Bears Ears National Monument
Credit: Bureau of Land Management

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s office has been slowly trickling out details on the future of the Bears Ears National Monument. Central and Eastern Utah Director Ron Dean, who works underneath Hatch, told a commission in a meeting Tuesday he expects the monument’s 1.35 million acres to shrink to 100,000 to 300,000 acres.

That’s nearly 90 percent of it gone, at worst, and about only 30 percent of it to stay, at best. However, this is exactly what the state envisioned when it demanded a scale back.

Bears Ears isn’t the only Utah monument on the chopping block, though. So is the Grand Staircase-Escalante, the largest national monument in the United States, with 1.9 million acres under its belt. That title would no longer be true if it were reduced to anywhere between 700,000 and 1.2 million acres, as Dean indicated Tuesday.

Dean noted his intel could be wrong, but if it were, “my rumors are bad rumors,” he said,