PASTORAL, n. A poem which describes the scenery and life of the country.(mus.) a simple melody. From Nevil Shute’s Pastoral.

I want to start with an aside. When President Trump reversed President Obama’s establishment of Bears Ears and Escalante Staircase National Monuments, I thought it was just an anti-Obama show of power with more show than substance. Yes, it was a nasty, petty act; but it was also a political act, a political quid pro quo with the entrenched Republican power structure of rural Utah. I had not understood the seriousness of drilling and fracking for oil or gas in rural Utah. My mantra has been, Why worry? Nobody will drill an oilwell in rural Utah because it is much cheaper to drill in the Permian Basin and much cheaper to transport to a refinery.

But that is the mantra of an outsider who who doesn’t understand the reality on the ground. Nine Mile Canyon is rural, not near any towns rural, only one road through it rural, but it has several places where people are drilling for oil or natural gas (or something). Sure, it is much cheaper to extract oil from the Permian Basin and much, much cheaper to transport that oil to a refinery, but the Permian Basin is a rich man’s game. The small-time operator who can only raise a million or two has to settle for making less money. But less money is not no money and they can still make a buck or more by drilling in rural Utah where the local politicians have greeted them with open arms hands.

Now that we have driven down Nine Mile Canyon and seen several extraction operations, I don’t feel so sanguine about Bear’s Ears or Escalante National Monuments being safe. Now I understand that I have been looking at the problem from the wrong angle, and, if we let them, there will always be somebody willing to take less money to stay in the game and politicians to accommodate them. End aside.

Nine Mile Canyon is cluttered with prehistoric art. It has an estimated 1,000 art sites, and there are more than 10,000 individual images in the canyon. The canyon is touted as one of the world’s biggest and densest collections of prehistoric art. In any other state, it would be, at least, a State Park with trails, outhouses, and, probably, an entrance fee. In Utah, almost every place is spectacular and the bar to parkhood is much higher so the canyon is only loosely protected by the BLM, the Federal Bureau of Land Management (although a couple of the abandoned cabins seem to be protected by one of the local counties).

The road into Nine Mile Canyon starts by going up a canyon into the mountains only to change its mind to drop into the actual Nine Mile Canyon near its top to follow the small but reliable year-round stream flowing towards the Green River. The water makes this a place that invites the passerby to settle down, and various peoples have been doing that for over 2,000 years. This is also a place that is not easy to scratch out a living, so during that 2,000 years, humans have only lived here sporadically. Still, it seems most of them left evidence that they had been there.

Rather than go into detail, I’m just going to leave you it with a visual pastoral (most pictures taken from the car are by Michele and she took the coral detail and the last detail of a wolf? attacking a sheep? both of which were taken by her iPhone).