Nine Mile Canyon to be Nominated for National Register Listing 

Contact:  Byron Loosle, (801) 539-4276

Salt Lake City—October 6, 2008—The Bureau of Land Management Utah in cooperation with Utah Division of State History, State Historic Preservation Office intend to nominate the significant cultural resources sites within Nine Mile Canyon to the National Register of Historic Places.

Nine Mile Canyon, in eastern Utah, is perhaps best-known for its thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs.  Listing in the National Register would further acknowledge these unique and irreplaceable cultural resources.  The area is also recognized as home to the remains of Native American granaries and villages as well as numerous historic structures.  Established by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Register of Historic Places is the U.S. government’s official list of historic districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation.

BLM Utah, with the support of the State Historic Preservation Office, is nominating Nine Mile to the register as a multiple property listing, which groups together related sites under a common theme.  A multiple-property nomination is the most appropriate nomination method because it lists eligible sites that contribute to one of the listed themes.  Additional themes and newly recorded sites can easily be added in the future. 

“Working in partnership with the state, we came up with the best approach to recognizing the significance of Nine Mile Canyon’s cultural resources,” said Selma Sierra, BLM Utah State Director.

“Multiple-property listings are more inclusive of important sites and listed sites are not artificially encumbered by a hard boundary line,” she said.  “One of the long term benefits of a multiple-property listing is recognizing new sites as they are found,” Sierra concluded.

Every year, approximately 30,000 properties are added to the register.  BLM Utah and the State Historic Preservation Office have worked together to see that nine Mile Canyon receives the recognition and honor National Register listing provides.

Although register listing is a significant honor, it does not carry with it additional resource protections.  To further protect these resources, Nine Mile Canyon would be managed as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) under the BLM Utah Price field office Proposed Resource Management Plan.  In Nine Mile Canyon, oil and gas leasing would be subject to major constraints—one of which is No Surface Occupancy.  This means that none of the 26,200 acres of BLM-administered, federal land located in the Nine Mile Canyon ACEC can be surface occupied with oil and gas pumps, drilling rigs or tank batteries.

BLM Utah acknowledges the significance of Nine Mile Canyon’s cultural resources and continues to work to preserve those resources as part of its multiple use mandate, while also facilitating environmentally responsible energy development.

For more information, please contact Byron Loosle at (801) 539-4276.