Monument Valley, Moab, Glen Canyon, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon & Beyond – Southern Utah

Monument Valley, Moab, Glen Canyon,

Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon & Beyond -

Southern Utah

Madeleine Osberger & Steve Cohen

HUNTER PUBLISHING, INC,

comments@hunterpublishing.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

This guide focuses on recreational activities. As all such activities contain elements of risk, the publisher, author, affiliated individuals and companies disclaim any responsibility for any injury, harm, or illness that may occur to anyone through, or by use of, the information in this book. Every effort was made to insure the accuracy of information in this book, but the publisher and author do not assume, and hereby disclaim, any liability for any loss or damage caused by errors, omissions, misleading information or potential travel problems caused by this guide, even if such errors or omissions result in negligence, accident or any other cause.

Introduction 

Utah is home to canyons and mountains, desert and abundant waterways, thriving cities. The setting for novels by Zane Gray and Edward Abbey, film characters Thelma and Louise and Butch Cassidy, Utah has harsh country for individualists and tamer areas for the meeker at heart. The Beehive State (so called because of the industriousness of its residents) is the geological crossroads of the elevated tableland known as the Colorado Plateau, the western slope of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin, the huge expanse of land cradled between the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch mountain ranges.

The state boasts six national monuments, five national parks, countless wilderness areas and thousands of additional acres of public lands accessible for hiking, biking, skiing, rafting, fishing, and much more. Needless to say, these natural spaces provide one of the greatest year-round concentrations of adventurous pastimes.

The preponderance of rugged, virtually primeval terrain lends itself naturally to high adventure. Furthermore, the territory has long been pre-eminent in the pantheon of spiritual places to the native peoples who were first to settle here, and whose ancient mysteries and modern presence are keenly felt today.

If you want to experience the special nature of this exceptional area, and to get out and do things, this book is for you. It provides all the nuts-and-bolts information you need to plan and accomplish an informed trip, as well as specific details on a variety of adventures.

Ride a horse for a day, raft through rapids the next. Climb mountains for a week and know all the best fishing spots in advance. Ski at world-class resorts or snowmobile over hundreds of miles of groomed trails. Climb through ancient Indian ruins. Steer a jeep or a mountain bike over the Wasatch Plateau. Soar above it all in a glider, a balloon, or take a scenic motorized flight. Trek through labyrinthine canyon country with a llama to carry your gear. Snuggle under a blanket of stars while a draft horse pulls your sleigh through the snow. Dip a toe into thermal hot springs. Paddle a canoe or cruise on a houseboat. There’s enough to fill vacations for years, and it’s no surprise that so many people return year after year.

The Wasatch Mountains

The state’s population base is clustered around a 100-mile-long swath of mountains known as the Wasatch Front. There you’ll find the capitol, Salt Lake City, two university towns (Logan and Provo) that are home to high-tech industries, and the up-and-coming former railroad center, Ogden. The cities make great jumping-off places for high-country adventures. Venture beyond the Wasatch and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a crowd of people anywhere.

Utah is also home to some of the world’s best skiing. Feather-light snow, which dries out over the vast Great Basin, frequently slams hard into the Wasatch Range. The  result: feet, not mere inches of white stuff, cover the mountains. The majority of resorts are clumped within an hour’s drive of Salt Lake City.

Utah contains the modern mountain biking mecca of Moab, which seems to grow more popular every year. And there is much more, such as Arches and Canyonlands national parks, awesome Dinosaur National Monument, little-known Capitol Reef National Park, better-known Bryce and Zion national parks, the San Juan and Colorado rivers flowing into Lake Powell, the world’s second largest man-made body of water, and the less overrun option, striking Flaming Gorge National Park. The Great Salt Lake is an underutilized playground and pristine Bear Lake offers plenty of elbow room for sailors and motorboaters.

Canyonlands National Park – the Needles

This is to say nothing about the expansive spaces between these landmarks, slickrock trails, multi-colored tiered sandstone formations, snow peaks above clear alpine lakes, and cactus-studded deserts. Towering natural arches and bridges formed over millions of years by the effects of wind and water on stone dot the landscape.

There’s plenty of ground to cover, so careful plans are needed to manage the great distances involved yet still have time to do the adventurous things you enjoy. This guide gets right down to the logistics of having fun by connecting you with a multitude of pleasures in this wondrous part of the world.

