Show Your Love for Bears Ears This Valentine’s Day

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Heather Eastman by Heather Herold, Native America Associate

Here at the Trust, we’re smitten with the new Bears Ears National Monument. And instead of being secret admirers this Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing our love for its spectacular rock art, innumerable archaeological and cultural sites, striking geologic features, cathedral-like caves, expansive canyons and mesas, and diverse ecosystems. 

We’ve seen deep and abiding support across the country for Bears Ears since its official monument designation. Here, we highlight some recent adoration of Bears Ears:


For Kevin Jones, Utah archaeologist and writer, Bears Ears is a gift to the future. “We now have the will, in the form of a special designation, to preserve this legacy for generations and generations to come. We can choose to leave for those to come a land cared for and lovingly tended, a land that they can revere and take pleasure in and pass along,” said Jones in a January Daily Herald op-ed. 

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. … This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

— Terry Tempest Williams

We love everything about the Bears Ears landscape, from its red canyons and mesas stretching across the skyline to the expansive, verdant meadows near the buttes. As Mary Benally describes in a recent Salt Lake Tribune article: “The rain, the snow, the wind — all those have beauty. That was the teaching I heard my elders say.… If you’re aware of those, and if you can observe nature very closely, there is so much beauty in everything on earth that has been created for us. If you can create that beauty, that gives you health — mentally, physically, emotionally and in every way.” 

This January, hundreds of monument supporters, native and non-native alike, gathered at the Oljato chapter house in Monument Valley to celebrate the new monument, share a meal, and offer words of encouragement and gratitude. Alfred Lomahquahu, Vice Chairman of the Hopi Tribe and Co-Chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition told the crowd, “Your strength becomes our strength. Your blessings become our blessings. We’re doing this for all the people who realize this land holds our being. It holds who we are.” Bears Ears is a monument for and by native people, but it is also a testament to our country’s love of public lands. Protection of these public lands is an American ethic.

Love is a powerful tool, and maybe, just maybe, before the last little town is corrupted and the last of the unroaded and undeveloped wildness is given over to dreams of profit, maybe it will be love, finally, love for the land for its own sake and for what it holds of beauty and joy and spiritual redemption that will make [wilderness] not a battlefield but a revelation.

— T. H. Watkins

Despite the outpouring of positivity we saw in January around Bears Ears, the monument is facing its greatest challenges yet. Bears Ears and the Antiquities Act are in danger of potential congressional and executive branch actions that could shrink the boundaries or rescind the monument entirely. 

But this Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating the most beautiful part of Bears Ears National Monument — its intersection between people from all walks of life, united in a common ethos of respect and gratitude for this landscape.

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Tim Peterson

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