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.

It’s Autumn and Michele wanted to go to the mountains to see some Autumn color on our trip to Southeastern Utah. We started East through Park City before turning south towards Price with a side trip up a rural road to Rainbow Lake (at exactly 10,000 feet according to the USDA).

Utah is stunning but, having seen the Fall Color in the Northeast and Maine, we are spoiled. Here, the Fall Color is mostly only in a band from about 7500 feet to 8500 feet and, in New England there is no place at 8500 feet but the color is everywhere.

By the time we get to Price, we are out of color and almost out of light. We spend the night at an 196070s Ramada Inn that has been refurbished recently but still has what I would call merchant builder details like fluorescent lights in a dropped soffit over the bathroom washbasins and a recessed toilet paper holder. We ate in the hotel dinning room which featured steaks served on a sizzling platter another 60-70s touch. Michele and I split a small steak, a salad, and roasted cauliflower and it was delicious. Tomorrow our plan is to go to the local dinosaur museum, drive through Nine-Mile Canyon and the spend the night in Green River.

OK, this is not a picture of Salt Lake City, I’ll come back to Salt Lake City later – and, from what we’ve seen, it is well worth coming back to – when I have a little more time. This is the view from our room yesterday morning in Bluff. The picture below is the view from our room this morning. They should help to explain why I haven’t been blogging.