How One Utah Lawmaker's Multi-Year Campaign to Preserve Hunting Country Cut the Ute Tribe Out of Its Own Ancestral Land
In the northeastern corner of Utah, the Book Cliffs rise out of the high desert in a wall of broken sandstone and forested ridgeline that stretches, almost unbroken, for 250 miles into Colorado. The place is genuinely wild — roadless, remote, and almost impossible to reach except on horseback. It holds elk that run big even by Utah standards, mule deer, black bear, and one of the last wild, unfenced bison herds left in the continental United States. A blue-ribbon cutthroat trout fishery runs cold and clear through its drainage. The Book Cliffs Roadless Area is a roughly 50,000-acre stretch of rugged mountain country in the state's northeastern corner that, save for a few grazing permits, remains largely untouched by industry — and it holds oil.
For years, multiple parties have wanted a piece of it — or all of it. Oil companies eyed the petroleum beneath the surface. Hunters and anglers built a near-religious attachment to the elk and trout that inhabit it. And the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, whose ancestral territory spans much of this part of Utah, quietly pursued a legal right to buy back parcels of land that were, by any historical reckoning, taken from their people generations ago. What happened next — how those interests collided, who won, and who got cut out — reveals a great deal about the hidden mechanics of Western land politics, the uneasy overlap between hunting culture and tribal sovereignty, and the lengths to which one determined state legislator would go to lock up hunting access for future generations.
The Land at Stake: Trust Lands, School Funds, and the Public Access Problem
Before any of the political maneuvering can be understood, it helps to know what "state trust land" actually means in the American West. When Utah entered the Union, the federal government granted it land to manage in trust — not as public land open to everyone, but as an asset whose revenues were supposed to fund public schools and other state institutions. SITLA manages 7.8 million acres of trust land in the state to generate income largely for public schools, and since the group's inception in 1994, it has been tasked with managing, developing, or selling its land to maximize benefits for their beneficiaries.
That mandate creates a structural tension that has plagued Utah's outdoor recreation community for decades. State trust lands are owned by public entities, but they are not "public" the way federal lands are. Most states do not have to manage them for multiple uses, so there is no guarantee of public access for hunting, hiking, and camping — instead, these lands are managed to make money, traditionally by leasing them for grazing, mining, timber, or energy development, and sometimes the land is sold outright. When trust lands go on the open market, the result can be brutal for hunters. If the Department of Natural Resources could not match market rates, SITLA seemed ready to lease exclusive access to beloved places like the Book Cliffs to wealthy hunters — with access to prime areas scooped up mainly by customers willing to pay thousands of dollars for a single hunt, with only a handful of permits issued through a public lottery.
The Book Cliffs had already come dangerously close to that fate. In 2013, the trust lands board voted to lease the Book Cliffs Roadless Area for petroleum development. The prospect of drilling the remote wilderness drew such a backlash from hunters and anglers that then-Gov. Gary Herbert stepped in to suspend the lease. Snider, then serving as the state coordinator for Trout Unlimited, was among the most prominent opponents.
Casey Snider: The Quiet Architect of a Hunter-First Agenda
The man most responsible for what ultimately happened to the Book Cliffs is a 40-year-old Republican state representative from the small town of Paradise, Utah. Casey Snider has pushed a hunter-first agenda since joining the Utah Legislature in 2019, spearheading the campaign to establish a state constitutional right to hunt and fish the following year. He's not your typical Utah Republican when it comes to land — while much of his party has spent years demanding that the federal government hand over its public landholdings to state control, Snider represents a different wing of conservative thinking, one rooted not in extractive industry but in something closer to a Teddy Roosevelt-style sporting ethic.
In a state where the Republican Party has declared war on federal public-land ownership — a policy that critics see as a Trojan horse for privatization — Snider still sees public land as a democratic inheritance that keeps the hunting tradition alive by preserving habitat for dwindling big game populations and giving hunters a place to pursue them. That philosophy puts him at odds with the loudest voices in his own caucus, but it has made him enormously effective on a different front: quietly engineering a legal architecture that directs state trust lands into wildlife management rather than private hands or industrial development.
Not all of Snider's conservation-minded legislation has gone smoothly. He authored a law that required people to buy a state hunting or fishing license in order to recreate on Wildlife Management Areas, which drew sharp backlash and an eventual revision after game wardens threatened to ticket confused birders and trail runners. The blowback from hikers and mountain bikers forced a legislative fix, with the requirement eventually replaced by a short educational video accessed via QR code at trailheads. But the episode was a minor speed bump in a much larger campaign.
