Salt Lake City surprised and sometimes delighted us. It was unexpectedly interesting. Salt Lake was founded by Brigham Young and the Mormons who were following him. Those early believers laid the streets out on a rigid north-south grid- just like Escalante, only way bigger – and they have to be wide enough to turn an ox-drawn wagon around, both of which contribute to a slightly different feel than, say, San Jose. Salt Lake is both grubbier than I expected, with lots of homeless people, and booming, with the construction of new apartments almost everywhere.

As an aside, I wonder if a booming local economy and homelessness are connected. I hope not. End aside.

Salt Lake also feels more Liberal than I expected, with a woman mayor – the city’s third woman mayor, BTW – although on thinking about it, the Liberalism might be an illusion. I think it feels more Liberal to me because I associate Liberal with concern for the greater Community, as opposed to living in a gated community, and Salt Lake City’s many new public buildings and parks exude Liberal Civic Pride.

In the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, almost due east from downtown – and I’m defining downtown as Temple Square – is the Natural History Museum of Utah overlooking Salt Lake City like the Lawrence Hall of Science over Berkeley and the Bay. I’ve read, and Linda Melton has reminded me that the tallest buildings in a village or a town or – even/especially, take your pick – a cosmopolitan city reflect the place’s values. In that way, this building which is high on a hill overlooking Salt Lake is a statement building saying Science is valued here, which somehow warms my soul.

The Museum is designed by Ennead – that’s all, Ennead, just Ennead – who have offices in both New York and Shanghai and seem to be a sort of a co-op specializing in museum and public buildings. They have designed a 427,000 square-foot natural history museum for the Yangtze River Estuary Chinese Sturgeon Nature Preserve, the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University in New Jersey, the Wuxi Museum and Art Park near Shanghai, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University near us – actually two buildings at Stanford – and the University of Michigan, Biological Sciences Building and Museum of Natural History (for starters).

The Lobby is enormous, with a wall of windows overlooking Salt Lake City and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. At the back of the Lobby is an excellent topo map of Utah. I love maps like this, and I could have stayed there all day. With all this going for it and its excellent pedigree, I wished I liked the museum more. My lukewarm opinion might be influenced by the fact that we went through the museum backward. The Museum is a strange hybrid of an old-timey-style museum at the bottom and a new-style museum on top. When we bought our tickets, they told us that most people take the elevator to the top but walking up the ramp from the bottom would give us the exhibits in chronological order. We chose chronological order and walked into the largest collections of dinosaur fossils I’ve ever seen. It was overwhelming, and by the time we got to the skimpy section on early man, three floors up, we were pretty burned out.

There were two things about the museum that annoyed disturbed surprised us. When we walked up the ramp to the museum, we ran across very noticeable lines in the concrete walks and retaining walls with numbers. The lines seemed random, with some lines straight and some curved. We asked several of the museum staff what they were, but nobody knew, and one guy even asked his supervisor, who also didn’t know. Now, come on! somebody put the lines and numbers there for a reason, and they are the opening sequence of a museum visit, our visit, anyway. Later, while we were staring at a giant skeleton, one of the guys we had asked about the mystery lines came up to us and pointed out that there was only one real fossil in the display, the rest were copies, and we could tell which one by its exoskeleton. Because the copies were lighter than the stone original, they could stand up on their own.

BTW, Michele and I think the lines represent the contour lines of the original, pre-graded, site.

The second building in our building walk day was The City Library, designed by Safdie Architects in conjunction with VCBO Architecture. Looking at the VCBO website, I think the heavy lifting was done by Safdie Architects, whose list of famous public and semi-public buildings starting with Montreal’s Habitat, built in 1967, is legendary. Fifty years later, they are still going strong. Safdie Architects’ oeuvre includes buildings like Alice Walton’s – of the Walton family – Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the 1.3 million square foot Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore, Exploration Place Museum and Educational Center in Wichita, Kansas, and the United States Institute of Peace Headquarters in Washington. Moshe Safdie is the founder, but according to their website, Safdie Architects is an extended family of partners and colleagues. I think all of these new, much younger, partners and colleagues are why the firm is still so creative.  

The City Library is stunning, playing a reflective glass building against a huge curved colonnade, with a five story open space between them. The colonnade has shops on the first floor and four floors of reading areas above, with stairs leading from the plaza to the top of the library on top. The elevators connected the floors are behind glass elevator shafts and are kinetic sculptures.

Coming-up, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work that well.

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There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.

Michele and I think of Boulder when we talk about going to Utah. We have, after all, been going there, going through there, or going near there, for about twenty-eight years. We haven’t been to Salt Lake City even once during that twenty-eight years. Now, looking through my latest pictures, I wonder if we have been to Boulder, either. Where we have been is the Boulder Mountain Lodge and the Hell’s Backbone Grill, which, in actuality, are sort of cultural islands. Cosmopolitan islands in a provincial sea.

