Comb Ridge parcel sold at auction
Utah's school trust lands office sold 391 acres on Comb Ridge to a private farming company this week for $500,000, putting a stretch of the Hole-in-the-Rock wagon route under private control.
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At a Salt Lake City auction on Wednesday, October 19, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration sold a 391-acre parcel on Comb Ridge, six miles west of Bluff, for a reported $500,000. The buyer was Lyman Family Farm Inc., a company with roots in Blanding. The Hole in the Rock Foundation, a heritage group that had nominated the parcel for sale and hoped to buy it, was outbid.
Earlier reports described the tract as a full section of 640 acres. The parcel that went under the hammer was smaller.
Why the state sells land
When Utah became a state in 1896, Congress granted it four sections in every township, scattered across the map like squares on a checkerboard, to support public schools and a handful of other institutions. The state still holds more than 3 million acres of these trust lands. Unlike federal public land, they are not managed for general public use. The trust lands administration has a legal duty to earn money for its beneficiaries, chiefly the permanent school fund, through leases, development and sales. A parcel that earns little from grazing can earn its value once by being sold.
That mandate is why scattered state sections sit inside landscapes otherwise managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and why some of them come up for auction.
What the parcel holds
The Comb Ridge parcel carries a stretch of the route Mormon settlers cut in 1879 and 1880 on their way to found Bluff, part of what is now called the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail. The foundation that nominated it had hoped to use it for youth treks retracing that journey.
Comb Ridge as a whole is rich in Ancestral Pueblo and Navajo archaeology.
The parcel sits inside the area the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition asked the president to designate as a national monument in 2015, and near lands addressed in Rep. Rob Bishop’s Public Lands Initiative bill. Neither proposal has been settled.
What private ownership changes
Most of Comb Ridge is federal land managed by the BLM’s Monticello Field Office, open to anyone who follows the rules. This parcel had been open to the public in practice as well. As private land it is open only with the owner’s permission.
Legal protection for the archaeology changes too. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act applies to federal and Indian land, not to private land, and in American law artifacts on private land generally belong to the landowner. On this parcel much depends on the owner’s own care. The foundation said afterwards that the buyer’s representatives had told it the land could still be used for educational hikes by young people.
The sale adds to a long argument in San Juan County over who should decide the future of public land, and whether state trust parcels inside places of national interest should be traded to the federal government rather than sold.