Steve Simpson, Twin Rocks Trading Post and Cafe co-owner, Bluff Utah
“We all knew what was coming, Monday was just the last chapter, or the first chapter.”
Steve Simpson, co-owner of the Twin Rocks Trading Post and Cafe, which proudly advertises itself as the gateway to the Bears Ears, had long advocated for the national monument.
He was just out of the hospital with pneumonia on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, when President Donald Trump issued his proclamation dismantling the 11-month-old national monument.
“It’s pretty discouraging, it’s pretty upsetting,” Simpson said two days later, back inside his cafe, dressed in the yellow hoodie of the high school wrestling team he coaches. “There’s something wrong with the man.”
However, Simpson is hopeful that the legal challenges against Trump’s proclamation will prevail, and the president’s entire effort will go down as a waste of time and money.
“I think he’s on a fool’s errand, all he’s buying is years of litigation,” Simpson said. “We all knew what was coming, Monday was just the last chapter — or the first chapter.”
Simpson said he had assumed cuts to Bears Ears National Monument were coming when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke met briefly with him and a few other supporters during his review tour of the landscape earlier in 2017. As Zinke suggested removing parcels of the national monument, Simpson thought his rationales seemed arbitrary and “ludicrous.”
“I think his understanding of the landscape was extremely limited and extremely odd,” Simpson said. “Anyone who has any background in this land knows how much looting has gone on.”
Simpson said the inadequacy of the “local control” Zinke touts was proven by the extensive looting that happened in Bears Ears before it was even designated a national monument. Simpson believes that because this point failed to make an impression on Zinke, it would have no different effect if presented to his boss, Trump.
“Based on our meeting with Secretary Zinke I don’t feel that I have anything that would make any difference to” Trump, Simpson said. “I really don’t have anything to say to him.”
He added that the Trump administration’s “bottom line seems to be, ‘We want to exploit this land now and we don’t really care what happens in the future.’”
As Trump’s effect on public lands mushrooms, and while he feeds on energy from fracturing relationships between neighbors in the towns that border them, Simpson said he refuses to succumb to the rancor. As a San Juan County native, and father of three, he said he will not stop respecting or caring for his neighbors.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is people who are most opposed still come here and eat and we talk and we joke.” he said. “These are big issues, but at base the relationships are the most important.”
