The Antiquities Act Still Means Something. The Question Is Whether We Are Honest Enough to Use It Well.

There are few things more American than a good argument over public land. We can turn a dirt road, a sandstone ridge, a cattle gate, a two-track, a petroglyph panel, a county commission meeting, and a federal register notice into a bar fight with footnotes. Give us a map and a little unclear authority, and we will divide ourselves into tribes faster than a campground fills up on Memorial Day weekend.

Somewhere in the middle of that fight sits the Antiquities Act of 1906, a short little law with long legs, sharp elbows, and a habit of walking into modern controversies wearing Theodore Roosevelt’s hat.

For motorized recreation enthusiasts, the Antiquities Act is often understood only by its consequences. A president signs a proclamation. A new national monument appears on the map. The press release sounds noble. The photos are beautiful. The words are polished smooth enough to skip across the Potomac. Then, sometime later, the real work begins in a windowless office, where agency staff, consultants, lawyers, specialists, and organized interest groups begin turning the proclamation into management-speak. That is when the road inventory matters. That is when the old club ride matters. That is when the family hunting access, the snowmobile route, the Jeep trail, the motorcycle singletrack, the UTV loop, the dispersed campsite, and the local gas station suddenly need to exist beyond memory.

Because in federal land management, if you are not in the record, you are often not in the room.

The Antiquities Act deserves more than slogans. It is not simply a villain hiding behind a Smokey Bear poster, nor is it a magic wand carried by saints in fleece vests. It is a powerful tool created for a specific purpose in a very different America. It still matters. It may still be necessary. But in the modern world, it is carrying a weight the original law was never built to bear alone.

The Act was passed by Congress in 1906 during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt. Its purpose was to give the president authority to quickly protect federal lands containing “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.” The law also included a limiting phrase that still matters today: the land reserved for a monument must be confined to the “smallest area compatible” with the proper care and management of the objects being protected. In plain English, the president can use the Act to proclaim a national monument on federal land, but the boundary is supposed to be tied to the actual thing being protected, not to every acre someone might like to place under a broader management philosophy.

That is the clean civics lesson. Now comes the American part, where the clean idea gets muddy boots.

Roosevelt first used the Antiquities Act in 1906 to proclaim Devils Tower in Wyoming as the nation’s first national monument. The National Park Service describes Devils Tower as the first monument created under the Act, proclaimed by Roosevelt on September 24, 1906, to protect that extraordinary geologic formation rising out of the Wyoming landscape like a stone fist from another age. Roosevelt did not hesitate to use the authority. By the end of 1906, he had already proclaimed four national monuments.

Since then, presidents have repeatedly used the Antiquities Act. The number depends on how one counts original monument designations, later boundary changes, enlargements, redesignations, and monuments that Congress later converted into national parks or other units. But the National Park Service says presidents have used Antiquities Act authority almost 300 times to protect archaeological sites, historic landmarks, structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest. What began as an emergency tool to stop looting and destruction became one of the most consequential public land authorities in American history.

It is important to be precise here. The Antiquities Act does not automatically create wilderness. It does not automatically close every road. It does not directly create a national park, wildlife refuge, national conservation area, or national recreation area. Formally, it creates national monuments. What happens next depends on the proclamation, the managing agency, the management plan, existing law, public process, environmental analysis, administrative discretion, and, occasionally, the kind of litigation that makes normal citizens question their life choices.

This distinction matters to motorized users because the access risk is often not immediate. A monument proclamation may not say, “Close Trail 412, lock the gate, and send the local club a fruit basket of regret.” The access risk usually arrives later, dressed in the respectable language of planning. It arrives through resource management plans, travel management plans, environmental assessments, environmental impact statements, route inventories, cultural resource reviews, biological opinions, seasonal restrictions, special designations, enforcement priorities, and local office interpretation. The Forest Service or BLM may be the agency on the sign, but the real machinery is bureaucracy, and bureaucracy has a long memory for paperwork and a short memory for undocumented tradition.

