Bears Ears' mining rush falls flat as no one bothers to show up

Early on Friday morning, vast swathes of the red-rock high plateau that surrounds federally protected buttes in southern Utah were officially thrown open to miners.A controversial decision weeks earlier by President Donald Trump had shrunk the size of two national monuments — known as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — by hundreds of thousands of acres, enraging environmentalists and American Indian groups who feared a stampede of mine and oil wildcatters would rush in and de