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The Uinta Basin Railway plan to direct billions of gallons of Utah crude oil through Colorado has been derailed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Friday agreed with Eagle County and several environmental groups and overturned federal approval of the Uinta Basin Railway, citing violations of the National Environmental Policy Act.

“They cut corners in their environmental analysis of this project particularly as it relates to Colorado and now they have to start over,” said Eagle County Attorney Bryan Treu, who joined several environmental groups in opposition to the controversial railroad plan.

The appeals court ruled that the Surface Transportation Board’s three-year study of the Utah railroad, which will connect remote oil fields with the national rail network and direct billions of gallons of crude oil through Colorado, failed to consider downstream impacts along the Colorado River. The railway is an economic development project by Utah’s Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.

The Surface Transportation Board conducted a “poor environmental review,” the court found, by failing to adequately study the potential of oil spills, trail derailments along the Colorado River and the potential for wildfire in communities along tracks that will be carrying heated tankers filled with “waxy” crude from Utah to the Gulf Coast.

“The limited weighing of the other environmental policies the board did undertake fails to demonstrate any serious grappling with the significant potential for environmental harm stemming from the project,” the ruling reads. The court ruled that the board “hurriedly disposed” of objections by railway opponents in the Environmental Impact Statement review of the project.

The board in 2021 approved the Uinta Basin Railway, which planned 88 miles of new track connecting oil basins in Utah with the national rail network. The new railroad would quintuple production in the Uinta Basin with an estimated 3,300 new oil wells. The rail line in central Utah would direct 225,000 to 350,000 barrels of crude every day along the Colorado River to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The Uinta Basin already directs its waxy crude along railroads through Colorado but the new track would increase traffic as much as five times.

The plan galvanized opposition in Colorado, with dozens of communities opposing the project. Eagle County and five environmental groups in 2022 filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Appeals challenging the board’s approval.

In recent months, several Colorado federal, state and regional lawmakers have urged federal officials to reconsider approval of the Uinta Basin with a focus on how a derailment of tankers carrying the basin’s oil in Colorado could foul the Colorado River and increase wildfire danger for railside communities like Glenwood Springs.

The Surface Transportation Board argued it did not have jurisdiction to address or enforce mitigation of impacts outside the 88-mile rail corridor.

The appeals court ordered the Surface Transportation Board to redo its environmental review of the project. But the court did not agree with Eagle County and the environmental groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity that the Uinta Basin Railway could lead to the opening of the long-dormant Tennessee Pass Line between Dotsero and Cañon City.

The court also did not wholly agree that the transportation board failed to adequately consider the climate impacts of burning the new crude, which could increase pollution and account for 1% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The court also found “the board failed to weigh the project’s uncertain financial viability and the full potential for environmental harm against the transportation benefits it identified” and ordered the federal transportation board to vacate its approval of the Uinta Basin Railway.

If the board decides to relaunch a new environmental review of the project, it will include heavy scrutiny from urban and rural communities far from the proposed new track, Treu said. Eagle County was among the only Colorado communities to formally object to the Surface Transportation Board’s analysis of the Uinta Basin Railway, opening the opportunity for the county to join the environmental groups in a legal challenge in the federal appeals court. A new environmental review will likely include challenges from many more communities, Treu said.

“We raised a lot of awareness around this project and this time around, there will be a lot more eyes watching,” Treu said.

Elected leaders, including Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse cite environmental concerns about trains hauling oil through Colorado.

GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. — As seven counties in Utah continue progress towards building a railway connecting Utah’s resource-rich Uinta Basin to the national rail network, a coalition of federal, state and local elected leaders are calling on the Biden administration to stop the process – citing environmental concerns about trains hauling crude through Colorado.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Boulder) held a news conference near the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon Friday, urging the U.S. Forest Service not to grant a special use permit to build the railway though Utah’s Ashley National Forest. Bennet called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the impact of up to five trains a day hauling waxy crude along 100 miles adjacent to the Colorado River.

“We’re all here today to say the oil trains from Uinta Basin are not welcome in Colorado,” Bennet said. “When the federal government reviewed this project… it’s important to understand they didn’t properly assess the risk to Colorado.”