The HB262 Maneuver
The core of Snider's strategy centered on a piece of legislation known as House Bill 262, which he sponsored in 2024. HB262 created a streamlined process allowing the Trust Lands Administration to transfer large, contiguous land blocks directly to the Utah Department of Natural Resources — as long as the department pays fair market value — removing a key bureaucratic barrier that had previously made purchases like this difficult. On its face, the bill looked like a sensible efficiency measure. Under the hood, it was something far more targeted.
HB262 gives the Utah Department of Natural Resources preferential treatment during the sale of large blocks of land that is supposed to be managed to maximize revenue for Utah public education — and, in some cases, land that is part of the Ute Tribe's ancestral homelands. The bill could cut out potential private buyers, such as the Ute Tribe, who were willing to pay more for the land than state agencies. Critics said this would result in less revenue for Utah schools since the state would not have to compete to match higher bids.
The Ute Tribe understood the implications immediately. The Ute Tribe has sued the state over the type of sale outlined in the bill, with the tribe saying that giving preference to state entities in these sales to preserve public access for hunting and fishing is simply an excuse not to sell them the land.
The Fee Hike Nobody Saw Coming
Legislation alone was not enough. Snider also needed money — enough of it to make a serious bid for tens of thousands of acres of trust land at fair market value. The solution he and his allies engineered was as clever as it was controversial. In March 2025, news trickled out through internet forums that the Utah Legislature might double the price of non-resident hunting permits — which would have made Utah one of the most expensive states for nonresidents to hunt big game, fueling hunters' frustration as their sport evolves from a working-class birthright to a luxury for the rich.
Utah's Department of Wildlife Resources normally raises permit fees through a lengthy process that requires multiple public meetings around the state. This time, the state's Republican-dominated Legislature buried the changes over 100 pages deep in an agency-funding bill. The hunter-backed wildlife groups that would normally have loudly championed or opposed such a measure said nothing publicly. The DWR did not issue a public statement about the changes until after Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill into law.
Behind the scenes, state Rep. Casey Snider was working with wildlife agency leaders to raise money to purchase tens of thousands of game-rich acres from a separate state agency. The fee hike was the funding mechanism. Out-of-state hunters paid roughly $7 million into the state's land-buying fund last year, according to the DWR, and wildlife officials still have the authority to raise fees for those permits by about another 45 percent before hitting the ceiling legislators imposed.
The Legislature backed the land-buying effort with serious money beyond just permit revenues. During the 2025 session, the Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environmental Quality Appropriations Subcommittee approved a $50 million one-time transfer from the Public Education Economic Stabilization Account, plus $12 million ongoing from the Wildlife Resources Restricted Account, specifically to purchase Trust Lands parcels for the Department of Natural Resources. The Book Cliffs property was among the first identified.
The $30 Million Deal That Shut Out the Tribe
In June 2026, the Trust Lands Administration board convened to consider what had quietly become one of the most consequential land transactions in Utah history. The Trust Land Administration's board of trustees authorized a no-bid sale of the most coveted block of land — a 50,000-acre roadless portion of the Book Cliffs — to the DWR, despite the fact that the tribe had challenged the legislation authorizing the sale in court.
SITLA agreed to sell approximately 50,600 acres of land it manages in northern Grand County to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. The price came in at just under $30 million. Though the DWR wants the land to conserve it for wildlife instead of exploiting it for oil and gas, the Trust Lands Administration will retain the mineral rights, and the wildlife agency plans to buy up more parcels in the near future.
For hunters, the outcome looked like a clear victory. The new acreage joins the existing 6,929-acre Little Creek Wildlife Management Area, and the combined holding will be renamed the Book Cliffs Roadless Wildlife Management Area. The area already draws more than 6,000 hunters a year. Wildlife officials pointed to the ecological rationale. "This property provides important habitat for deer, elk, bison, black bear, Colorado River cutthroat trout and many other wildlife species, and it was crucial to ensure this area remains available for wildlife and the public," said DWR Deputy Director Mike Canning.
Snider was ebullient. "Utah has this reputation for disposal or that we don't like public lands," he said. "This real example disputes that narrative. At the same time, you see us bringing very disparate interests together to solve what has been historically a very tricky problem to solve. And right now, because of this deal, we're proving that conservation and development and financial return and preservation can all exist." He also pitched the deal as a financial win for schools. SITLA Executive Director Michelle McConkie said, "Our analysis shows that selling this property at fair market value and investing the proceeds in the Permanent State School Fund will generate substantially greater returns for Utah schools than continued ownership."
