The Real West: Utah

May, 2018

From our little cabin at Sevier River Ranch my sister and I can look down into the Sevier Valley at Hatch Station, a town split in two by Utah scenic highway State 89. 20 miles east lies Bryce Canyon National Park, and 40 miles south west lies Zion National Park. From the cabin’s back window we can view a sagebrush and mormon tea section of the 300 acre Ranch, and beyond to the long dark smudge of the Paunsaugunt Sunset Cliffs Plateau.

I think about how I felt the first time I saw Utah in 1987, thrilled by the magic of Horseshoe Canyon and its towering petroglyphs, the deep canyon mazes and petrified dunes of Arches, and Canyonlands with its Colorado River Plateau stair-step canyon walls and balanced rocks.

And how I feel now thirty years later. Quietly respectful and awed by the long, long southeast view from the Bryce Canyon rim down the Grand Staircase to shadowy mesas shrouding the iconic Colorado River.

The west is in my blood; there is no filtering or bypass machine that will erase it. I live in Oregon now, but it is all part of a whole, from the cedar wetlands of Vancouver Island, Olympic penninsula, Oregon coast, to dryer Redwood Humbolt, Mendocino, Monterey-Big Sur, the habitat-strewn desert valleys of the L.A. basin.

East to the Mojave, Panamint Mountains. Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, Sedona. Then on to New Mexico, Albuquerqe and northward to Monument valley in the vast Navajo Nation.

Not to mention Nevada and finally Utah.

The Grand Staircase, thousands upon thousands of hectares of canyon and mountain, is protected from mineral, gas and oil exploitation by the Escalante National Monument. In today’s turbulent political setting, I doubt visitors to this place of Southern Utah, coming here from Germany, Japan, Great Britain, South America, China, and anywhere else in the world, or anywhere else in the United States—North Carolina, Texas, California, Virginia, Michigan, Florida—would come here to see open lithium mines or fracking towers tucked up next to the Vermillion Cliffs or Squaw Bench or the Devil’s Backbone.

The people who are the archival custodians of the landscape: Paiute, Ute, Navajo, Hopi, fight for the few rights left to them.

After viewing the tourist meccas of Zion and Bryce, we take our last drive through the Sevier (pronounced “severe”), Plateau, high country tucked between two patches of Dixie National Forest. To our great luck we came upon a round-up. Jones Valley Road between Antimony and the Bryce Canyon entrance, travels through cattle ranges. It’s an open road with few fences, rolling sage brush and Mormon tea, and Herefords, Angus, and the breeds in between. The sky was a checkerboard of puffy clouds and we could see the Escalante Grand Staircase jagged red teeth to our south. My sister, driving, saw the cowboy first, galloping his quarter horse mustang along the highway in a big hurry. We passed him in his Stetson hat and chaps, and the next thing we saw was another small figure galloping in the road. Slowing, we saw a mottled, brindle cattle dog, high-tailing his way after the cowboy, his best buddy, to see if he was needed for the job of rounding up a steer or two.

Then, a clot of men, horses, cattle and dogs clumped against a barbed wire fence. We slowed, and waved, and they waved back; speckled cattle dogs grouped up with the mustangs, and a small herd of cows, heifers and calves, a collection of black and tan and red, huddled nearby.

Our last sighting as we left them, hurrying on so as not to provide distractions from their jobs, was another group. A horse trailer, a cluster of horses and people saddling up. To our great amusement, we saw boy in cowboy gear, maybe 11, grinning ear to ear and waving back at us as he readied his palomino pony, a gorgeous horse, for the round-up. No school today! Riding to herd with Dad and uncles and Mom.