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

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.