Geography & History 

Long overlooked, Utah has become incredibly popular in the last few years. It evokes visions of Indians and cowboys, snow-capped peaks, buttes and mesas stalked by howling coyotes, wild rivers, and long sunsets. But the state has always been popular with those looking for wide open spaces beneath skies so clear they lend a brightness to the air.

The earliest nomads probably wandered down from Canada and the Bering Land Bridge, settling over time into the first stable populations. Their descendants were the ancient and now extinct Anasazi Indians, whose skillfully constructed and mysteriously abandoned communities are the source of today’s ruins. Other descendants were the Hopi Indians, whose oldest inhabited dwellings, just south of the Utah border in neigboring Arizona, look a lot like ruins. The Spanish came upon Navajos and other modern tribes when they explored the Southwest in the 16th century searching for gold.

A pair of Franciscan priests, Fathers Escalante and Dominguez, came through Utah in 1776 while charting a new route from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Monterey, California. The priests’ party found the Green River east of today’s Dinosaur National Monument. 

Looking down at the Green River

The second wave of European travellers came upon the Great Salt Lake in 1824 when fur trappers, Etienne Provost and James Bridger, made their way to the western side of the Wasatch Range. They were followed by Brigham Young and his band of followers who, fleeing religious persecution in the East, established a new  homeland called Salt Lake City in 1847. Mormons, trappers and traders – each had their mission.

Only in the last 175 years has the area experienced modern civilization. First came trappers and traders, then gold- , silver- , or copper-miners, followed by ranchers, cowboys, and business people who created small towns (many of which stayed small or became smaller).

Most of the mines are closed (save for the enormous Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City), but ranching and the cowboy arts are still widely practiced on vast, open rangelands.

The rugged contours of Southwestern geography haven’t changed much throughout the years. Much of Utah, outside the heavily populated Wasatch Front, still resists massive development, although once-inhospitable places are today’s pleasure spots. Towns in the wilder hinterlands of southern Utah are still few and far between, but they’re here. Confronting modern realities, these towns have survived by mining a mother lode of tourism dollars out of this hard land.

The enormity of the Southwest provides space that cannot be found in urban areas. And, even if you are accustomed to the outdoors, there’s no place else where you can find so many diverse geological, historical, cultural, and just plain drop-dead beautiful features. It’s a vast canvas on which to paint your own adventure.

In today’s rural Utah, the pickup truck is the vehicle of choice for ranchers. Horses continue to serve cowboys who really do wear pointy-toed boots, broad-brimmed hats or, increasingly, baseball caps advertising farm equipment. Dusty jeans and shirts with pearl snaps identify the cowboy style, a pervasive presence here. Except for ceremonial occasions, most Indians wear clothing that looks a lot like cowboy duds. The cities offer a more modern yet still traditional mix of attire.

The unlikely blending of three cultures – Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo – in a still remote, long-isolated environment far from any urban population centers has combined with various natural attributes of mountains, rivers, and deserts, to produce a unique status quo.

Accommodations range from campgrounds and dude ranches – that offer as much time on horseback as you can handle – to deluxe resorts. Dining out in the boonies here is mostly unsophisticated – not the chi-chi grilled avocado and mango salsa one finds in competitive Santa Fe. It’s mostly corn dogs and chile, sloppy Joe’s and salad bars. In the cities and along the Wasatch Front you’ll find some good ethnic restaurants, however. Hearty meals are more the rule than the exception and, in general, you get good value.

As for entertainment, you may be content to gaze at night skies filled with stars, but there are stomping cowboy bars with free two-step lessons or Indian dances. Some of these are ceremonial and restricted to tribal members only, while others are open for all to enjoy. A visit to the capitol city could land you at a Utah Jazz basketball game or a performance by Ballet West. The state has publicly supported the arts since 1899.

There is no shortage of Indian jewelry offered by roadside vendors, trading posts, and galleries. What you’ll find on sale ranges from cheap stuff to high-priced objects. Blankets, rugs, baskets, and pottery were once offered as simple trade goods, but even they are pricey these days, reflecting their recent return to the halls of fashion. Country crafts are prevalent in small towns everywhere, on the order of what you’d find in New England.

Activities related to the epic, hard terrain and seasons draw a ski crowd in winter, bikers and river runners in spring. Campers and hikers arrive in summer, leaf peepers and hunters in fall. The Utah outdoors has been claimed by a young, dynamic, fun-loving crowd. You will see sun-tanned hikers and kayakers cruising along in expensive four-wheel-drives with bike or boat racks. Alongside will be cowboys and Indians riding the range on horseback or in battered pickups with gun racks.