In March, Bennet and Neguse wrote a letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, warning of the danger of running the trains along the banks of the headwaters of the Colorado River, which provides water to 40 million people in the American West. In that letter, the lawmakers warned of potential derailments, especially after the environmental disaster after a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

“Derailments in this country are shockingly common… more than 1,000 per year on average,” Bennet told reporters Friday.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that this project, which as the senator said would enable 4.6 billion gallons of oil to travel adjacent to this river, is not a smart idea,” Neguse said. “Imagine the degradation of this river, imagine the ecosystems impacted, imagine the people impacted if a disaster were to occur.”

Glenwood Springs has been no stranger to disaster in Glenwood Canyon.

“This canyon is a very fragile place,” Glenwood Springs Mayor Jonathan Godes said at a news conference. "We’ve had the Grizzly Creek Fire. We’ve had climate change induced floods… rockslides...Glenwood Springs has an economy that’s based on tourism and a lot of that tourism is based on water.”

The company building the railway did not respond to a 9NEWS request for comment on the opposition as of Friday afternoon. In the past, the head of the company has criticized environmental concerns, saying the waxy crude is easier to clean up than other materials.

Bennet responded to that criticism saying the proponent of the project shouldn’t be the judge of the environmental impact and again called for the federal government to assess the Colorado impact.

The Uinta Basin Railway would allow for a new way for hardened crude to be transported out of the region in Utah. Currently a small road is the only way to move material out. If connected to the national railway, crude could be transported from Utah to the Gulf Coast.

“We are in favor of domestic energy production, I want to note,” said State Sen. Dylan Roberts (D-Steamboat Springs) said. “But you’re supposed to do that in the right and safe way. This is not the right or safe way.”

A proposed 85-mile oil railway through Ashley National Forest, in the northeast corner of Utah, is on the cusp of final approval from federal agencies. The Uinta Basin Railway project intends to connect the oil-rich but hard-to-access region to refineries on the Gulf Coast by linking the basin to an existing line. The route would then chart a course east beside the Colorado River, through flood and rockslide-prone Glenwood Canyon and onwards into downtown Denver before heading south.

Up to five 2-mile-long trains would traverse it each day, carrying crude oil. A federal analysis predicts that accidents are likely to occur once a year on the segment from Kyune, Utah, to Grand Junction, Colorado, with the portion between Grand Junction and Denver experiencing one every two years. Up to 2,000 new oil wells would need to be drilled in the Uinta Basin to make the project economically viable.

A coalition of seven fossil fuel-producing counties in Utah have allied with Drexel Hamilton, a New York investment bank, to promote the railway, and Rio Grande Pacific would manage train operations on the new Utah section as well as on the existing Union Pacific line through Colorado. The Ute Indian Tribe also holds a small equity stake in the project, since the nation has an economic interest in oil extracted from Uintah and Ouray reservation land.

Too sludgy for pipelines, the viscous petroleum can only be moved by train and truck. Some consider waxy crude “clean-up friendly” because it must be heated to flow and tends to form globules, rather than oil slicks, when it encounters water, making remediation easier.

But critics are concerned about how a derailment of the toxic material would affect the Colorado River, a major artery of Western agriculture and the source of drinking water for 40 million people. Roughly150 miles of preexisting trackline the Colorado River, and other stretches run through the headwaters of the river system. The federal environmental impact study did not examine the consequences of a spill in Colorado, nor the downstream effects a crash could have on the seven states that rely on the river’s water. The study that accompanied the rail line’s approval in 2021 confined its most comprehensive impact analysis to Utah.

Tanker rail cars run along the Colorado River near its confluence with the Roaring Fork River in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The federal environmental impact study of a new oil railway project did not examine the consequences of an oil spill in Colorado, nor the downstream effects a crash could have on the seven states that rely on the river’s water._____________Major King

Environmental groups, Colorado communities and politicians have seized on that omission in a last-ditch effort to stall the railway. “The last thing in the world we should be doing is jeopardizing that water source,” said Deeda Seed, a campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups involved in lawsuits against the railway.

“The last thing in the world we should be doing is jeopardizing that water source.”

The February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, alarmed Matt Scherr, Eagle County’s commissioner. “After what happened there, we can’t ever believe that they’re taking the risks seriously,” Scherr said. Still, attempts to thwart the project preceded East Palestine’s crash. The impetus behind Eagle County’s lawsuit is simple, Scherr said: “It’s just math. With greater volume, there will be more accidents.” Union Pacific would not comment on whether waxy crude and other petroleum products are already transported along the route. The rail operator “is required by federal law to transport chemicals and other hazardous commodities that Americans use daily, including fertilizer, ethanol, crude oil and chlorine,” a spokesman said in an email.