This is where motorized recreation must be painfully honest with itself. Congress may never vote to close a trail. A president may never mention a route. But a local management process, operating under NEPA and related planning tools, can translate broad monument language into very specific access restrictions. Sometimes that process is professional, evidence-based, and fair. Sometimes it is shaped by institutional caution, litigation fear, incomplete route data, organized pressure, or the personal bias of decision-makers who view motorized recreation not as a legitimate public use, but as a nuisance to be managed toward extinction with polite language and a GIS layer.

That is not a conspiracy. That is a process. And the process is where grown-ups either show up with evidence or complain afterward from the cheap seats.

Theodore Roosevelt is a fine ghost to have in this story because he complicates everyone’s favorite argument. Roosevelt was neither a modern environmental activist nor a modern access advocate. He was a hunter, a naturalist, a nationalist, an imperialist, a reformer, a reader, a brawler, and a man who could turn a paragraph into a cavalry charge. His conservation legacy was enormous. During his presidency, he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land, established the United States Forest Service, and helped create or expand a vast architecture of national forests, bird reserves, game preserves, parks, and monuments. Yet his conservation was not born from a simple belief that nature should be left alone. He wanted wildlife and wild places protected from waste, commercial slaughter, and foolish destruction so they could remain part of the national inheritance.

There is greatness in that. There is also trouble.

Roosevelt could see the moral emergency in vanishing birds, ruined forests, slaughtered bison, and landscapes being devoured by short-term greed. But his writings on Indigenous people reflected the brutal racial hierarchy of his age and his own belief in Manifest Destiny. He could recognize that an ancient ruin, a bird rookery, a canyon, or a forest deserved protection, while still failing to recognize Indigenous nations as equal sovereign stewards of the lands that held those things. That does not require us to throw Roosevelt into the fire. It requires us to stop making cardboard saints out of complicated men.

The paradox is not that Roosevelt protected land while being imperfect. All men are imperfect, and most of us would look worse than we prefer if history read our private thoughts with a spotlight and a subpoena. The deeper paradox is that the Antiquities Act came from an era that often protected Indigenous “objects” while ignoring Indigenous people. It could preserve ruins, artifacts, sacred places, and cultural landscapes as part of America’s national story, while the living descendants of those places were too often treated as background characters in their own homeland.

That is why Bears Ears matters.

Bears Ears is not merely another beautiful piece of federal ground in southeastern Utah. It is a cultural landscape of deep importance to Tribal Nations, including the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni. The modern Bears Ears management framework includes the Bears Ears Commission, composed of representatives from those five Tribes, and the BLM has stated that the approved management plan emphasizes resource protection, along with Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and Tribal perspectives, in the stewardship of the Bears Ears landscape. The five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission described the final resource management plan as a major step in collaborative stewardship and shared responsibility.

That is a remarkable turn in the long American argument. A law born in the age of Roosevelt, an age still soaked in conquest and civilizational certainty, is now being used in part to recognize Indigenous knowledge, Tribal leadership, and living cultural relationships to land. That does not make every boundary perfect. It does not make every management choice wise. It does not justify every road closure. But it does make the conversation more serious than the usual bumper-sticker war between “lock it up” and “open it all.”

For One Voice and for motorized recreation, seriousness is the point.

We can respect Bears Ears as a place of Tribal importance and still ask hard questions about monument scale, management authority, route-level decisions, public access, agency discretion, and whether the “smallest area compatible” standard still has teeth. We can recognize that Indigenous history matters without accepting the idea that responsible recreation must be treated as inherently incompatible. We can support protection of cultural resources while demanding that agencies use evidence rather than prejudice when deciding which routes remain open and which are closed.

The recent litigation over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante shows why this matters. In June 2026, the Tenth Circuit sent challenges to President Biden’s restoration of those monuments back to the lower court for further review. The litigation continues, and the legal questions remain complex, including presidential authority, monument boundaries, reviewability, and standing. For recreation advocates, the standing issue should ring like a fire bell in a dry canyon. Caring deeply is not the same as proving legal injury. General frustration is not the same as documented harm. A beloved trail, if it exists only in stories told at club meetings and over tailgates, may not carry much weight in an administrative record or a courtroom.

