Clarkston • Curtis Godfrey has spent his entire 72 years in Clarkston, a small northern Utah farming town of about 750 people, tucked by the western slopes of Clarkston Mountain.

As a boy, Godfrey said he often roamed the mountain trails on horseback and hiked through Winter Canyon, a rugged landscape familiar to generations of families in his hometown.

Over the years, he returned with his children — and later with Boy Scout troops — clearing brush and helping maintain the narrow paths that wind up the mountain’s steep slopes.

“My first few times going up there were always on a horse. We’d have them shuttling the ponies and the first time I went up, I was like 10, 12 years old, and I was bareback on one of those,” Godfrey said, laughing at the memory. “It was just me, my brother, and some friends.”

The mountains form the western edge of Cache Valley along the Utah–Idaho border, part of the Malad Range and crowned by the 8,200-foot Gunsight Peak. The ridge is a patchwork of U.S. Forest Service land and private parcels.

But access to those mountains has become the center of a legal battle after a private landowner started blocking off access to paths that lead into the foothills.

Scott Shriber, who owns an 800-acre ranch at the base of the ridge near Gunsight Peak, says the routes now in question are private trails crossing his land, not public county roads.

He put up “No trespassing” signs, cameras and fencing around his property — and the paths leading into the mountains.

However, Godfrey and other residents say for decades, the paths have been used to access public lands on Clarkston Mountain — through Winter Canyon, Elbow Canyon, Green Canyon, Old Canyon and New Quigley Canyon.

Cache County Executive George Daines said the dispute reflects a broader tension playing out across Utah, where long-standing recreational use is increasingly colliding with changing land ownership and shifting interpretations of public access law.

How the case is resolved, he said, could influence how Cache County — and other communities across the state — handle similar conflicts in the future.

“It’s an ongoing problem all up and down the state,” Daines said. “Landowner buys land that’s on the foothills of the mountains and wants to restrain citizens from going through the foothills to the mountains that are public.”

Tensions flare in Winter Canyon

The dispute has turned into dueling lawsuits in the Utah’s First District Court in Logan.

In 2024, Shriber and his company, Winter Canyon Ranch LLC, sued Cache County over the contested routes.

In response, a group of residents formed Clarkston Mountain Conservation, a nonprofit advocating for continued public access, and filed a separate suit against the landowner alongside BlueRibbon Coalition, an Idaho-based national nonprofit that pushes for recreational access to public lands.

The debate escalated in November, when a BlueRibbon Coalition member riding a dirt bike along the path leading into Winter Canyon was stopped by Shriber and three other men.

Shriber is seen in a video with a gun strapped to his chest as he spoke to the man. Both Shriber and the man called the Cache County Sheriff’s Office, according to a probable cause statement. Shriber was arrested on suspicion of unlawful detention, but no charges appear in court records.

The man recorded the encounter and provided the video to the BlueRibbon Coalition, which provided it to The Salt Lake Tribune with the faces blurred.

In December, Cache County Sheriff Chad Jensen said in a statement that motorized vehicles are not permitted on the routes, and access is allowed only by walking, hiking, biking or horseback while litigation is ongoing.

“Please note that any movement off the designated roads may be considered trespassing,” Jensen said. “We do not want a violent incident due to a trespassing issue.”

Daines, the county executive, said the question of whether — and how — the routes are open to the public during the litigation has caused confusion on both sides, and the issue will likely head back to court for clarification.

A dispute over access

If the routes are blocked off by the ranch, BlueRibbon Executive Director Ben Burr said, public access into the mountain would be cut off.

“If he succeeds at this, he will be land-locking the public almost entirely out of high-value recreation public land that’s otherwise owned by the Forest Service and should be there, available for all of us to go use and enjoy,” Burr said. “We won’t be able to because we can no longer use the long-standing county roads that have been getting us up there for forever.”

Since the 1860s, Burr said, settlers and residents have accessed the slopes through the contested routes for gathering wood, livestock grazing, hunting and travel. Over time, he said, the paths were also used for recreation, including dirt bikes and ATVs.

“Some of these roads were there before the private property deeds were even created,” Burr said. “The community there has been using those trails continuously since they’ve been settled.”

Until 2023, the private land on the mountain was held by families who had owned it for generations, some dating back before 1900, according to Winter Canyon Ranch’s complaint.

That year, the complaint says, Shriber purchased several adjacent parcels near Gunsight Peak, established Winter Canyon Ranch, and became the primary private landowner, holding seven parcels.

Shriber’s attorney, Bruce Baird, said the disputed routes were never legal public roads.

“There’s a state statute that says if the public has used a road for 10 continuous years, it’s dedicated as a highway,” Baird said. “There’s no evidence that the public has used these trails as a road, basically at all.”

Baird said that while residents may have used the routes for hiking, horseback riding and dirt biking, that kind of use doesn’t qualify the paths as public “highways” under Utah law.

He said the statute applies to roads used for standard vehicle travel, not narrow trails used primarily for recreation.

Residents and advocacy groups counter that the routes have long been mapped and labeled by the county as public roads, which Burr said is reflected in the warranty deed noting the sale excluded county roads.

Decades of continuous use, he said, have created public rights-of-way under Utah law.

Ben Burt, who has lived in Clarkston for more than a decade, said he respects Shriber’s rights as a property owner but believes the trails should remain open to the public.

Burt said many live in rural areas “because we care about our property.”

“We want to have a say about our property. So we understand that this guy wants to be able to develop on his property,” Burt said. “It’s not right for them to be able to cut off complete access to that federal land. That’s the difference.”

