There is no there there. Gertrude Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography. 

(idiomatic) The indicated thing, person, or other matter has no distinctive identity, or no significant characteristics, or no functional center point…Wiktionary.

When I visit Bears Ears, I am visiting the ancestors. I leave an offering, and I reconnect back to my ancestors. This whole area is sacred to us — from a petroglyph to a site, from a spring to a viewshed, from the smallest rock to the mountains, they talk, they speak with us. Octavius Seowtewa the head medicine man of A:Shiwi (Zuni) tribe and a member of the Zuni Cultural Resources Advisory Team.

People go to Niagara Falls to see Niagara Falls. If they see the surrounding area, that is a bonus, but that is not why they went to Niagara Falls. Bears Ears has no Niagara Falls; it is all surrounding area. That is not to say that Bears Ears isn’t worth saving; it is a vibrant environment, rich in scenic beauty, rich in human history, and considered sacred by five local tribes. It is very much a place worth saving; it is also an acquired taste. People lived here a long time ago, and they left traces of their civilization, traces of our common history on this land. The traces are everywhere but they are mostly hidden.

When Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in the waning days of his presidency, I was surprised even though I had two memorable backpacking trips in the general area. The first was from Bears Ears, itself down to the Colorado River in Dark Canyon, and the second was down Grand Gulch from the Kane Ranger Station to Collins Spring. They were memorable trips, and Dark Canyon was especially spectacular, but they were multiday backpacking trips in hard-to-reach areas. The easy-to-reach stuff just didn’t seem to be that distinctive.

Now that Michele and I have actually been to Bears Ears and seen it as a separate entity on the ground, I don’t think I was entirely wrong. Not entirely. My first reaction was that the lack of a signature sight was a problem, but that was only my first reaction, my White Tourist reaction, not my reaction after talking to people and reading about it. Bears Ears is not meant to be a typical National Park/Monument destination for us aimless tourists; it is intended to protect the land and the treasures on that land.

As an aside for those who don’t follow Utah Wilderness legislation, President Obama, under Proclamation 9558, established the Monument as a 1.35 million acre set-aside. For comparison, that is larger than the Grand Canyon or Glacier Nation Parks (or the State of Delaware). On December 4, 2017, President Trump, under Proclamation 9682, reduced that to 201,397 acres (while adding 11,200 acres). Then, President Biden, under Proclamation 10285, restored the Original set-aside plus the 11,200 acres President Trump had added. End aside.

Protecting this land, however, is more complex than we would like it to be. It raises the question, Whose land is Bears Ears? Who are we protecting the land for? This corner of Utah is contested land; the land is sacred to the local tribes, but the Mormons also consider the Hole in the Rock Trail sacred or semi-sacred, at least. And what about the guy who says “My great-grandfather hunted on this land, my grandfather and father hunted here, and now you’re saying I can’t? My hunting rights are sacred to my family and me.”

To try to resolve this and to make everybody happy – or equally unhappy – the Proclamations call for joint management by saying the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior (Secretaries) shall manage the monument through the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), respectively…with guidance and recommendations on the development and implementation of management plans by a Commission of one elected officer each from the Hopi Nation, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray, and Zuni Tribe. Everybody we talked to about this convoluted management plan added, “Whatever that means.”

Another thing we heard, over and over again, is along the lines of “Now that this is a National Monument, there will be a lot more people and more vandalism. They should have just left it alone.” I’m sure that is at least partially true. When we spent six days hiking Grand Gulch, we saw no other people. On this trip, we saw people everywhere. But it probably would have become popular over time anyway. The area is just too spectacular.

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.

Starting with an aside, I don’t actually think Interstate 70 is called The eye 70 in Utah but it probably will be soon enough because that is what it would be called in LA and what happens in LA seldom stays in LA. End aside.

The western part of Utah is in the Basin and Range Province and pretty much stands by itself (or stands with Nevada). The I70 sort of splits the rest of Utah: north of The I70 is in the Rocky Mountain Province, the skiing part of Utah, and south of The I70 is the Colorado Plateau, the mesa country, the canyoneering part of Utah. Up until this trip, Michele and I have spent all of our Utah time south of The I70 and the north side was an revelation to us, it is both scenic and interesting but, for me at least, it isn’t as additive as the Colorado Plateau.

Our original plan was to go from Price to Moab, but after spending last night in Price, we decided to spend the next night in Green River…at the Holiday Inn Express. Green River because Moab, the next place down the road, was more money than we wanted to spend, and the Holiday Inn Express because it is, strangely, a hotel that always seems to work for us. This Holiday Inn Express is not an exception. Although its location was bizarre, plopped down in the middle of nowhere, of all the places we stayed in Utah, this was the most suitable and the most anonymous (hmmm, maybe that should be the least personality). But, among other features, this Holiday Inn Express has a desk with two chairs and a walk-in shower.

The best thing about staying in Green River is that it gave us a chance to visit a small museum named the John Westly Powell River History Museum. The museum is small but John Westly Powell is a giant, probably the biggest historical name in this part of the world. Powell is best known for being the first European – actually, the leader of the first group – to run the Colorado from the Green River in Wyoming, through Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon to the Virgin River.

This little museum celebrates Powell and also celebrates what I would call the River Runner Life. It is hard to raft a river – any river, probably, but especially here – and not be strongly affected by the landscape as you float by. The quiet and the wildness are ever present and that has greatly influenced this museum. The Mission of the museum, or more accurately, the mission of the group behind the museum is Celebrating the significance of river history through the cultures and landscapes of the Colorado Plateau and their Vision is Ethical stewardship of the rivers, landscapes, and cultures on the Colorado Plateau.