Early last year, Eagle County, with the Center for Biological Diversity, launched a legal challenge against the Surface Transportation Board, which arbitrates disputes on transit projects, arguing that the environmental impact study neglected to fully account for the risks posed to Colorado. A judge won’t hear the case until sometime this fall.

Meanwhile, Sen. Michael Bennet, D, and Rep. Joe Neguse, D-District 2, have been writing letters to anyone in the Biden administration who could intervene to stop the railway. They wrote Brenda Mallory, who chairs the Council on Environmental Quality, to request an environmental study focusing on Colorado’s watershed and noted that an oil spill in the Colorado River would be “catastrophic.” They also highlighted the West’s extreme drought conditions and how wildfires could spark from a crash. In 2020, the Grizzly Creek blaze, likely started by a flicked cigarette butt or sparks from a dragging trailer chain, burned the same section of Glenwood Canyon where the oil trains would pass. But money, or the lack of it, could also stop the project in its tracks. In promotional materials for the railway, the coalition of counties behind the project promised “private pays for it,” indicating the costs of construction and operation likely wouldn’t fall to taxpayers. But then the estimated costs doubled and last week, the coalition applied for over $2 billion dollars in tax-exempt government bonds.

“It’s just math. With greater volume, there will be more accidents.”

Deeda Seed thinks this could be a sign of trouble for the sprawling oil route. “The efforts to secure these bonds show how fragile the financing of this railway is. They never represented to the public before that anything like this would be needed,” said Seed. The bonds are normally issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation for projects with clear public benefits — think bridges or bus lanes — and would cost taxpayers $80 million per year.

Bennet and Neguse leaned on the news of the bonds to once again ask the federal government to intervene. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, they implored him to use his authority to block access to the bonds, citing the project’s failure to provide public value.

“The additional risks posed by this project ... have gained new urgency in the wake of the East Palestine disaster,” the politicians wrote. It would “irretrievably sink taxpayer dollars into a project that has proven unable to contain its own costs.”

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern forHigh Country Newsbased in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at[email protected]or submit aletter to the editor. See ourletters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable.

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Luke Gair knew where he wanted to go for college and what he wanted to do in college dating back to his early childhood.

Gair dreamed of not only studying at the University of Missouri, but also playing for the football program.

Coming out of tiny Glenwood Springs, the odds were stacked against Gair getting a spot on the Tigers’ football team in the tough Southeastern Conference, but on Aug. 19, Gair’s dream came true as the Tigers awarded him a roster spot, a helmet, and a locker with plans on using him on the scout team offense and defense with a chance to crack the gameday roster on special teams.

“Honestly, it’s a dream come true,” Gair, who is studying industrial engineering at Mizzou, said during a phone interview from his dorm room in Columbia, Missouri. “When they gave me my helmet and locker, it really didn’t feel like I was there; it was all surreal. Everything I’ve ever wanted was being placed in my hands, and I’m so excited to be part of this great program.”

Two years ago, Missouri offered Gair a preferred walk-on spot in the recruiting process, but last season — Gair’s senior year at Glenwood — the Tigers gave the preferred walk-on spot to another player, leaving Gair in limbo. The senior, who rushed for 1,576 yards and 22 touchdowns in three years at Glenwood while adding 40 receptions for 598 yards and two touchdowns, garnered some attention from smaller Division I schools like the University of Northern Colorado, but Gair remained steadfast in his desire to play for the SEC program, even if they didn’t seem to show much interest until late in the process.

“I’d been communicating with them here and there, but I didn’t really know if I was going to play football for them,” Gair said. “In the back of my mind, I made the decision to come to Missouri for the education, but it really ate at me that I wasn’t playing football this fall until they called me Monday and asked if I was interested in coming out for the team.

“But once I got that call and got a chance, there was just a lot of satisfaction that I felt,” Gair added. “I realized that all the hard work was towards something, and that it’s actually possible to make it coming from a small-town school like Glenwood. That’s a big lesson in life for me, knowing that if you have the will and the determination, things will work out.”

Once Gair got word he’d earned a spot on the Tigers’ team, he fired off a quick text message to his father, Todd, with a picture of his Missouri helmet and locker.

“It was a really cool moment,” Todd Gair said. “We weren’t expecting him to get a chance so quickly; it was just a great moment to get that text from Luke. He was kind of up in the air about not being a preferred walk-on with them and all the work being worth it without getting a real chance, but once they gave him his helmet and told him what the plan was, he was all in.”

