A stretch of the Green River popular among rafting enthusiasts and touted by the state's travel Web site for its scenic and peaceful qualities could now also be sought out by energy companies for exploration.
   The state Bureau of Land Management office has announced that a Feb. 21 oil and gas lease sale will include parcels in and around the Green and San Rafael rivers between Green River and Moab. Included are three parcels encompassing 3,700 acres along the Green River in Labyrinth Canyon, long a popular spot among river runners. The sale also takes in about 100,000 acres around the San Rafael River and in the San Rafael Desert, at least parts of which have been identified as potential wilderness areas.
   "This is a popular place to run the river," Steve Bloch, an attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said Wednesday. "It's a calm stretch of water, a place where people from all over the country - including a lot of families - go to get away from it all.
   "The state [travel Web site] invites people to Labyrinth Canyon because it looks the same today as it did when John Wesley Powell floated it," he added. "But it's not going to look that way when they start issuing permits to explore for oil and gas."
   Local river outfitters are also opposing the lease sale, arguing that it will not only spoil the solitude of the area, but harm their businesses.
   "We use the canyon corridor in the course of our regular business for canoeing, camping and hiking. The wilderness qualities of the corridor and the side canyons are essential to our business," Theresa Butler, co-owner of the Red River Canoe Co., said in a letter to the BLM protesting the lease sale. "Oil and gas development in these parcels would be in direct conflict with our business."
   State BLM officials cautioned on Wednesday that no final leasing determinations on whether to offer the leases will be made until next week.
   "There have been a couple of protests and we are looking at them," said Terry Catlin, leader of the agency's state oil and gas leasing team. "One of the issues seems to be that the Price Field Office initially said not to offer these three parcels, because they're not consistent with their land-use plan. But they later called it a mistake, and said there was no conflict with their preferred alternative. It's consistent with the existing plan."
   This isn't the first time the agency has put up controversial oil and gas lease sale parcels for bid.
   In the last several years, the BLM has offered leases in what are known as the "viewsheds" of Dinosaur National Monument, Hovenweep National Monument, Canyonlands National Park and the Parowan Gap petroglyphs - outside the boundaries, but within the view of visitors centers and other areas where people congregate to take in the scenery.
   The BLM, after further review, eventually withdrew most of the contentious parcels. It is unclear whether the agency will do so this time. But critics wonder why the BLM goes to the effort to list the leases in the first place, given the strong opposition they arouse.
   "How are these parcels even making it onto the list?" said Bloch. "It's such a Byzantine process to follow these lease sales. But for these outfitters and other groups, the BLM would no doubt sell these leases. They can sit down, and make the determination to pull them again, but in effect, they have already said this is appropriate."
    jbaird@sltrib.com