Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We left Capitol Reef, wishing we could stay longer. The last leg of our trip would take us to one of our favorite haunts—Moab. The drive time is about four hours, but the nice thing about Utah is that the traveling is almost as enjoyable as the destination. There is seldom a boring mile. Most of the trip is along Utah 24, another “scenic byway,” not completely paved until the 1960s. After the Mormons colonized the southeastern part of Utah, in the years following the expedition through the Hole in the Rock, they began to backtrack westward and establish settlements. Some of the land surrounding the Fremont River was suitable for farming and ranching, and communities were formed in Hanksville, Caineville, Torrey, and Fruita. The last one was the most interesting. Founded around 1880 and originally named Junction because it was at the confluence of the river and Sulphur Creek, Fruita (pronounced “froot-uh”) became famous for its fruit trees. The village itself never housed more than a few families, but the orchards helped them to prosper. Utah.com tells us: Read More

The drive from Zion National Park to Capitol Reef National Park is spectacular. Almost every road in southern Utah has been designated a “scenic byway,” or for unpaved roads, a “scenic backway.” The landscape changes radically once you drive through the Mt. Carmel tunnel and out the East Entrance to Zion; the dramatic sandstone cliffs of the park give way to flatter ranch lands. Since the change is so startling, I recommend that you enter Zion from the east rather than from Interstate 15 as we did. As is true for so many national parks, the land surrounding them gives no indication of what is in store for the visitor a few miles away. About twenty miles east of the tunnel, you arrive at the intersection with Highway 89, which traverses the Great Valley, a wide swath of relatively fertile land between rocky hills and cliffs. Springs, creeks, and the Sevier (pronounced “severe”) River allow more ranching and farming than is otherwise the case in arid southern Utah (Mormons have a well-deserved reputation for farming in inhospitable outposts, but they also had more water available that a casual observer might think and they relied upon techniques like irrigation ditches first employed by Indians). Between the intersection and the turnoff at Utah 12 to Bryce Canyon National Parks is the town of Orderville. Today the population is about 600, and there is nothing that distinguishes the place to the eye. But late in the nineteenth century, Orderville was a communist society, established by order of Brigham Young, under the direction of the United Order. I discussed Orderville in a previous post, and I refer you to that. There were other egalitarian communities in Mormon country, in both Utah and Nevada. The short-lived United Order community of Bunkerville, Nevada (near the cheap-motel gambling mecca of Mesquite) is the birthplace of the writer Juanita Brooks (1898-1989). Brooks, the granddaughter of a Mormon pioneer, Dudley Leavitt, went on to write the first in-depth history of the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. Leavitt may have participated in the infamous massacre, although this has not been definitively established. Read More

“Zion”: A fortress. An ideal religious community. A sanctuary. A perfect place.  Zion National Park is in that part of Utah known as “Dixie.” Brigham Young, looking both to consolidate his earthly empire and to begin cotton production, partly to make up for the lack of cotton fabric brought about by the Civil War, sent colonists into what is now the southwestern corner of the state. Later, Young build a summer home in the region’s largest settlement, St. George, which today is a city of nearly 80,000 people, its rapidly growing population driven in part by warm weather and proximity to Las Vegas. Read More

For the third time in four years, we visited southern Utah in November. There are five national parks here and many other beautiful public spaces. I don’t think there is a more spectacular place in the country. The high sandstone cliffs of Zion National Park, the hoodoos and fantastical shapes of Bryce, the upheaved earth and gigantic rocks of Capitol Reef, the Delicate Arch in Arches, and the harsh grandeur of Canyonlands all make you happy that the national government has not caved in completely to the private interests that would mine and drill every inch of these special places if they could. And I doubt the Mormon hierarchy would try to stop them. I can’t imagine that Orrin Hatch is a “vagabond for beauty,” like Everett Reuss, the intrepid young chronicler of these vast and sparsely settled lands. Read More