Welcome to Helma the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. At the end of the last episode I said there'll be blood in this one and that was a mistake. I shouldn't have gone that way. I should have tried to describe the landscape

what it feels like to be there in the Bears ears area. It's a place where you can see

the sun set from a long ways away, looking across 80 to 100 miles of

land to the horizon.

And at night it's silent.

It's not just quiet. There are no sounds.

One night in comb wash I took out my microphone and turned up the record level

and all I heard was the static electricity from my machine.

And it was so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.

I also made a mistake at the beginning of the last episode.

I said the petroglyphs along the San Juan River are inside Trump's new monument boundaries.

That was not correct.

It looked like they were going to be inside the new boundaries, but in the end, they were excluded,

along with thousands of other archaeological sites.

What does it matter? Why should we care?

I care because the Bears' Area is a wilderness, a place where you can feel like you're the only person

in a hundred miles from you to the sunset.

An easy place to get lost, or let's just say confused about which way to go or how to get back.

The Bears Ears is pretty much right in the middle of the Colorado Plateau,

a high desert unlike any other place on the planet,

a geologic province unto itself,

the last place in the United States to be explored and mapped because the terrain is so difficult.

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