It didn’t take long for prospectors to stake their claims on land in southeast Utah that was previously protected in Bears Ears National Monument.
On September 11, the first day the 1.2 million acres were opened up, miners filed 16 claims, two months after President Donald Trump shrank the monument by about 90 percent. All of the claims appear to have been filed by small-scale local miners with other jobs, small businesses, and an interest in uranium mining. But the rapid timing of those claims alarmed environmental groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and they expect more to come.
“Hobby miners who want to go locate claims, play miner on the weekend, leave disturbance and pollution in their wake that really damages the monument resources,” said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the environmental nonprofit.
George Schultz, an off-roading guide based in Moab, filed three claims in the Lockhart Basin. He said staking a claim is merely a “step” in the mining process and noted Bureau of Land Management Lands outside of monument protections are meant for multiple uses.
Schultz declined to say which minerals he expected to mine at his claim sites, but his LinkedIn profile notes experience in uranium exploration.
Thirteen of the Bears Ears mining claims were filed by Kimmerle Mining based in Moab, a family business, including two modifications to the 21-acre Easy Peasy mine and 11 additional claims nearby.
Kyle Kimmerle, a managing member of the mining company, declined to comment. He was appointed to the board of directors of Urano Energy, a Canadian mining company focused on uranium, in 2024. He also apparently operates a Moab-based general contracting business and a tire shop.
Bears Ears became a political ping-pong ball immediately after the monument was established by President Barack Obama during his final weeks in office in 2016, adding protections to 1.35 million acres of federal land in the southeastern corner of the state.
The next year, Trump slashed the monument’s footprint by about 85 percent. President Joe Biden restored the monument’s original boundaries and also slightly expanded it during his term, only for Trump to once again shrink its size this summer.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, saw a similar back-and-forth between the Trump and Biden administrations.
In the latest proclamation shrinking the monuments, Trump disbanded the tribal commission that managed Bears Ears along with the Bureau of Land Management. He also listed a “grab bag of minerals” the lands “may or may not” contain, Bloch noted, including silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc in Bears Ears. Trump’s proclamation said that these minerals “create jobs, fuel prosperity, and are essential to important sectors of the economy of the United States.”
“He was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas,” Bloch said.
Kimmerle was also party to a 2023 lawsuit challenging Biden’s restoration of Bears Ears’ boundaries in 2021. His company owns the Easy Peasy mine, and dug up 30 tons of ore in search of uranium in 2018. Uranium prices weren’t high enough to make mining profitable at the time, however, and the mine stopped operations.
But with the rise of artificial intelligence and massive projected demands on the electricity grid, the Trump administration and Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s own Office of Energy Development have championed nuclear energy as a solution for powering the country’s future. Uranium is the main fuel for nuclear power.
Having his mining claims “locked up” in the Bears Ears monument made them “useless,” Kimmerle asserted in the 2023 lawsuit, and cost him up to $3 million in lost profits.
Kimmerle attempted to file his Bears Ears claims in July, shortly after Trump issued his proclamation slashing the monument’s boundaries. But the proclamation did not open the lands to new mining claims until September 11 — the same day San Juan County recorded both the Kimmerle and Schultz claims, according to records obtained by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
The CEO and chairman of Energy Fuels also bought thousands of shares of his company’s stock just days before Trump downsized the monument. Energy Fuels operates the White Mesa Mill directly next to the former Bears Ears monument boundary, the last conventional uranium processing site in the country.
Utah was historically the third-most productive state for uranium, according to information from the Utah Geological Survey, with most of those minerals coming from the Colorado Plateau.
Bloch said he doubts there is enough uranium available to justify the expense and environmental damage of mining on lands removed from Bears Ears.
“It’s not like people weren’t poking around in the monument, locating claims, moving dirt, seeing what was there” in the decades before Bears Ears became a monument, and during the first Trump administration when it was originally shrunk, Bloch said. “There were no production-level mines that were established.”