Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante lost 90% of their acreage. Your trip lost nothing.

A number is going around. Ninety percent.

Depending on where you heard it, it means one of two things. Either the President cut two national monuments by ninety percent, or he cut the National Park Service budget by ninety percent. One of those is accurate. The other is off by a factor of about forty.

This is a road trip site, so the question I care about is a narrow one: if you were planning to drive southern Utah, does any of this change your trip? I went and read the proclamations. Here is the report.

What did Trump actually sign?

On Monday, July 13, 2026, President Trump signed two presidential proclamations under the Antiquities Act. One modifies Bears Ears National Monument. One modifies Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Both are in Utah.

They are proclamations, not executive orders. A fair number of outlets have called them executive orders. It is a small distinction, but boundary changes under the Antiquities Act are made by proclamation, and if you go looking for an executive order you will not find one.

They were published in the Federal Register on July 17, 2026 — Bears Ears as Proclamation 11043 and Grand Staircase-Escalante as Proclamation 11044. If you see a story citing "Proclamation 9558," set it aside — that is Obama's 2016 proclamation establishing Bears Ears, cited inside the new order as a prior instrument. It is not the order itself.

Is the 90% cut real? Yes — but it's acreage

Here is what the two proclamations do:

• Bears Ears — from approximately 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,096 acres. A 91.1% reduction. What remains is two units: Shash Jáa (~106,816 acres) and Indian Creek (~14,279 acres).
• Grand Staircase-Escalante — from approximately 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,541 acres. A 90.3% reduction. What remains is two units: the Canyons of the Escalante Unit and the Kaiparowits Horizon Unit.

Combined, the two go from about 3.23 million acres to about 302,600 acres. Roughly 2.93 million acres leave monument status. For scale, the pre-cut footprint was close to the size of Connecticut.

So the ninety percent figure holds. If anything, it rounds down.

I want to be plain about the sourcing, because this is the part people will argue over. These numbers are not from a press release I decided to trust. They are in the proclamation text and the White House fact sheet. They are also confirmed, independently, by the organizations preparing to sue over them — Earthjustice puts Bears Ears at 8.9% of its prior size and Grand Staircase at 9.7%, which is the same arithmetic from the other direction. Nobody disputes the acreage. The dispute is about the law.

Was the national parks budget cut by 90%? No

The other ninety percent story says the National Park Service budget was cut by ninety percent. It was not.

Congress enacted the FY2026 budget on January 23, 2026, in P.L. 119-74:

• National Park Service — $3.267 billion. That is 2% below FY2025.
• Bureau of Land Management — $1.378 billion. Also 2% below FY2025.

Both agencies took a two percent trim. Not ninety. A ninety percent cut would have left BLM at roughly $141 million; the real figure is off from that by about thirty-eight times.

Where the number probably came from: the administration requested much deeper cuts — 37% for the Park Service, about 36% for BLM. Congress rejected them and funded both well above the request. Separately, the administration proposed a roughly 93% cut to one small Park Service account called National Recreation and Preservation. That account is about 2.8% of the NPS budget, and Congress ended up funding it at $91.6 million, a 2% increase.

So there is a real ninety-something in the budget story. It is a proposal that did not pass, and it applies to a sliver.

Are these national parks? No — and that matters

This is the part that undoes the budget framing completely.

Neither Bears Ears nor Grand Staircase-Escalante is a National Park Service unit. Grand Staircase-Escalante is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Bears Ears is managed jointly by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service. The Park Service does not administer either one.

Its budget and these boundaries are unrelated things. Anyone telling you the national parks were cut by ninety percent is wrong twice — wrong about the number, and wrong about the agency.

What the monuments looked like on July 12

Below are the two monuments as they stood the day before the signing, drawn from the Bureau of Land Management's own boundary data. Switch to terrain or satellite to see what the acreage actually covers.

The official map is out — the data to plot it isn't

This is the part almost nobody is saying out loud, and it is the reason the map above still shows the old lines instead of the new ones.

