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.

Driving to Salt Lake City – the fastest way – involves getting to Highway 80 and mindlessly blasting east for two six hour days. The first leg of the blast is driving north thirty miles to San Francisco, then, getting serious, we turn right, go through the Coast Range in the general area of the Sacramento River delta , across the Great Central Valley, into the Sierras. It is a trip I have done hundreds of times and watched it urbanize a little bit each year.

Now, on this trip, we pass through the Sierras, past Reno, into and through the Humboldt Sink to Winnemucca, Nevada; mostly in the dark as is our way. Two thoughts keep reoccurring to me as day fades into night, Nevada is underappreciated and everyplace is a long way from Coastal California.

We spent the night in Winnemucca Nevada in an unmemorable motel after an unmemorable dinner served by a young Mexican woman with impeccable, accent free, English which, she said, she got from reading a lot. The next morning, we drove east for 124 freeway miles to Ely Nevada for breakfast.

We are on Highway 80 which very roughly follows the California Trail – of Donner Party fame – which, itself, was following the Humboldt River as it flows west into the Humboldt Basin. The Humboldt River is the largest River in Nevada and it flows for about 250 miles across the top 1/3 of Nevada.

Elko is an surprisingly wonderful little city – OK, very little city – that features the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering each January and has over a hundred street murals. The Poetry Gathering is sponsored by the Western Folklife Center and, by all accounts, it is terrific. And I say that in all sincerity.

After Elko, we are back on the road again.

As we drive through Eastern Nevada, we see several bridges over the highway that seem to go from nowhere to nowhere. I think that is the point, they are wildlife corridors that allow migrating – or just curious – animals to cross the highway. Increasingly, humans are starting to realize that this planet has not been put here for us to destroy.

We are starting to realize that we are not the only worthy animals on the planet. Some people even believe that all life is valuable – and I count myself among them – and needs to be considered when making decisions, especially infrastructure decisions. In Los Angeles they are now building a wildlife corridor over the I5 connecting the isolated Santa Monica Mountains to the wildness of the San Gabriel mountains, essentially because the Santa Monica Mountains mountain lion population is genetically isolated. The estimated cost is 90 million dollars and it is inconceivable that, twenty years ago, any official agency would have even considered this.

We pass through West Wendover Nevada where people coming from the east get their first chance to gamble and then Wendover Utah where people can’t gamble. Then we drive past the Bonneville Salt Flats where we had expected to watch some very dedicated hotrodders trying to break various arcane speed records before they were rained out. From Bonneville, it is a long straight haul to Salt Lake City, arriving in the dark.