I expected Bluff to be different.

Given its history as well as its importance in Mormon lore, the entrance sign saying that Bluff was established in 650 A.D. is shocking. I would have expected that the sign would say EST. 1880 A.D.

I’ve been trying to write something that makes sense and is entertaining about Bluff for almost a week, and I can’t put together a decent narrative. Instead, I’ll just list several factoids still looking for the narrative.

• There is a monument in  Salt Lake City’s Temple Square of a man and a woman dragging a handcart with a small boy pushing from the back. It stands out because the only other monuments are a statue of Brigham Young and the Testimony of the Three Witnesses Monument. Nearby is a plaque that says The Handcart Pioneer Monument is a tribute to the thousands of hardy Mormon pioneers who, because they could not afford the larger ox-drawn wagons, walked across the rugged plains in the 1850s, pulling and pushing all their belongings possessions in handmade, all-wooden handcarts. Some 250 died on the journey, but nearly 3,000, mostly British converts, completed the 1,350-mile trek from Iowa City, Iowa to the Salt Lake Valley…
• My first backpacking trip in Utah’s canyon country was probably in 1982. We started in Escalante, Utah, with a 26-mile drive down a very rough dirt road. I found out later that the road was built in 1879, and we had driven just the beginning.
• In 1879, Escalante was at the edge of what is known as the Mormon Corridor that eventually ran from Idaho to Southern California. The church leaders in Salt Lake City wanted to enlarge the Mormon controlled lands by establishing a presence in the San Juan River basin. They assigned 70 families to start the colony. Those 70 families and some additional volunteers formed the San Juan Expedition, which eventually consisted of 250 people – pioneers or Saints if you prefer – 80 wagons and 1,000 head of cattle. It took them almost six weeks to build a road 55 miles from Escalante to the Colorado River, where they enlarged a crack in the canyon wall with dynamite and lowered their wagons 2,000 feet down to the river.
• That was the easy part. The trip took six months over an extremely hard winter, but everybody made it. More than everybody, really, because three children were born on the trip.
• The end of that road, 180 rough cross-country miles from Escalante, is in Bluff, Utah, where the colonists built forty primitive homes.
• Of the original forty homes, only one is still standing, although 14 other homes have been recreated. The recreation homes are roughly in a “U” shape, and the area is called Bluff Fort. Bluff Fort is manned – peopled? – by attentive guides who are part of the 90,000 Mormons doing Missionary work. Our guide was a retired man from Rexburg, Idaho, and his wife was nearby demonstrating the making of a traditional quilt.

• There have been people living, off and on, in the Bluff area for a long time. 650 A.D. was about the time Mesa Verde was flourishing, and Mesa Verde is only sixty miles away as the crow flies, so the 650 A.D. on the sign seems about right. The Mormons arrived about 1,231 years later, long after the permanent residents had drifted south. Like the previous residents, probably, the Mormons settled here because of the easy access to the San Juan River.
• The 650 A.D. on the sign is also interesting, to me at least, because I haven’t seen A.D. for Anno Domini, used in a long time; now it is usually shown as CE for Common Era.

• According to two completely unrelated sources, Bluff has the highest average education level of any town/city in Utah. Over 25% of the inhabitants have done graduate work and have at least a Masters. We heard that first from Steve Simpson at the Twin Rocks Trading Post. The second time was from our server at the Uptown Steakhouse in the Price Ramada. From what little I know about Bluff, I believe it.

• Ever since I started going to the Southwest, I’ve been wandering into shops selling Indian curios, mostly looking for fetishes. Most of what was on offer were copies of past art, sad Kachinas, tired blankets, and crude fetishes. I have interpreted this as a sign of a declining culture and wondered if it would ever change. I was heartened by Guatemala, however, where I remember first seeing that new indigenous art – mostly huipils -was alive. Each Guatemalan village had an overall feel, but the local artists were making art that was constantly changing and growing. But that seemed to not be the case in the Southwest until we wandered into the Twin Rocks Trading Post in Bluff. Here was Indigenous American art rooted in the past but free of hackneyed cliches and manifestly, proudly, contemporary.

We spent three nights in Bluff at the Desert Rose Resort and cabins. It was pretty much what we expected. A very nice new building built in an old style; not ironically I should make clear. We had dinner next door at Duke’s which was in the same style and I’m guessing Duke owned the entire operation. Duke did not serve booze or, even, wine so we presumed it to be owned by a local rich Mormon.

For our first dinner – at Duke’s – I had the Wild Mushroom Raviolis and Michele had a burger. Her burger was excellent and my ravioli was on the wrong side of mediocre. The next night we ate at the Comb Ridge Eat & Drink and it was completely different and, as Michele pointed out, completely unexpected. It seemed a local celebrity chef – who knew there was such a thing in Bluff? – lost his lease? interest? in a well liked restaurant at about the same time another restaurant went under because of COVID. The celebrity chef was running a sort of popup restaurant in the empty space. Michele ordered the Asian Chicken Salad while saying “This is probably a mistake.” and I ordered the Fish and Chips with a salad instead of chips, thinking the same thing. We were both wrong, the meals were excellent.

Our last dinner was at the Twin Rocks Café where we shared an excellent appetizer of Hummus made with Anasazi beans and served with ash bread. Michele had ribs with a salad, and I had a steak with a salad. They were both surprisingly good. As an aside, but still sort of interesting, the servers at Duke’s were all White, about half White and half Indian at the Comb Ridge Eat & Drink, and all Navajo at the Twin Rocks Café.

Most of the time we were staying in Bluff, we spent the days in the nearby Bears Ears National Monument because there isn’t much in Bluff. There is no semblance of a downtown, only The Church, Bluff Fort, a small non-governmental information center, with a couple of restaurants, motels, and a gas station spread out along Highway U.S. 191. Still, I don’t feel that we came close to seeing all that Bluff and the surrounding area has to offer.