When they were signed, each proclamation defined its monument by reference to "the accompanying map, which is attached to and forms a part of this proclamation" — and that map was not posted with the text. That changed on July 17, when the Federal Register published both proclamations in full, official numbers (11043 and 11044) and attached boundary maps included.

But the map is a static image, not data. As of July 27, BLM's public boundary service — the same one the map above is drawn from — still serves the old, pre-cut outlines, with nothing in it carrying the new unit names or acreages. So the official picture of the new lines now exists; the official coordinates a mapmaker can plot do not, yet. Here is that picture:

Which leaves the honest state of things about where it was. We know precisely how much came out: 1,238,904 acres from Bears Ears and roughly 1.69 million from Grand Staircase-Escalante. For exactly which acres, the proclamation maps above are now the authoritative reference — but anyone turning them into a precise digital "after" boundary today is tracing them by eye. It may well turn out close. Treat it as an estimate, particularly if you are working out whether a specific canyon you wanted to see is in or out. We will redraw the map on this page the moment BLM publishes the new boundary data.

Which places landed outside the lines?

In the two weeks since the maps published, the newsrooms that cover this country have been tracing them against the places people actually drive to — the Salt Lake Tribune and KSL both ran annotated maps, and the climbing press did the same for Indian Creek. Tracings, remember, not coordinates. But they agree with each other, and until BLM publishes data they are the best available answer to the question a trip actually turns on: is the thing I wanted to see still inside a monument?

Still inside, per those tracings: the Bears Ears buttes themselves, House on Fire ruin in Mule Canyon, the Sand Island petroglyphs, and — right off Byway 12 — Lower Calf Creek Falls. The retained Indian Creek unit keeps the Creek's core corridor, Supercrack Buttress included.

Now outside: Grosvenor Arch, Devils Garden and Metate Arch on Hole-in-the-Rock Road, Chimney Rock, the Paria River corridor, and — the one that keeps striking me — portions of the Grand Staircase itself, no longer inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On the Bears Ears side: Butler Wash, both Six-Shooter peaks, Valley of the Gods, and by Climbing magazine's count roughly 80% of Indian Creek's climbing — about 1,200 routes out of some 1,500.

Read that list the way this whole article asks you to. Outside the line does not mean closed, gated, or gone. Every one of those places is still federal public land, still open, still reached by the same roads. What changes outside the line is what can happen there — mining claims and mineral leasing, starting around September 11 — and even then, only where someone actually stakes one. If Devils Garden is on your list, go see Devils Garden.

Is anything closed? Both monuments are open

Nothing that I can find. And I want to be careful about how I say that.

There are no reported closures. No visitor centers shutting, no campgrounds closing, no reduced hours, no staffing cuts, no road changes. I went looking and they are not in the record. Two weeks in, that is still true — the only crews reported at work out there have been changing signs, which is its own story and gets its own section below.

But you should know what kind of statement that is. It is an argument from absence. No primary source addresses visitor operations either way — not the proclamations, not the fact sheet, not the agencies. The absence of bad news is not a guarantee. It is just the absence of bad news.

What I can tell you with confidence is what the proclamations actually do. They move a boundary. The land does not stop being federal public land. It leaves monument status and reverts to ordinary BLM and Forest Service multiple-use management. Nobody is putting up a fence. The roads that crossed that country on Sunday cross it now.

The first visible change was the signs

For the first week and a half, "nothing changed on the ground" held literally — the proclamations moved lines on paper and the country looked exactly as it had on Sunday. Then, around July 22, Bureau of Land Management crews removed the seals of five tribal nations from Bears Ears' roadside signs and began relocating boundary signs to match the new lines.

The seals — Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah & Ouray Reservation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni — went up in 2022 under a cooperative agreement that made Bears Ears the first national monument in the country formally co-managed with tribal nations, through a body called the Bears Ears Commission. This is a piece of the story I underweighted in the first version of this article: the July 13 proclamation didn't just move the Bears Ears boundary, it terminated that commission. BLM's stated reason for taking the seals down is exactly that — the commission the seals represented no longer exists.