For many in Cache Valley, Burt said, access to trails in their own backyard is part of the lifestyle that draws them to the area.

Godfrey, the Clarkston resident who grew up with the trails, said protecting access isn’t just about recreation — it’s about preserving decades of family tradition. The trails carry memories of childhood horseback rides, hunting trips, scouting outings and long summer hikes — experiences he hopes to share with his grandchildren.

“I have a bunch of grandkids. They’re getting older, too, but I haven’t had them up there, but I want to; I want them to be able to go,” he said. “That’s one of my concerns, is the things that I’ve enjoyed growing up, and the scouting and taking my family up there, if he gets his way, we won’t be able to do that.”

Parker Trent Kingston, 21, is currently being held at the Washington County jail without bail.

A Brigham Young University football standout has been arrested and is being charged with rape stemming from allegations in southern Utah.

Parker Trent Kingston, 21, will face a first-degree felony rape charge, according to a statement posted online Wednesday by the Washington County Attorney’s Office.

According to the statement, a then-20-year-old woman told officers at a southern Utah hospital that she had been sexually assaulted by Kingston on Feb. 23, 2025, in St. George.

Detectives with the St. George Police Department, the statement says, gathered evidence and spoke to “other witnesses.”

Kingston is now in custody, being held at the Washington County jail without bail. Jail records confirm that. But charges against Kingston have not officially shown up in the court system as of Wednesday evening.

The county attorney’s office could not be immediately reached Wednesday after business hours.

The office’s statement says Kingston has an initial appearance set in court for Friday at 1:30 p.m.

“The Washington County Attorney’s Office takes allegations of sexual assault seriously,” the statement adds. It also asks any members of the public with information to call 435-301-7100.

Kingston is a senior wide receiver for the BYU Cougars. The school also confirmed the arrest.

“BYU became aware today of the arrest of Parker Kingston,” BYU said in a statement. “The university takes any allegation very seriously, and will cooperate with law enforcement. Due to federal and university privacy laws and practices for students, the university will not be able to provide additional comment.”

The charges against Kingston come less than a year after BYU’s team was rocked by allegations against its former quarterback.

Jake Retzlaff was accused of sex assault in a civil lawsuit. That case was later dismissed after Retzlaff and the woman who filed the suit came to a resolution.

But the allegations led to Retzlaff leaving the team, as he was facing a seven-game suspension from the university for breaking the school’s Honor Code. BYU, owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has strict rules that prohibit, among other things, premarital sex.

Retzlaff later transferred for a spot on the roster at Tulane.

Utah Auditor Tina Cannon’s office began a probe into the state’s health agency after a whistleblower complaint.

More than two million people’s sensitive case records — related to child welfare in Utah and psychiatric treatments at the Utah State Hospital — have not been adequately protected and are easily accessible to over 2,000 employees, according to a report published Tuesday.

After a whistleblower reached out to a hotline run by Utah Auditor Tina Cannon’s office, it began looking into how the state’s health agency is handling access to the records.

“The deficiencies we uncovered at the Department of Health and Human Services represent a critical failure to protect the privacy of families, individuals and our most vulnerable, Utah’s children,” Cannon said in a statement Tuesday.

Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services holds approximately six million records related to 2,020,726 individuals in its information system. The documents include caseworkers’ notes and detail foster care, adoption, child abuse and neglect cases.

The information system for the Utah State Hospital currently contains health records for 10,587 patients.

Auditors found there are almost no limits on viewing those records for the employees who have accounts to use those databases.

“Users are expected to determine for themselves what range of viewing access is appropriate,” the auditor’s office noted. “There are no automated or proactive mechanisms to flag or prevent inappropriate access.”

Currently, 1,222 state employees have access to the DCFS information system. In addition to DHHS social workers, they include representatives from the Utah Office of Guardian ad Litem, which provides legal representation for children who have been abused or neglected; the Utah Psychotropic Oversight Panel, which oversees mental health medications for children in the state’s custody; and the Utah attorney general’s office.

The Utah State Hospital’s information system is accessible to 823 DHHS employees.

All of them have unfettered access to the health records of the 340 patients currently staying at the hospital. And although discharged patients’ records are “soft locked” after 60 days, users can still view them immediately by merely submitting a comment, according to the audit.

Allowing improper access to sensitive information entrusted to the state raises the risk of privacy violations, increased emotional trauma and reputational harm, Cannon’s office wrote.

It also warned that a single compromised account could expose entire databases to bad actors, noting the information “is highly valuable on the dark web.”

DHHS staffers have a low level of awareness about privacy policies and generally did not know how to report violations, the report said.

Employees on the Information Privacy and Security team keep records about policy violations in personal files, rather than using a centralized repository, it said.

And some use the terms “incident” and “breach” interchangeably — a mistake that could make it more difficult to identify and follow laws around responding to a large-scale data breach.

The auditors office did not conduct a full privacy audit, in an effort to secure the databases as quickly as possible and to avoid further jeopardizing confidentiality. Instead, it interviewed 21 employees about metrics and the health agency’s policies.

Responses from DHHS included with the audit outline plans to fix the problems identified, and it has already taken action on some issues.

Tuesday’s report comes less than two weeks after legislative auditors presented findings that DCFS workers had endangered thousands of Utah children by not adhering to deadlines and other policies. Both legislative staffers and Cannon will discuss their respective audits Wednesday morning in front of the Legislature’s Social Services Appropriations Committee, which makes recommendations on DHHS’s budget.