What the Ute Tribe Lost
To the Ute Indian Tribe, the transaction looked entirely different. The Book Cliffs and the surrounding Uinta Basin country are not just scenic hunting ground — they represent the core of the tribe's ancestral territory, land that was systematically reduced through treaty abrogation and federal policy across more than a century. The tribe had been trying to purchase Tabby Mountain, a separate 28,500-acre trust-land block in eastern Utah, and had been watching the Book Cliffs situation closely, viewing both parcels as legitimate targets for LandBack-style reacquisition. Tabby Mountain is a 28,500-acre block in eastern Utah owned by the Trust Lands Administration, and the land has been at the center of a controversy involving hunting interests, school trust principles, and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.
In November 2025, the Ute Tribe re-filed its Tabby Mountain lawsuit against the state of Utah. The new complaint added a few defendants, including Snider and his former colleague Joel Ferry — by then the Department of Natural Resources Director — accusing them of illegally colluding to keep the tribe from buying the Book Cliffs Mountains Roadless Area.
Snider denied the substance of those allegations. He told the Utah News Dispatch that the law does not apply to Tabby Mountain and was inspired by a prior sale for a tract in his district known as Cinnamon Creek, and that the tribe's assertion was "just categorically false." State officials also pushed back on the framing. In a joint statement, they said "the narrative being presented is simply inaccurate," adding, "We firmly believe all Utahns should continue to have access to enjoy Tabby Mountain and all our state has to offer."
But critics of HB262 had anticipated this exact outcome long before the lawsuit was filed. As one trust land advisory committee member noted, "For 60 years, the story with Tabby Mountain and the Book Cliffs has been no money for schools, and the land has been used for hunting primarily that the state gets big time money from." Meanwhile, in 2017, SITLA and DNR had agreed to a deal that gives hunters access to state trust lands in exchange for $1.8 million annually. The Ute Tribe, by contrast, was prepared to bid at or above market value for parcels that would have come out of trust land management and into tribal sovereignty — a categorically different outcome for the land's future.
LandBack in Context: A Movement Meeting Real Walls
The Ute Tribe's blocked bid sits within a much broader national conversation about what it actually means to return land to Indigenous peoples. The LandBack movement has achieved genuine wins in recent years. Between 2003 and 2023, according to one study, tribes recovered about 420,000 acres in 100 cases involving over 70 federally recognized tribes. The federal government's Land Buy-Back Program, a decade-long effort tied to the 2010 Claims Resolution Act, consolidated and restored nearly 3 million acres in 15 states to Tribal trust ownership, with $1.69 billion paid to more than 123,000 interested individuals.
High-profile wins have come from California to Wisconsin. In the largest single land-back deal in California history, the Yurok Tribe reclaimed 73 square miles of ancestral territory on the eastern side of the lower Klamath River in June 2025. In the Midwest, the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa completed one of the largest tribally initiated land recoveries in American history without requiring an act of Congress. The agreement returned 28,089 acres to tribal control, but it required a twisting, years-long effort to seal the deal.
Yet even as wins accumulate, the challenges facing tribes pursuing LandBack are not unique to any single case — even when federal policies support Indigenous rights, tribes continue to face significant resistance. In Alaska, state government sued the Interior Department over a tribal land-into-trust application. The land-into-trust process offers tribes significant benefits, expanding both sovereignty and access to resources, with trust status exempting lands from state taxation and qualifying Native nations for Bureau of Indian Affairs programs in forestry, natural resources, and energy services. Those are precisely the kinds of benefits that competing state interests — whether driven by school trust revenue mandates or hunting access politics — work against.
In Utah, the structural obstacle is the state trust land system itself. The establishment of land-grant universities in the United States was another opportunity to extract land from Native Americans — in 1862, the Morrill Act created state educational institutions with over 10 million acres taken from 250 tribes. Western states were given their school trust selections in the same era and from similar circumstances. Like most western states, Utah was given trust lands by the federal government when it became a state, with the lands designated to support public institutions, namely public schools and universities. The irony is acute: land originally extracted from tribes now serves as a legal barrier to those same tribes buying it back.
The Broader Utah Land War: Where Hunters Fit In
The Book Cliffs deal plays out against a political backdrop that is among the most contested in the American West when it comes to public lands. For decades, state and local officials have been pushing to unwind federal stewardship throughout Utah, arguing that Washington has failed to prioritize their communities and stifled mining and drilling. Despite overwhelming bipartisan support for protection of public lands among Utah voters, no other state in the union has been as zealous in its quest for control over the federal estate as Utah, especially since it passed a law in 2012 demanding the federal government turn over its landholdings.