Both the Boulder Mountain Lodge and Hell’s Backbone Grill were designed by the architect that did several of Steven Spielberg’s houses? buildings? and they look like it. I want to quickly say that I mean that with the greatest admiration. It feels like it has been here for years; and it hasn’t. In a conservative society like Boulder, that is a virtue. This is a destination resort, without a pool, or activities, or…anything , really, but a room with a view of the next door wetlands and two picnic tables. The first time we came here, it was because Boulder was where the pavement ended and the graded-dirt Burr Trail, which was the only access to the trails on the east side of the Escalante River Basin, started; this time, we came here just to have dinner at the Hell’s Backbone Grill and see the scenery.

On the other side of the wetlands that the Boulder Mountain Lodge overlooks are the remains of an Anasazi village that was inhabited from about 1050 AD to 1200 AD. Now it is the Anasazi State Park Museum. Other than the park, Boulder is pretty much a ranching community without much to see. That probably should read at its heart, it is still a ranching community despite its growth and the cross-pollination between the native population – for lack of a better term – and transients like us. In 1999, the population was listed as 136 and slowly declining; by 2000, with the arrival of the Lodge, it was 184, and now the population is 236.

For us, the biggest attraction in Boulder is dinner at what is probably, our favorite restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill. The food at the Grill is excellent, good enough to be a five-time semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurant from the James Beard Foundation. Still, it is the way the owners have become part of this small town, and have changed it, and have been changed by it, the spiritual groundedness and connection of the restaurant’s owners, that leaves the longest impression. Although Boulder is a small provincial town without much in the way of attractions, the surrounding area is world-class scenic.

Finding world class scenery in Salt Lake City, is, however difficult to find. But far from impossible.

  In Salt Lake City, it is much easier to find world-class buildings. To be continued.

 

 

 

A monocline is a step-like fold in rock strata consisting of a zone of steeper dip within an otherwise horizontal or gently-dipping sequence. Wikipedia

“Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it — it’s amazing.” tagline in ad for Vilnius, Lithuania.

My Utah is all about the landscape and the geology that has made that landscape. Sure, there are Indian ruins and petroglyphs and lots of fossils, but it is the land that draws me, over and over again, to Southeastern Utah. For close to half a billion years, this part of the world was, off and on, underwater. Half a billion years is a long time, and, during that time, material washed down from the nearby mountains in different ways and at different times. Part of that time, this area was at the edge of a supercontinent, Pangea, which reached from the Antarctic to the equator, and part of that time, this area was at the bottom of a shallow sea that divided the North American proto-continent. By 70 million years ago, these thousands of different layers settled underwater, horizontally, about 10,000 feet deep. Then, as Pangea was breaking up, the Farallon Plate very slowly rammed – rammed can’t be the right word for something that is only moving inches a year, but what is? – into the North American Plate and, because underwater plates are heavier, the Farallon plate started to slide under the North American Plate.

As the Farallon Plate slid under the North American Plate, it raised the Sierras and the Rockies along with the Colorado Plateau, exposing them to erosion. For reasons I need to fully understand, unlike the Sierras and the Rockies, this area of thousands of layers of sentiment was raised almost level resulting in the different layers, now thousands of feet above sea level, still roughly horizontal. This nearly level area is composed of layers of varying hardness. Millions of years of erosion have washed away the soft layers on top until the hard layers were exposed, forming large flat mesas with steep drops into canyons or, at the eroding edges, down to the next hard layer.

As if that were not enough drama, deep below these layers, accumulating under water, were vertical faults caused by various compressional forces. Above the faults, the layers were vertically displaced. In the Waterpocket Fold’s case, this movement along the fault caused the west side to shift upwards by more than 7.000 feet compared to the the east side. The overlying sedimentary layers were draped above the fault and formed a monocline.

We drove north from Bullfrog along a long cliff formed by this monocline and then turned west to go through it on our way to Boulder, Utah.

I can’t imagine any place more different from Utah than Lithuania, but it sure looks like an interesting place to visit.

I expect the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of the most wonderful lake in the world, Lake Powell, is my crowning jewel. Floyd Dominy, the Reclamation Commissioner who pushed for and headed the Colorado River Projects.

Glen Canyon Dam is an insult to God’s Creation, and if there is a God he will destroy it. And if there isn’t we will take care of it, one way or another, and if we don’t then Mother Nature most certainly will. Edward Abbey.  

The reservoir—Lake Foul, to its detractors—would, I assumed, last far longer than I would. There was no way I was going to get to see what lay beneath it. It turns out I was wrong. This isn’t because I was too pessimistic; rather, I wasn’t pessimistic enough. by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker, The Control of Nature Issue: The Lost Canyon Under Lake Powell

Michele and I left Bluff to drive to Boulder Utah. Michele had initially planned that we would spend one night at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell to see how low the water level had dropped. We wanted to gloat; I’m a little embarrassed to admit. But Bluff’s goodness convinced us to stay an extra day, so we just spent an half an hour at Bullfrog. Still, an half an hour was enough.

