Stories from National Conservation Lands
(The hidden stories of the public lands that unite us.)
By Andrew Gulliford

While the National Park Service is widely known, far fewer Americans are familiar with the Bureau of Land Management’s vast National Conservation Lands—thirty-seven million acres spanning eleven western states and Alaska. Lonesome Landscapes is the first comprehensive history of this system from public domain lands to the designation of national monuments and conservation areas in the twenty-first century. Drawing from archives, interviews, and field reporting, Gulliford reveals the unsung heroes who safeguarded these lands, from pioneering rangers to grassroots advocates in Native American and Hispanic communities. With vivid stories of explorers, cowboys, hermits, and even an alligator named Clem, this book blends scholarship with storytelling. Lonesome Landscapes is both a definitive history and a call to keep America’s wild places in public hands—an essential read for anyone passionate about the West.

“A valuable contribution to the literature of American public land conservation history and policy. Gulliford succeeds admirably in bringing this substantial but greatly overlooked portion of the American landscape into vivid focus..”
Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold
Foundation and Center for Humans & Nature.

“Gulliford does an outstanding job shining a light on the overlooked National Conservation Lands System by tying them into the broader story of the American West, public lands management, and those who have helped shaped all three.”
Michael Childers,
Colorado State University

Landscape of Refuge and Resistance
Andrew Gulliford

UPDATE: Dr. Gulliford’s book on Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance from the University of Utah Press, which became the 2024 Finalist for Best Book in Utah History Award from the Board of State History at the Utah Historical Society.

An incisive exploration of the human and environmental history of Bears Ears National Monument and its vast cultural landscape.

Designated in 2016 by President Obama and reduced to 85 percent of its original size one year later by President Trump, Bears Ears National Monument continues to be a flash point of conflict between ranchers, miners, environmental groups, states’ rights advocates, and Native American activists. In this volume, Andrew Gulliford synthesizes 11,000 years of the region’s history to illuminate what’s truly at stake in this conflict and distills this geography as a place of refuge and resistance for Native Americans who seek to preserve their ancestral homes, and for the descendants of Mormon families who arrived by wagon train in 1880.

Gulliford’s engaging narrative explains prehistoric Pueblo villages and cliff dwellings, Navajo and Ute history, impacts of the Atomic Age, uranium mining, and the pothunting and looting of Native graves that inspired the passage of the Antiquities Act over a century ago.

The book describes how the national monument came about and its deep significance to five native tribes. Bears Ears National Monument is a bellwether for public land issues in the American West. Its recogni-tion will be a relevant topic for years to come.

Andrew Gulliford is professor of history at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He is an award-winning author whose books include Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale; Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions; and The Woolly West: Colorado’s Hidden History of Sheepscapes.

“The work is a significant contribution to a current controversy. It presents both (several, actually) sides of questions fairly, in my opinion. In the ongoing arguments over Bears Ears, Gulliford’s book will be a resource and a reference. It presents an excellent history of Bears Ears and surrounding southeastern Utah.”
— Steve Lekson, author of A Study of Southwestern Archaeology

“Andrew Gulliford’s long experience with the lands and people of Utah’s San Juan County is apparent in this fair-minded, richly informative historical account. He shows how the Bears Ears National Monument became such a charged public issue and what can be learned from the ongoing struggle to protect it.”
—  John D. Leshy, author of Our Common Ground: A New History of America’s Public Lands