lands can help maintain connections between protected places. They reduce the effects of roads, development and other disturbances.
Charlie Luke is the associate director of The Wilderness Society in Utah.
He says decisions about the John Wesley Powell NCA could also set a precedent for other protected landscapes.
“Any sort of monument reduction, any sort of boundary reduction, just opens the door and does set that precedent for other reductions in size of other national monuments.”
For Luke, that makes public participation critical.
“Talk to your elected officials. Talk to your neighbors and share your opinions,” he says. “Utah elected officials believe that Utahns are on their side with a lot of these things. The only way that elected officials are going to change their positions on things is if they actually start hearing from people on the ground, people who live here.”
And that's part of what Living Rivers is trying to do.
The organization is working to raise awareness about the John Wesley Powell NCA and build support for keeping the area protected.
Perry says that starts with getting people to experience the landscape for themselves — including from the air.
Because from up here, the boundaries on a map disappear.
What you see instead is one connected landscape — from the canyons around Dinosaur National Monument, across the NCA, and into the surrounding public lands and nearby towns.
