Ask around Main Street this week and you will get three different answers. Someone will tell you the whole range is still closed. Someone else will say it opened back in July and you missed the memo. A third person will just shrug and say they haven't been up there since the smoke cleared enough to see the ridgeline again. All three are half right, because the Babylon Fire didn't close the Blues the way most people assume, and it didn't reopen them all at once either.
The short version: if your fall plans involve Lloyd's Lake, Dalton Springs, Buckboard, or the drive up toward Abajo Peak, you've had access to most of that since late July. If you were picturing the whole Manti-La Sal shut down through Labor Day, that's not what the closure order actually said.
The fire closed a specific corner, not the mountain you use
The Babylon Fire started naturally on June 25, 2026, and eventually burned 107,189 acres before crews reached full containment on August 20. The closure order that followed didn't blanket the entire Monticello Ranger District. It drew a boundary around the Dark Canyon Wilderness and the Monticello-side portion of Bears Ears National Monument, tracing a line from Johnson Creek Road north through Dry Wash, up past the Skyline Trailhead and Shay Ridge Trail junction, and along the Indian Creek Trail back to the forest boundary. That's the country southwest of town, closer to Blanding and Cedar Mesa than to the campgrounds most Monticello households actually use on a Saturday.
Dalton Springs Campground, Buckboard Campground, and Lloyd's Lake sit on Forest Road 105, a short drive straight west of town toward the old Blue Mountain ski area. That's a different piece of the forest from the one the fire order named. It stayed accessible for longer than the headlines suggested, and the record of when specific pieces came back proves it.
The reopening happened in layers, not all at once
Fire recovery on public land almost never flips a single switch. This one released in four distinct stages over two months, and the dates matter if you're deciding whether to plan a hike or a camping trip this September.
| Date | What came back |
|---|---|
| July 17, 2026 | State Highway 211 reopened to the Needles District boundary; BLM land north of 211 released |
| July 21–22, 2026 | Dalton Springs Campground, Buckboard Campground, and Foy Lake Road reopened; closures lifted south of Elk Mountain and South Elk roads |
| August 20, 2026 | Babylon Fire reached full containment; the Monticello Ranger District closure order was rescinded entirely, including Dark Canyon Wilderness and Bears Ears |
| August 28, 2026 | Forest-wide fire restrictions dropped from Stage 2 to Stage 1 |
That middle row is the one people miss. Dalton Springs and Buckboard, the two campgrounds that anchor most local fall trips into the Blues, had already reopened by July 22, nearly a month before the Forest Service made its official announcement that the entire district was clear. If you'd been waiting for a press release before booking a weekend up there, you lost most of August for no reason.
The one thing that actually changed this week
Here's the part that matters right now, not in July. From July 17 through August 27, the whole Manti-La Sal sat under Stage 2 fire restrictions, which ban open flame entirely, including inside the metal fire rings at developed campgrounds. Stoves and grills with an on-off switch were fine. An actual campfire, the kind you'd build at a site at Dalton Springs on a September night, was not.
That changed on August 28, when the forest dropped to Stage 1. Under Stage 1, a fire is legal again as long as it's inside a permanent fire structure at a developed recreation site, which describes exactly the fire rings at Dalton Springs and Buckboard. Back when Dalton Springs and Buckboard first reopened in July, the Forest Service's own announcement carried a reminder that stuck around for weeks after:
Please note that this reopened area is still under Stage 2 fire restrictions.
That caveat applied through most of the summer, which is why a reopened campground still meant no real campfire. It's the Stage 1 downgrade on August 28 that actually changes the answer, and it's recent enough that plenty of people haven't caught up to it yet.
What's actually open for the color season right now
As of this week, the pieces that make up a normal Monticello fall weekend are back on the table:
- Lloyd's Lake and its 2.3-mile loop trail, which turns reliably colorful against the Blues as the aspens change
- Dalton Springs and Buckboard campgrounds, both open with campfires now permitted in the existing fire rings
- The drive up Forest Road 105 toward North Creek Pass and Abajo Peak, the same route locals have used for decades to get above the desert heat
- Foy Lake Road, reopened alongside the campgrounds in late July. The immediate trails around the lake itself stayed closed a while longer and only came back with the full district rescinding on August 20, so that corner has been open for about a week and a half longer than it feels like
That's not a reason to stay off the mountain. Containment means the fire is surrounded by firebreaks and unlikely to spread past them, not that every wisp of smoke is gone. The Deseret News reported that isolated pockets of smoke may still show up in the interior of the burn scar even weeks after full containment. If you're driving up for a color hike and catch a faint haze somewhere off toward Dark Canyon, that's expected, not a sign the mountain isn't safe to use.
What's stacking on top of it
Fall in Monticello runs on its own calendar regardless of what the forest is doing, and this year the two overlap directly. Hideout Golf Course, the town's 18-hole course that's been running since 2002, hosts its Founders Tournament on September 5 and the Fall Couples Classic on September 11, both scheduled for the same weekends when the Blues are turning color and campfires are legal again for the first time in six weeks. If you're planning a Saturday that starts with nine holes at Hideout and ends with a fire at Buckboard, this is the first year since mid-July you can actually do both halves of that plan.
Main Street holds its own version of the season too. Wagon Wheel Pizza has been serving the four corners area since 1984 and stays open into the cooler months. The Shake Shack, the burger stand that half the town has a memory of working at as a teenager, tends to wind down with summer rather than fall, so a late-September stop is closer to a last call than a sure thing. The Grist Mill Inn, built into the old grain silos, keeps its bar and kitchen running through the season for anyone who wants dinner after a day on the mountain rather than a drive back to eat.
None of this required the fire to end for Monticello to keep functioning as a town. What the fire did was close off one specific, mapped section of the forest for two months and then hand it back in stages, with the last real restriction lifting just this week. If you'd been avoiding the whole mountain since June out of caution, you gave up more weekends than the actual closure order ever asked for.
The Blues look the way they usually do heading into September: green going gold at the higher elevations, cool enough in the evenings to want that campfire, and finally clear to use exactly the way most people here already were before the smoke ever showed up over Blanding.
Whether you're weighing a weekend up Forest Road 105 or thinking further out about what it would take to actually put down roots near the Abajos, the Blake Walker Group knows this ground the way only people who live here do. Get a free home valuation and talk to someone who can tell you what's really happening on the mountain behind your house, not just what the last press release said.
