{"id":1951,"date":"2026-09-30T06:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T06:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/?p=1951"},"modified":"2026-09-30T06:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T06:45:11","slug":"prospectors-rush-to-stake-mining-claims-as-soon-as-bears-ears-national-monument-shrinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/?p=1951","title":{"rendered":"Prospectors Rush to Stake Mining Claims as Soon as Bears Ears National Monument Shrinks"},"content":{"rendered":"

It did not take long for prospectors to capitalize on newly opened public lands in southeast Utah. On September 11, the very first day that 1.2 million acres previously protected within the Bears Ears National Monument were made accessible, miners officially filed 16 claims. This rush came just two months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order shrinking the monument\u2019s boundaries by about 90 percent. <\/p>\n

All of the initial claims appear to have been filed by small-scale, local miners who maintain other professions, operate small businesses, and harbor a keen interest in uranium exploration. However, the remarkably rapid timing of these filings has alarmed environmental organizations, including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which fully expects more claims to follow in the coming weeks and months.<\/p>\n

"Hobby miners who want to go locate claims, play miner on the weekend, leave disturbance and pollution in their wake, that really damages the monument resources," said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the environmental nonprofit.<\/p>\n

Among the early filers was George Schultz, an off-roading guide based in nearby Moab, who staked three claims in the Lockhart Basin. Schultz defended his actions by explaining that staking a claim is merely an initial "step" in the mining process, while noting that Bureau of Land Management lands outside of strict monument protections are legally designated for multiple uses. <\/p>\n

While Schultz declined to specify which exact minerals he expects to unearth at his claim sites, his professional profile on LinkedIn indicates prior experience in uranium exploration. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, thirteen of the Bears Ears mining claims were filed by Kimmerle Mining, a family business based in Moab. These filings included two official modifications to the 21-acre Easy Peasy mine alongside 11 additional claims staked nearby. <\/p>\n

Kyle Kimmerle, a managing member of the mining company, declined to comment when contacted regarding the new claims. However, public records show that Kimmerle was appointed to the board of directors of Urano Energy, a Canadian mining company with a primary focus on uranium, in 2024. Alongside his mining ventures, he also reportedly operates a Moab-based general contracting business and a local tire shop.<\/p>\n

The protected status of Bears Ears has turned the region into a high-stakes political battleground ever since the monument was first established by President Barack Obama during the final weeks of his administration in 2016. Obama\u2019s original designation added federal conservation protections to 1.35 million acres of culturally and ecologically significant land in the southeastern corner of Utah.<\/p>\n

The political pendulum swung the following year when President Trump slashed the monument\u2019s footprint by roughly 85 percent during his first term. Years later, President Joe Biden restored the monument to its original boundaries and even slightly expanded its total acreage during his term in office. That protection was short-lived, however, as Trump once again significantly reduced its size this past summer.<\/p>\n

A similar back-and-forth legal and administrative battle has defined the history of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, which was originally established by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and has since been repeatedly downsized and restored by successive presidential administrations.<\/p>\n

\"After<\/figure>\n

Under the terms of the latest proclamation shrinking Bears Ears, the Trump administration disbanded the tribal commission that previously shared management of the monument alongside the Bureau of Land Management. The proclamation also explicitly listed what attorney Steve Bloch described as a "grab bag of minerals" that the lands "may or may not" contain. These include silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc. <\/p>\n

The White House proclamation argued that extracting these subterranean resources will "create jobs, fuel prosperity, and are essential to important sectors of the economy of the United States."<\/p>\n

"He was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas," Bloch noted.<\/p>\n

Kimmerle is no stranger to the legal battles surrounding the region, having been a party to a 2023 lawsuit challenging President Biden\u2019s restoration of the Bears Ears boundaries in 2021. His company, which owns the Easy Peasy mine, previously extracted 30 tons of ore in a targeted search for uranium back in 2018. At that time, however, market prices for uranium were not high enough to make the extraction operations economically viable, leading the company to suspend operations.<\/p>\n

The economic calculus surrounding uranium has shifted dramatically in recent years. With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and the massive projected demands being placed on the national electricity grid, both the Trump administration and Utah Governor Spencer Cox\u2019s Office of Energy Development have increasingly championed nuclear energy as a crucial solution for powering the country\u2019s future. Uranium serves as the primary fuel source for commercial nuclear power plants.<\/p>\n

Having his mining claims "locked up" inside the Bears Ears monument boundaries rendered them "useless," Kimmerle asserted in the 2023 lawsuit, a restriction he claimed cost his business up to $3 million in lost potential profits.<\/p>\n

Kimmerle initially attempted to file his new Bears Ears claims in July, shortly after Trump issued his proclamation slashing the monument\u2019s boundaries. However, the official proclamation did not legally open the lands to new mining claim filings until September 11\u2014the exact same day that San Juan County officially recorded both the Kimmerle and Schultz claims, according to documents and records obtained by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.<\/p>\n

The push for regional mining extends beyond small-scale prospectors. Records show that the CEO and chairman of Energy Fuels purchased thousands of shares of his own company’s stock just days before Trump announced the downsizing of Bears Ears. Energy Fuels operates the White Mesa Mill, which is located directly adjacent to the former Bears Ears monument boundary and remains the last conventional uranium processing facility operating in the United States.<\/p>\n

Historically, Utah was the third-most productive state in the country for uranium mining, according to historical data compiled by the Utah Geological Survey, with the vast majority of those valuable mineral deposits originating from the rugged terrain of the Colorado Plateau.<\/p>\n

Despite the renewed commercial interest and the push for domestic critical minerals, Bloch expressed skepticism that the region holds enough viable uranium deposits to justify the financial expense and ecological damage associated with industrial mining on lands excised from the monument.<\/p>\n

"It\u2019s not like people weren\u2019t poking around in the monument, locating claims, moving dirt, seeing what was there" in the decades before Bears Ears was ever designated as a national monument, as well as during the first Trump administration when its boundaries were initially reduced, Bloch said. "There were no production-level mines that were established."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It did not take long for prospectors to capitalize on newly opened public lands in southeast Utah. On September 11, the very first day that 1.2 million acres previously protected within the Bears Ears National Monument were made accessible, miners officially filed 16 claims. This rush came just two months after President Donald Trump signed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3105,1759,1438,825,3214,1437,2034,3215,1690,3211,3011,3216,3213,3212,1439],"class_list":["post-1951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bears","tag-claims","tag-climate-change","tag-conservation","tag-ears","tag-environment","tag-mining","tag-monument","tag-national","tag-prospectors","tag-rush","tag-shrinks","tag-soon","tag-stake","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tcjsj.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}