When I was in my early 30s, my dad bought a ranch in Nevada’s Big Smoky Valley, so named because a haze often sits above it. My cousins had grown up on a ranch there, where they had attended a K-12 high school with a graduating class that averaged about four students. I went on several 50-mile hikes as a Boy Scout in the Toiyabes, a majestic range that towers over the valley.
I had just moved back to the West after grad school in New York, and I persuaded my dad to let me accompany him and the other real cowboys on the fall cattle drive, where they pushed their herd from the meadows and streams of the Toiyabes down to the ranch for the winter. I was gobsmacked by the size of the ranch — three million acres (the legendary King Ranch in Texas is one third the size) — and wondered how my dad and his partners managed it all. He explained that they didn’t own most of it. Only 14,000 acres were deeded; the rest belonged to the federal government.
Growing up in the West, I knew how most people felt about the feds owning public lands. If my dad had anything to say about the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service controlling most of this ranch, I figured it wouldn’t be positive.
I was wrong. The BLM and the Forest Service were good stewards of the land, he said. On top of that, the arrangement gave him and his partners access to far more land to graze their cattle than they would be able to afford otherwise, and it kept the land open to the public. What if one rancher bought it all and Boy Scouts couldn’t hike the Toiyabes as I had, or ATV enthusiasts couldn’t zoom around on the old mining trails?
My dad did have his complaints, however. Environmentalists didn’t want cattle on the ranges at all, and as a result, agents at the BLM and the Forest Service told him they spent most of the agencies’ funding fighting off lawsuits that never went anywhere. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use that money to do the job Congress had intended: to find a balance between preservation, recreation and business interests?
In the years since, I’ve reported on these tensions from time to time. I’ve talked to ranchers and farmers in Monticello and Blanding, near the Bears Ears National Monument, who oppose federal control of public lands. And I’ve talked to conservationists and Native American leaders who say the idea of the state managing public lands is simply a path to privatization.
I was just a few years old during the original Sagebrush Rebellion. There weren’t any standoffs, or seizures of federal property; it played out in state legislatures and courtrooms, primarily in Nevada and Utah — a response to the federal government’s tightening grip on public lands.
Now, nearly 50 years later, that seed has taken root again. This month, in our annual State of the West issue, we explore what we at the magazine have dubbed Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0, an effort led by Utah to once again attempt to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. The motivations behind this new push echo the original rebellion — frustration with federal oversight, a belief that local control would mean better stewardship, and an insistence that Washington doesn’t understand the realities of life in the West. But there is one crucial difference, according to an exclusive Deseret Magazine poll by HarrisX: Utahns, by and large, don’t want these lands sold off or developed. They want them to remain public — open for recreation, for hunting, for the wide, unfenced freedom that defines this region. I found one of the findings of the poll particularly striking: Most people support state control of public lands — but not if it means privatization. That distinction is critical. It signals a shift in the way people see this debate, moving away from the old “government vs. industry” framework and toward something more nuanced.
The first Sagebrush Rebellion ultimately faded, but its ideas never really died. What happens in this new chapter will depend on how Utah navigates the complexities of control, conservation and commerce. It will also depend on how we, as residents of this vast and complicated place, define what it means to be stewards of the land we call home.
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.