Cathy Church, Kanab, UT guide & hotelier — a Dispatches follow-up

“Things are out of control…(Trump is acting) totally selfish.”

In the summer of 2017 Cathy Church, who runs a guest lodge in Kanab, Utah and in former military vehicles drives visitors on scenic tours through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, spoke of her fears about President Donald Trump shrinking that designated landscape.

Those fears came true on Monday, Dec. 4 when Trump in Salt Lake City and ordered the 1.9 million acre national monument halved. That morning, Church sat in her living room, with a book of Kane County history on her coffee table trees she painted by hand on her walls.

“Now that it’s actually happening,” she said, and sighed, “it’s frustrating.”

As she had in the summer, she described the blackened, deathly look of nearby mountains that had been chopped open so their reserves of coal could be scooped out. Were such sights to come into the land that had once been preserved inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, she would find abominable. Since much of the land Trump segregated out of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument contains coal — a mineral whose natural black and grey stripes on the landscape Church finds beautiful — she is afraid.

“It would be a terrible, terrible shame,” she said, to harm that land.

Church said that Trump’s plan to cut Grand Staircase-Escalante down into three small national monuments means that those areas will become overcrowded, ruining the solace visitors once were able to find in the in-tact landscape. Because of how difficult it will be for Bureau of Land Management officers, with no prospects of additional resources, to supervise three far-flung units saturated with visitors, she worries about ancient petroglyphs being damaged, and artifacts looted.

“We’ve already seen it in a few places,” she said. “It’s like putting a red stripe across the Mona Lisa.”

In the summer she spoke of her fears of convoys of coal trucks careening through Kanab, hampering the quality of life for residents, and the quality of visits for tourists, a major economic resource for the town. To illustrate a story she had told before, she fetched a framed photo of herself with Robert Redford, taken in Zion National Park during the filming of the 1979 movie “The Electric Horseman.” Church had gone to see Redford as a fan, but joined him in his environmental activism to stop coal mining on the Kaiparowitz Plateau in the heart of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

“I was in agreement with him because I did not want coal mining trucks coming through town every 15 minutes, and the other option was sluceing and, no, you’re not gonna do that with our water,” she said. “We thought it could never be touched when Clinton did that (designate the national monument) but obviously it can, things are out of control.”

The 2017 tourist season was Church’s best yet. Of note, for the first time she can remember, she hosted more Americans than she did Germans, French and Australians. She doesn’t know to what to attribute this rise in domestic tourism. But it gratified her to introduce Americans to their land.

It’s really wonderful for people to see their country,” she said. “They were just totally awestruck by the area.”

There is one in particular whom she would like to show Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The president. She thinks if he actually saw it, he would find it too beautiful to decrease and desecrate.

As it is, she said, he is acting, “totally selfish.”