Personal values aside, the land remains the dominant force here. Everybody needs to pay close attention to nature’s power. In Utah’s canyon country the earth reveals deep cracks, dropping precariously to distant rivers. Buttes and mesas are nearby, striped in iron-tinged red and orange colors painted by geological epochs, with mountains, usually snow-capped, looming beyond.

Sometimes, at a quiet moment in a place far from the ordinary, ghosts of those long departed may even pay a visit.

You can go a long way out here without seeing another human being, but you probably won’t get far without finding evidence of deer, elk, rattlers, coyotes, eagles, ravens, turkey vultures, or hawks. Less frequently spotted are black bears, mountain lions, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and the occasional bison.

This spectacular landscape was created over eons by the geological forces of volcanoes, wind, erosion, flowing water, and movements of geological plates inside the earth’s crust. The result is sometimes phantasmagoric, as displayed by improbably shaped sandstone towers, serpentine canyons, or brooding mountains crowned by massive thunderheads. Water, though sometimes scarce, remains a fashion power as it flows from the snowmelt of high mountains. The streams it forms nourish forests and the giant Colorado River system, which drains the 130,000-square-mile Colorado Plateau. Even in the driest deserts a turbulent downpour can fill thirsty stream beds in a frightening instant. Flash floods can carry away homes, trees, and cars, then subside as rapidly as they appeared, leaving only damp testimony to nature’s power.

Of course, many have tried to tame these elemental forces. The area has attracted a long line of explorers and settlers. Indians constructed primitive cities and cultures 1,000 years ago with a sharp eye to the vagaries of nature, yet their dwellings could not protect them from nature’s omnipotent energy. Deserted structures – once dwellings and  now ruins – pepper the state and attest to ancient conflicts with drought, crop failures, and ensuing famine. Dusty trails may be all that remain of once-productive grassland that was thoughtlessly overgrazed and is now reclaimed by the desert. Crumbling mine structures recall expended mineral resources and dreams.

Modern researchers believe that nomadic hunter-gatherers were predecessors of the Anasazi Indians, presumed to be the area’s first settlers 1,500 years ago – coincident with the advent of agriculture and the farming of beans and corn, which became dietary staples. Around 500 years later, another nomadic strain of Athabascan Indians began its migration south through Canada. The earliest of these arrivals began filtering in 600 years ago – at just about the same time the Anasazi were abandoning their cities and disappearing into the sands of time. They are thought to be the ancestors of today’s Navajos and Apaches, as well as several other tribes. The term Anasazi actually comes from the Navajo language. Various interpretations give the meaning as the ancient enemies or simply the old ones. From these differing beginnings a variety of cultural conventions emerged, lending distinctive spice to today’s Navajo, Hopi and other Native American communities.

The earliest Anglos were ambitious, mostly hunters or traders exploring the territory. In 1825, the United States government purchased 530,000 acres of the Southwest from Mexico, including today’s Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of Colorado. Twenty or so years later, after the Civil War, Anglo migration began in earnest. News of gold, silver, and copper discoveries encouraged prospectors. Shopkeepers followed and word of the vast new region spread. By the mid-19th century, the railroads were racing to lay tracks, signaling the end of many centuries of isolation here.

With the rise of Anglo culture, once the government recognized the value of this epic wilderness, Indian interests were ignored or violated, igniting conflicts that would be resolved only after much strife and bloodshed. Eventually, around the same time the railroads chugged into towns like Ogden and then Promontory Summit, there was no turning back.

Monument Valley

Unfettered winds and raging waters of the Colorado River have created sculpted sandstone arches, towers, mesas, and scorched canyons on the Colorado Plateau. Mountains are a welcome surprise in the Great Basin, where ranges like the Deep Creek Mountains offer relief from the often bland valleys. From Naomi Peak in the north to Navajo Peak near Arizona, mountains are rimmed by somewhat tortured topography slotted by abrupt canyons. Monument Valley, which stretches across the Utah-Arizona border on the Navajo Reservation, is actually a Navajo Tribal Park with many access restrictions. Its famous buttes rising from the desert are certainly among the most photographed landscapes in all of the Southwest. A string of John Wayne movies in the 1940s and 50s, such as Fort Apache and Stagecoach, made these vistas widely famous. It was  director John Ford’s favorite location and an overlook within the park has been named after the Hollywood legend. For more contemporary references just click on your TV. You’re bound to see a commercial for a car or a soda that was filmed here.