That land transfer push — championed by figures like Sen. Mike Lee, who sought to include massive public land sales in federal reconciliation legislation — drew opposition from not only hunting and fishing groups worried about limiting access for users, but also from Lee's Republican colleagues from other Western states where public lands are economic engines as well as a point of pride.
Snider's approach is distinct from the Lee wing of Utah Republicanism precisely because it is not about transferring public lands to private or extractive interests. It is about using the state's existing land bureaucracy — and its revenue-maximization mandate — as a vehicle for wildlife conservation at public expense. In that sense, he has more in common with the philosophy of groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers than with the standard Utah Republican land agenda. When folks out West feel about public lands, the general public feels very differently than decision-makers — public land approval ratings have been fixed above 70 percent for years. Snider's political genius has been tapping that popular support while threading it through a state legislative process largely controlled by people who are openly hostile to any expansion of public land protection.
The School Fund Argument: Who Really Benefits?
One of the more complicated dimensions of the entire saga involves the school trust beneficiaries — Utah's public school children — who are, at least in theory, the reason SITLA exists in the first place. Snider and state officials framed the Book Cliffs deal as a win for schools: by selling the land at fair market value and investing the proceeds, SITLA could generate better long-term returns than hanging onto a remote, rugged parcel that generates modest grazing revenue. "They get the full value of the land, they maximize the return, and at the same time, we ensure that in perpetuity, the public will be able to use these areas," Snider told the Deseret News.
Critics pointed out a different arithmetic. One trust land advisory committee member argued that for 60 years, the story with Tabby Mountain and the Book Cliffs had been no money for schools, while the land was used primarily for hunting — a big moneymaker, but not for the school children whom the land was meant to benefit. And the no-bid structure of the sale, authorized under HB262, meant that the state was effectively setting its own price without competitive pressure from outside bidders. The Ute Tribe, which had demonstrated a willingness to pay market rates for Tabby Mountain, would almost certainly have pushed the bidding higher on the Book Cliffs had it been allowed to participate.
As Tim Brass, director for state policies for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, put it bluntly: "They go out to the highest bidder." Utah's interagency agreements have historically prevented the state from privatizing hunting access. The new law essentially changed the rules of the auction before the auction could happen.
What It Means Going Forward
The Book Cliffs acquisition is now a done deal, and for the 6,000-plus hunters who pursue elk and mule deer in that roadless country every year, it is unambiguously good news. Public recreation on SITLA lands is not guaranteed since the agency's primary goal is revenue generation — but switching ownership to DWR makes public recreation access a primary, permanent objective. That matters enormously in a state where the alternative — exclusive leases to wealthy outfitters — has been a live threat for more than a decade.
The Ute Tribe's lawsuit, however, has not been dropped. The legal challenge to HB262 continues, with the tribe arguing that the legislation was designed specifically to disadvantage them in the land market. Over the years he has spent charting a legislative path to buy the Book Cliffs, Snider has emphasized his land conservation ethos while generally sidestepping his long-simmering tensions with the Ute Tribe — much less acknowledging that he and his allies in the Legislature purposely blocked them from bidding on trust lands. That is the story behind the story: not a corrupt land grab for private gain, but something arguably more complicated — a conservation win achieved by closing off a door that another party, with legitimate historical claims, was trying to walk through.
The broader LandBack movement will keep pressing, as it has across the country from California to Massachusetts to Wisconsin. Tribes have shown considerable creativity in financing land reacquisition, sometimes partnering with conservation organizations, sometimes leveraging casino revenues, sometimes working with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. Although some tribal nations have agreed to land transfers with various preconditions — like conservation easements that bar development or allow public access — many others are wary of land deals brokered by conservation groups, since they have strings attached and can fall short of true ownership and autonomy. The Ute Tribe was trying to bypass all of that and simply buy back what was theirs outright. Utah's legislature, orchestrated in significant part by one avid sportsman from Paradise, made sure that could not happen.
The collision in the Book Cliffs between hunting culture and tribal sovereignty is not unique to Utah, but it is sharper there than almost anywhere else in the West. Federal holdings account for close to two-thirds of Utah's total land area, which means every decision about how state-controlled parcels are managed carries outsized weight. Snider's multi-year campaign was patient, methodical, and largely invisible to the public until the deal was done — a lesson in how Western land policy is actually made, far from the headlines generated by monument fights and federal lawsuits. The Book Cliffs are locked in for hunters now. Whether that outcome was worth what it cost the Ute Tribe is a question that the courts may ultimately have to answer.
