SALT LAKE CITY -- Inside the sprawling Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, signs posted by Kane County allow driving on some roads where the federal government has banned all vehicles.

That conflict was left unresolved Wednesday when a federal judge dismissed a 10-year-old lawsuit brought by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that sought to force the federal government to defend its own turf.

U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins ruled that because the Bureau of Land Management was unwilling to get involved, the wilderness group didn't have a case.

"It was a lot of work and motion for an eventual dismissal," said Ralph Finlayson, an assistant Utah attorney general.

Finlayson, however, said that when the case took a detour on appeal, the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals established new guidelines for resolving conflicts over roads claimed by county governments across federal lands.

The dispute involves an obscure 1866 mining law called Revised Statute 2477, which assured states and counties use of roads crossing federal lands.

The law was repealed in 1976 with protection for existing roads, but sorting through countless wandering dirt paths across the West has led to protracted disagreements about which roads qualify for local control.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance contends Kane, Garfield and San Juan counties have abused RS2477 by asserting rights to "roads" that hardly ever existed.

"We sued BLM for standing on sidelines while three counties took bulldozers and graders into lands proposed for wilderness," said Heidi McIntosh, a staff lawyer for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

"The problem is BLM and counties did not resolve their differences. The BLM just walked away," she said. "We're not just talking about roads here -- these are proxies for the real issue of who's going to control public lands."

Normally, Kane County would have to prove that faint tracks and paths across the monument qualify as roads but, in 2003, County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw and Sheriff Lamont Smith took matters into their own hands.

They ripped up 31 monument signs prohibiting vehicle travel and started planting their own route number signs for hundreds of disputed roads in the park. In many places today, BLM and Kane County signs stand in conflict on the same "roads."

At the outset, former U.S. Attorney Paul Warner threatened trespassing charges against county officials and convened a grand jury, but Habbeshaw says nothing became of it and wilderness advocates contend the Bush administration told federal authorities in Utah to back off.

Habbeshaw said negotiations with the U.S. Interior Department have lapsed, while the 10th Circuit's new process for validating road claims leaves the dispute in limbo.

Officially, the BLM tells visitors not to drive on county-asserted roads inside the monument, but rangers aren't enforcing the rule with warnings or tickets.

On the Net:www.blm.govwww.suwa.org

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B9.