The five tribes say the Interior Department had committed in writing, in 2025, to consult the commission before any boundary decision, and that no consultation happened. Their joint statement, issued the day after the signing, reads in part: "No political decision can sever our connection to this place, erase our histories, or diminish our responsibility to care for it."

Does any of this change a trip? No. A seal on a sign closes nothing, and the roads and ruins are where they were. But if the measure of this article is "what actually changed," the honest ledger now has three entries, not one: the boundaries, the commission, and the signs.

What happens on September 11, 2026?

There is a detail in the proclamations that most of the coverage has run straight past.

The boundary change took effect on signing. The land reopening did not. The excised acreage does not open to mineral leasing, geothermal leasing, or mining entry until 9:00 a.m. Eastern on the date sixty days after signing — approximately September 11, 2026.

So the reporting about three million acres opening to mining immediately is wrong for about two more months. If seeing that country before anything can begin matters to you, there is a window, and it has a date on it.

Is Scenic Byway 12 affected? No

We have a route that goes straight through this. Epic Trip #11, The Painted Mile — Scenic Byway 12 from Torrey down to Bryce Canyon City, 116 miles. Grand Staircase-Escalante is one of its signature stops.

It runs as it always has. Byway 12 is a state highway, a monument boundary does not close a state highway, and nothing in either proclamation touches the road. Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon are national parks on either end of it and are not affected by any of this.

If that drive was on your list, leave it there. If anything, the shoulder season ahead is the good time to go — see our notes on building a trip around a park for the timing.

Where to follow this from here

I wrote this the day after the signing; it gets a fresh pass weekly, and the change log at the bottom records each one. Between passes, three things can move faster than we do:

• The first lawsuit. As of July 27 — two full weeks after signing — still none filed, which has run longer than I expected. Earthjustice says it will file in the coming weeks; the Native American Rights Fund, representing three of the five tribes, has committed to sue; SUWA and the Center for Biological Diversity have said the same. And the 2017 cases were closed rather than dismissed with prejudice, so reopening one of those is also on the table.
• The boundary data. The Federal Register published both proclamations with their official maps on July 17, but the machine-readable boundaries still haven't followed — we re-check BLM's service weekly (last: July 27). The day that data lands, the map on this page gets redrawn.
• September 11. The one date in the proclamations. Nothing about the removed land's status changes until then.

None of those is a reason to change a trip. They are reasons not to treat any one week's version of this article as the last word. If you want the current state of things rather than our latest pass at it, here is where we are watching:

• BLM Utah — the agency that actually manages both monuments. It is also where road and campground conditions live, which is worth a look before any trip out into that country, news or no news.
• The Federal Register — the proclamations and their official maps, once published.

Has this happened before? Yes — in 2017

One last thing, offered as history rather than argument.

In December 2017 these same two monuments were cut by proclamation — Bears Ears by about 85%, Grand Staircase by about 47%. In October 2021 President Biden restored both. The 2026 cuts are the deeper of the two rounds.

Every lawsuit against the 2017 reductions was dismissed as moot after the 2021 restoration, before any court reached the merits. Which means no court has ever ruled on the question underneath all of this: whether a president who can create a monument can also shrink one. The Antiquities Act of 1906 says a president may declare monuments, and directs that they be confined to the smallest area compatible with caring for the objects protected. It says nothing explicit about undoing one.

The pattern is now repeating from the other direction, and the timing borders on comic. On June 23 — twenty days before these proclamations — the Tenth Circuit revived Utah's long-running lawsuit arguing the restored monuments were unlawfully large. Then the map changed underneath it, and that case is now reported to be likely moot for the same reason the 2017 cases died: the thing being litigated stopped existing mid-suit. A decade of litigation over these two monuments, and every case so far has been killed by a boundary change before any court could reach the question.

That question is still open. It may finally get an answer this time.