A long time ago I worked in Four Corners area. Most of those towns, especially in Utah are Mormon towns where you, as a visitor, are expected to respect their beliefs about smoking, alcohol, etc and to limit your own public use of things like this. It's pretty easy to do especially if you're like me and don't smoke or drink in the first place but it can be a culture shock to some like a few of my coon-ass friends (Cajuns from Louisiana) who are used to every afternoon being a great time to have a beer and party after a hard day's work. Summer's hot and the beer is cold but it sucked having to go to the state liquor store to buy since it was usually right across the street from the sheriff's office. LOL

Anyway, I spent months working there and came to know quite a few of the people pretty well, spending time with them in the field and after a while being invited to their homes for meals and an opportunity to relax outside the work environment.

In much the same way that those rich people who buy large ranches that surround public land end up believing that they can rightfully control how the public, with the exception of anyone in their circle of well-heeled friends, can access and use that public land, many of these local people there control access to public lands and use those lands as an extension of their own privately owned properties. Ownership of access equates to control of access and they feel is equivalent to ownership of public lands.

As an example of this I will note the very common case where locals carry out grave-robbing of Moqui and Anasazi sites that are on public land but are only reasonably accessible by passage across their private land since their land tend to control access into the lower canyon areas.

Back during the Cold War a lot of these people worked in uranium mines in the area and had good incomes. They supplemented their incomes by collecting and selling artifacts, even things they knew had been collected illegally on public land, and had separate businesses which, to tourists passing through looked totally legitimate.

For some of them, including several people that I personally knew, this ended back in 2009 when they were busted for dealing in artifacts [0] that they had illegally collected on public lands. Over a period of decades they have been responsible for so much destruction of archaeological sites out there with no repercussions until they were brought down by those arrests.

When I was eventually invited to their house I saw artifacts scattered all over the place. They were big collectors. They claimed that it all came from caves, grainaries, or other sites on their land just down the canyon from their house. They were very discrete about where they got everything but I had the feeling that since our company used helicopters to get access to the areas where we worked that they were absorbing what they saw for future reference. It was common for the chopper pilots to give a short tour of new sites that they had found as they traversed the countryside moving men and equipment.

It was spectacular from the air and appeared inaccessible from the ground in many places.

I wasn't surprised to see those people brought to justice. In some ways they were just trying to get by in an area with no real economy outside tourism. However, they knew they were breaking laws and chose to ignore the damages they did in the process.

Like I mentioned in a different post, a lot of these people did not have or hold full-time jobs. They worked when they wanted just long enough to earn a grub stake to continue exploration for artifacts or to allow them an opportunity to work gold or mineral claims across the state lines in Colorado. Our turnover in that area could be 20% daily as we cycled through people who only wanted a quick paycheck.

I won't talk about how the Mormon church is operating here in Texas though there is certainly no shortage of unethical individuals with that group either.

[0]https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/arrests-made-operation-target...

EDIT: I don't want anyone to come away with the message that Mormon = bad. That is not true. The message should be that they do not have a monopoly on ethics, morals, or anything else and as a group they share all the same faults and failings common to other religions or cultures. They're just people. Some spend their lives doing good things, others don't.