A monocline is a step-like fold in rock strata consisting of a zone of steeper dip within an otherwise horizontal orgently-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.
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 plansby 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.
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.
