BLM Could Close 124 Miles of Trail Near Kanab — Here's What's Actually on the Table

If you've ever ridden the slickrock and sand country around Kanab, Utah, pay attention to this one. The BLM's Kanab Field Office just wrapped a public comment period on the Trail Canyon Travel Management Plan — a draft environmental assessment covering roughly 326,000 acres in Kane County — and one of the alternatives on the table would close about 124 miles of routes that riders can legally use today (UTV Guide).

Here's the shape of it. The plan looks at 469 miles of existing routes across 182,766 acres of BLM land and sorts each one into open, limited, or closed for motorized use. The BLM published four separate alternatives rather than a single preferred plan — they range from largely preserving the current network to the more restrictive option that would designate 141 miles as closed outright. Nothing has been picked yet, and the agency can also mix and match pieces from different alternatives when it writes the final decision (SXS Nation).

The comment window ran a standard 30 days, June 22 through July 22, with an in-person meeting at the Kanab Center on July 9. That period is now closed, which means the BLM is sitting on public input right now and working toward a decision — no published date yet for when that lands. If you submitted a comment, or know someone in the Kanab riding community who did, this is the point where you keep an eye on the Kanab Field Office's ePlanning page rather than assuming the loudest alternative wins by default.

Worth knowing too: Trail Canyon isn't an isolated case. It's one of three travel-management plans the BLM is running in Utah right now, alongside the Dinosaur North plan near Vernal (about 344,822 acres in Uintah and Daggett counties) and a Dolores River-area plan out of the Moab Field Office — more than 816,000 acres of Utah public land getting route-by-route review at the same time (BLM.gov). Whatever precedent Kanab sets on how these plans get decided is going to matter for the other two.

None of this happens overnight, and it's not the kind of story where the sky is falling by next weekend — existing designations stay in effect until a final decision is signed. But travel-management plans are exactly how a riding area quietly loses a third of its network: not through a headline-grabbing shutdown, but through a wonky-sounding EA that most riders never hear about until the trail they've ridden for a decade shows up marked closed on the new map. The plans that survive these reviews tend to be the ones with a documented paper trail — usage data, maintained signage, a community that shows up to comment — not just vibes about how popular a trail is.

That's the whole reason we built ride-tracking and hazard reporting into BraapTrax the way we did. Every logged ride on a Kanab-area trail is a data point that this route gets used and by whom. Every hazard flag is proof someone's out there maintaining awareness of conditions, not just tearing through unchecked. If Kanab-area routes end up on your list this season, log the rides — that history is worth more than an opinion when the next comment period opens on Dinosaur North or the Dolores River plan.

Sources: UTV Guide, SXS Nation, BLM.gov.