Green River is less than an hour from Moab but they are in different worlds. Even before we got to Moab we saw large staging areas – for lack of a better term – with people unloading their off-road vehicles, getting ready for their off=road adventure. In a surprising way, Moab feels like a ski resort in that it is packed with young people, is vibrant, and it gives off the feeling that everybody is here for the same reason. But Moab has no snow, Moab’s skiing is off-roading and like skiing, off-roading requires a lot of special equipment, takes up a lot of space, and seems to be best enjoyed in groups. When I skied, I loved the comradery; now that I’m not skiing, I find it slightly off putting and Moab gives me the same vibe.

Of course, that is not entirely true, there are people here to hike and river raft, and there are people here to explore the two National Parks, Canyonlands, and Arches. Moab is crowded because Moab is the most famous town in this part of the world, and, as Michele said, they didn’t know where else to go.

The last time I was in Moab was just after Thanksgiving, before the lockdown, and it felt very similar to the first time I was there in the early eighties. Now it is unrecognizable. Like almost every ski resort I’ve been to or driven by recently, people in Moab are now buying condos like crazy. The town is packed. We stopped there for lunch at the Trailhead Public House &Eatery, I had an $18 burger, and Michele had a turkey burger with cranberry chutney, both of which were excellent. Then we got out of town, heading for Bluff with a detour through part of the Needles District of Canyonlands to see Newspaper Rock.

Canyonlands is broken up into three distinct areas that are separated by the Green and Colorado Rivers. I’ve been to the northern area, Island in the Sky, several times, but I’ve never been to the Needles District. Island in the Sky is the main show and the Needles always seemed out of the way, and it still is, so we end up only poking our nose in. People have been leaving their marks in this area for at least two thousand years, even before the Freemont culture, way before the Navajo peoples and up to, at least, C.D. Gonzales b 3 54.

Mike Iverson tells the story of a chance meeting he had with an petroglyph expert – or at least a guy who had been studying them for the last thirty years – while camping in the Gold Valley section of Death Valley. Mike asked him how could someone tell which were petroglyphs and which were idiot-glyphs. He answered “The longer I look at them the more I think they are all idiot-glyphs”. I’m inclined to agree.

What ever your opinion, Newspaper Rock is the best example I’ve ever seen. BTW, the dark brownish color on the surface of the rock is called desert varnish and it comes from infinitesimal amounts of iron and manganese oxide being deposited on exposed sandstone over a very long time. This area is the Indian Creek section of Bears Ears National Monument and it backs up to Canyonlands. It was one of the areas that President Trump had eliminated from the Bears Ears Monument.  

As the day winds down, we drive almost due south through Blanding, population 3,750 in 2010. This is rural Utah, red Utah, next to what most likely will be a permanent National Monument. In The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau postulates that each Nation – read area – is distinctive because different groups originally colonized them with different cultures and subsequent settlers blended in with the original culture. That is why Boston and New York are so different or San Francisco and Los Angeles. The interaction between the very old, old, and new cultures in Blanding should be interesting.  

As we drive south in the sun, we run along the edge of a storm, but it is gone by the time we get to Bluff .

 

 

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).

Utah is one of the most important archeological zones on the planet. Visitors can see or excavate undiscovered dinosaur species at the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price or visit ​​Jurassic National Monument, with the densest concentration of late-Jurassic bones ever found. Rachel Rueckert in Utah Elevated.

I first saw Price Utah in January of 1968. I know it was January because we were on our way to Aspen Colorado to go skiing. We were young – and hardy – and had driven from Oakland California to Salt Lake City Utah in one long day and were going to Aspen in a another long day. Now, even with freeways, it would probably take us four days. I don’t remember Price but I remember Helper, the city – town? – next door as seemingly miserable under grey skies and down-wind from a very dirty coal mine.

We had originally decided to stay in Price because it was near Nine-Mile Canyon, a treasure trove of Early American rock art. But Price brought the bonus of a smallish museum with the largest collection of fossils in Utah. This is a coal mining area, or was at least, and, apparently, coal beds come with lots of fossils (although, I’ve just learned, the layers between coal beds often produce the best fossils).  

I’m not particularly interested in dinosaurs: I do care enough to have been interested in and an early convert to Robert Bakker’s theory that, at least, some dinosaurs were warm blooded but not enough to know the full name of any dinosaur except Tyrannosaurus rex. I am also not particularly interested in early mammals; even less interested, actually. But I am very interested in the natural world and evolution as its primary driver – that’s not the right word, maybe creator – of our world so I’m always interested in Natural History Museums. The Prehistoric Museum, Utah State University Eastern – doesn’t that sound like the name is translated slightly wrong? – is a charming small museum that hits way above its weight. .

It may not be for everybody, but I think the principal diorama of two skeletons is a knockout. It is a mythic scene of an early Utahan, Homo sapiens, killing an even older Utahan, Mammuthus columbi. The scene takes place about 10,000 years ago at about 9,0000 feet, and Homo sapiens, that’s us, had arrived some time earlier in what is now Utah . The landscape wasn’t much different from today, but many of the very large animals that ruled the world 10,000 years ago are now extinct. Killed by the exotic humans which archeologists increasingly think started to arrive in North America about 29,000 years before this killing.

The size difference between the two animals is striking, as is the use of atlatl by the human. It is hard to ignore the implication that we are a dangerous species and that we are using our tools to change the earth.