Before this trip, I’d only seen Lake Powel five times. Once from the back of a pickup truck on the way to Dark Canyon, once with Michele when we went to a photography class in Page AZ, once when Michele and I crossed the lake on the ferry at Hall’s Crossing, and once when Michele and I went to see the Cathedral in the Desert. The Cathedral trip was in 2005, when the lake level had dropped to a record low and the Cathedral was exposed for the first time since it had been covered.

I’ve never seen Glen Canyon (except in my imagination). Nobody has seen it since 1963, and very few people saw Glen Canyon before 1963. 1963 was the year Lake Powell started flooding Glen Canyon to turn that part of the Colorado River into a reservoir, beginning a controversy that is much more passionate than anything at Bears Ears. People either love Lake Powell or hate it. I’ve never talked to anybody that knows the story of Glen Canyon and Lake Powell that is neutral. I’m on the hate-it side, by the way.

The dam was built during the 1960s when building dams was a virtue; they were going to tame the West. In California, where Governor Pat Brown’s motto was Make no little plans, when he ran against Richard Nixon in 1962, he bragged about how many dams his administration was building. But the Colorado, the biggest river in the Southwest, only had only Hoover Dam, which formed Lake Mead, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, whose main job under Commissioner Dominy was to build dams, wanted to build more.

Initially, the Bureau proposed building another dam near Dinosaur Nation Park, but that plan met too much public resistance and was abandoned. Then the Bureau tried to build a dam just below the Grand Canyon, which also met resistance, especially from the Sierra Club. But nobody cared about Glen Canyon; nobody – OK, almost nobody – even knew about it. Glen Canyon cut through what was probably the most remote place in the lower 48 states. From afar, it is just an area of mountainous rock and scrubby bushes. A place where nobody lived or, apparently, wanted to live.

But a mythic Eden was below the plateau, down where the Colorado River has cut the canyon. People who had been to Glen Canyon said it was the most beautiful part of the Colorado River, with 186 miles of winding river and 96 named side canyons. John Wesley Powell – the lake’s eponym and first European to go down the Colorado from Wyoming to the Virgin River – wrote that Glen Canyon was an ensemble of wonderful features — carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. Although I haven’t seen Glen Canyon, I’ve seen several side canyons, which are my favorite places in the world.

People who object to damming the Colorado here, like me, usually object on something akin to a moral issue. To destroy a place that beautiful, that unusual, that sacred, is just wrong. It is an ecological disaster not only under the reservoir, but it is also an environmental disaster downstream. Downstream, through the Grand Canyon National Park, the icy-cold water released from the bottom of Lake Powell washes away beaches and kills the river’s indigenous wildlife.

Aside from the ecological damage, there is another reason for not liking Lake Powell. Long term, which is actually pretty short, a dam just doesn’t work here. The Colorado just carries too much silt . When the dam was originally built the Bureau of Reclamation estimated it would take 700 years for the lake to fill with silt, now the estimate is about 55 years. Another reason the dam is counter productive, is that the area of the lake’s surface is exponentially more than the river, and the wide body of standing water increase the amount of evaporation and more water is lost.

We thought we would have our first sight of Lake Powell at Hite Marina, but the reservoir was gone, and the Marina was abandoned (Temporarily Closed, the sign said). All that was left was the muddy Colorado running free, way below the end of the boat ramp.

We were here to see the results of the West’s drought on Lake Powell, so we went south to the Marina at Bullfrog, where the monocline that forms the Waterpocket Fold ends. The last time we were here was in 2005, and the marina was packed. Trucks towing boats were backed up for a quarter mile, waiting to use the boat ramp and the wait for a boat rental was 45 minutes even though we had a reservation. Now Bullfrog is empty, and so is the hotel overlooking it. We went into the hotel to go to the toilet and only saw two lonely employees. The life is gone, and so is the view of Lake Powell. It is sad, and I didn’t expect that.

The whole sordid thing is sad, the most beautiful stretch of the Colorado River is underwater water and rapidly filling with silt. The reservoir is 170.7 feet below the level the dam was designed for, and the capacity is down to only 23.83% of what they call Full Pool. Neither one of us felt like gloating.

I got up Friday morning and checked Twitter to see what is happening in Ukraine. It made my day.

When we hear news of liberating villages in Kherson region.

Glory to Ukrainian Armed Forces! pic.twitter.com/biyhYCAv9p

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) November 10, 2022

You still here?! It’s over! Go home! pic.twitter.com/AYkQhrEXJK

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) November 11, 2022