Nature displays some of its most stunning sculpture in Utah’s canyon country. At Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge you can rent a houseboat for a day or a week of unhurried cruising through Glen or Red canyons; at Powell you’ll be stunned by the enormous stone span at Rainbow Bridge. 

Rainbow Bridge

West of Lake Powell, the multi-colored turrets and stone monoliths of Bryce and Zion national parks are as close to out-of-this-world as you are likely to find this side of the moon. If Bryce and Zion seem lunar then the red-hot and bone-dry canyons, along with the delicate, fascinating, and unlikely stone arches of Canyonlands and Arches national parks flanking the Colorado River must resemble Mars. To give you an idea of the scale of this region there are three unconnected dead-end roads that lead to different parts of Canyonlands. The entrance to each route is separated by more than 100 miles.

Across southern Utah foliage becomes scarce as canyons deepen below desertscapes. Summer temperatures are fiercely hot all across the Navajo Nation and in the canyons of Dinosaur National Monument. By contrast, the lush green valleys that tumble off the Wasatch Range are home to the state’s agricultural industry.

Parts of Utah have never been fully explored and some areas are as close to primal wilderness as you are likely to find in the lower 48 states. Turbulent whitewater rivers churn from snow peaks in springtime. After an average winter with more than 300 inches of snow in the high country, the Colorado River may run 40 feet above normal. Rafters float over rocks they would normally be floating under. Of course, the river comes back down and hardens into blistered, parched lowlands under the unforgiving summer sun. And yes, there are towns and dammed rivers, roads, airports, convenience stores on the reservations, and satellite dishes everywhere, some crowning home lots featuring Navajo hogans made of mud, sticks, and straw.

The roads here are better than in the old mining days, but rugged mountainous areas continue to defy all but idiosyncratic development, as evidenced by abandoned mines and ghost towns. Wildlife, wildflowers, and man all benefit as much from what’s not here as what is.

Regarding fashion, the vagaries of style that are in today and laughable tomorrow, Utah and the Southwest may be experiencing its Warholian 15-minutes of fame right now. For those who come in search of adventure, the mountains, rivers, canyons and mesas are very much the same as they were before they were stylish. They change at a glacial pace. They will be here tomorrow.

As always, the essence of Utah is discovered in the way being here makes you feel about yourself on the turf of cowboys, Indians, mountain men, and desert rats. It’s a hard  country open to all comers, but resistant to easy change.

The Nature Of Adventure 

Adventure travel has recently come into its own. It is no longer considered the province only of daredevils seeking the classic hang-by-your-teeth-over-the-jaws-of-death type of adventure, although that sort of trip is surely available in abundance out here. You probably won’t have to cheat death unless you choose to, but if you partake in a sampling of this book’s suggested activities, you will certainly raise your chances for having a life-affirming experience, without necessarily having a life-threatening one. Adventure doesn’t need to be a death march expedition, but it does need to get the juices flowing. At the least, it should provide attainable challenges that any reasonably fit and active participant with an open mind can enjoy.

Inside this book you’ll find extensive information on a range of activities, many of which will provide challenges relating to climate, altitude, remoteness, and physical fitness. Others may be less physically stressful while confronting your cultural perceptions.

From easy-to-accomplish soft adventures, family and senior’s trips, to daredevil ones that will really get your adrenalin pumping, you can find them here. There are activities you can pursue for an hour, a day, a week, or a month. Whatever your inclination may be the pay-off is in the remarkable regenerative power of a classic river trip, a bison round-up, an Indian ceremony, or an archeological dig.

Utah offers countless miles of maintained trails for you to hike, bike, and ride on horseback. If you’re a water-lover, river trips will lure you into canoes, kayaks, and whitewater rafts.

There are evocative backroads for you to explore by jeep and mammoth vistas to gaze upon from the gondola of a hot air balloon. You can visit historic and modern Indian and cowboy sites. You can travel by horse-drawn sleigh, raft wild rivers in springtime, climb cool mountains in summer, and explore canyons and high desert in fall, when mornings and evenings are cool, days warm, and changing leaves enhance the countryside.

How To Use This Book