Gair’s point of contact at Mizzou over the years has been former CU star safety Ryan Walters, now the Tigers’ secondary coach under head coach Barry Odom. Former Glenwood Springs head coach Rocky Whitworth has a long-standing relationship with Walters, so the connection was there from the coach’s side, as well as the family side.

“Missouri was our home, but we moved here to Colorado when Luke was 3,” Todd Gair said. “His mom and a number of aunts graduated from Mizzou, so he’s always wanted to go there and wanted to play football there. We’re really happy for him and proud of him. He set his mind to achieve this and worked hard over the years, so it’s great to see him get rewarded.”

Gair won’t travel with the Tigers for the first year, unless he makes the gameday roster as a special teams player in his first year. However, Gair will dress for home games and will get to run out of the tunnel with the Tigers on Faurot Field at Memorial Stadium.

“I’m really looking forward to that moment,” Gair said. “It’s hard to put it into words, honestly.”

The Tigers open on the road Saturday, Aug. 31, at Wyoming before opening up at home on Saturday, Sept. 7, against West Virginia.

PARK CITY, Utah — At the end of Silver King Road, nestled behind some condominiums at the base of Park City Mountain Resort, lies the Glenwood Cemetery. Established in 1885, the land was purchased by Park City’s many fraternal organizations to benefit miners, loggers, masons, and their families by providing an affordable place of rest. The organizations banded together to raise funds for the first three acres of land; then, two acres were donated, adding up to the five-acre plot with a 5,000-person capacity.

Today, the cemetery is less than a fifth full, with only 949 occupants. Within the 5-acres are plots designated to each organization. Most headstones offer an answer as to which occupation and organization the deceased was a part of. The woodmen’s gravestones are stone tree trunks or logs, the Odd Fellows’ headstones have three chain links, and masonry tools are etched into the Masons’ headstones.

Burials in the Glenwood slowed in the early 20th century in step with our town’s mining industry, and with that, maintenance and care fell to the wayside until the 1980s when community members rallied to preserve the land.

After restoring headstones and refurbishing the quiet grove, the Glenwood Cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. Currently, the Park City Historical Society heads up the cemetery’s maintenance and offers tours for those interested in peeking into the lives of Park City’s past.

Park City’s next two cemeteries are linked to the Snyder family, for whom Snyderville Basin is named. Prior to Mormon pioneers settling the area, the Snyderville Basin was a summer hunting ground for the Utes.

Samuel Snyder, George Snyder and one of his wives, Rhoda, and Samuel’s son Ephraim were among the first pioneers to settle in Park City, arriving in 1849 and purchasing Parley Pratt’s claim to Parley’s Park in 1850. It’s said that Rhoda was the first female Parkite.

The Snyders literally helped build Park City. Lumber from the Snyder Mill was used to build many of the mining structures and tunnels, as well as build infrastructure, homes, and buildings in town.

In the 19th century, loss was all too familiar to the community, from mining and labor accidents to illnesses. The child mortality rate was incredibly high. In 1874, Ephraim lost his six-month-old son Robert. Samuel’s grandson was laid to rest on a hillside plot, which is now the Snyderville Cemetery. The land belonged to Samuel’s brother, Chester.

The cemetery is tucked away in the Sun Peak neighborhood on Roffe Road. There are 27 documented burials at the pioneer cemetery; the last of whom was 15-year-old Sextus Snyder, buried in 1920. Now, headstones face an apartment building, and many of the Snyders rest on the hillside of their namesake land.

Another unfortunate Snyder death was George’s daughter, young Pearle Snyder, the first to be buried in what is now the Park City Cemetery in 1897.

The story goes that Pearle Snyder passed away in the winter of 1879. The Snyder family attempted the 3-hour wagon ride to Salt Lake City, where the closest public interment spaces were, but the wintry roads were too gruesome to navigate. So, out of necessity, George Snyder buried his daughter on his land and what is now the Park City Cemetery.

Soon after, he donated the land for use of the community. The cemetery began to be used in a more official capacity in 1892. Qualifying Parkites with “immediate need” can still be buried in the Park City Cemetery today. A qualified resident was born in Park City Miner’s Hospital, owns property or currently resides in Park City Proper, or has resided within the limits of Park City for a period of at least 10 years consecutively.