That is the uncomfortable lesson. Motorized recreation has spent generations building culture, family tradition, local knowledge, volunteer stewardship, economic value, and historic use across the West. But too often we have failed to document it in a form that agencies, planners, judges, and policymakers can recognize. We know the routes. We know the history. We know where the old mining roads go, where the families camp, where the veterans ride, where the local businesses depend on seasonal traffic, where the snowmobile trail keeps a winter town alive, where the dispersed camping loop has been used responsibly for decades. But knowing is not enough if the record is empty.

In the modern public land system, undocumented use becomes disposable use.

That should be written on the wall of every club meeting, right next to the coffee pot and the sign-up sheet for the next trail cleanup. If a route matters, document it. If an area has economic value, document it. If a trail has historical significance, document it. If volunteers maintain it, sign it, repair it, clean it, patrol it, educate users on it, or keep it from becoming a resource problem, document it. If families, seniors, disabled users, hunters, anglers, overlanders, snowmobilers, 4x4 users, UTV users, motorcycle riders, or local businesses depend on access, document it.

The future of access will not be saved by outrage alone. Outrage is easy. Evidence is work. Outrage gets applause. Evidence gets entered into the file. Outrage feels good for twenty minutes. Evidence can still matter twenty years later when a management plan is revised, a lawsuit is filed, or a field office tries to decide whether a route is a legitimate public access corridor or just another line to erase from the map.

This is where One Voice can lead. The motorized community needs route inventories, economic impact studies, historical use records, event records, stewardship logs, volunteer-hour documentation, business testimonials, photographs, maps, GPS data, accessibility impact statements, emergency access considerations, and public comments tied to specific routes and specific outcomes. We need local clubs trained to participate before the decision is made, not merely angry after the gate goes up. We need to treat every ride, cleanup, work party, charity event, and organized route survey as part of a larger public record.

That does not mean every road stays open forever. It does not mean every user gets everything they want. It means responsible recreation becomes visible. It means agencies cannot so easily pretend motorized users are an abstraction. It means a planning team has to weigh actual evidence of use and value. It means courts have something more concrete than nostalgia to consider when the lawsuits start flying.

The Antiquities Act still means something. It remains one of the most powerful conservation tools ever placed in the hands of an American president. Used carefully, it can protect places from looting, vandalism, neglect, and destruction. Used carelessly, or stretched beyond its honest purpose, it can become a substitute for Congress, a shortcut around local consent, a legacy machine, or a political offering dressed in the robes of permanent virtue.

The question is not whether conservation matters. It does. The question is not whether Indigenous history matters. It does. The question is not whether public access matters. It does. The harder question is whether a law written in 1906 should still allow one president, one proclamation, and one bureaucracy to reshape the future of a landscape without forcing Congress back into the room.

And that brings us to the question every reader should sit with for a moment.

Why do modern presidents create new national monuments?

Is it because a place faces an urgent and clearly documented threat? Is it because Congress failed to act? Is it because agencies need a stronger management framework? Is it because Tribal Nations have asked the federal government to finally recognize places it ignored for too long? Is it because monuments are politically useful, emotionally powerful, and historically permanent-looking? Is it legacy building? Is it coalition politics? Is it conservation? Is it all of these things at once?

The answer may depend on the monument. It may depend on the president. It may depend on which side of the locked gate a person happens to be standing on.

Roosevelt gave America a powerful tool. He also left us with a paradox. He could see that wild places needed protection from greed, but he did not fully see that many of those places were already bound to people whose sovereignty, memory, and stewardship long predated the American republic. Bears Ears asks whether the Antiquities Act can mature beyond that original blindness. Motorized recreation now faces its own test: whether we will continue to rely on memory, tradition, and outrage, or build the record necessary to defend responsible access in the modern world.

If we want a seat at the table, we have to bring more than dust on our boots and stories from the old days. We have to bring maps, data, history, stewardship, economics, public value, and organized participation.

Otherwise, we should not be surprised when the bureaucracy writes the story without us.