My Sojourns in Utah
Posted: September 3rd, 2025, 7:55 pm
I wanted to see the red cliffs of the desert Southwest, the ones in old western films. So I headed east across Nevada's gradual rise and fall toward Utah's steep cliffs. How could these two states share a border? Yet at the border they shared the same Nevada-like open majesty, and cowboys made a living the same way on either side. I filled the tank at a roadhouse by a road sign-- "No services for 100 miles"-- and rolled toward Confusion Range, three ascending ridges shaped the same, in roan, gray and smoke-blue.
...... Over the next pass a dark brown ridge appeared, like a hundred others in all directions except topped by a steep cliff shaped like a submarine fin. Was it the edge of cliff country? No. I still had oceans of subtle rise and fall to go, sea after shining sea of it, and after what seemed a thousand miles, when I finally reached the Wasatch Mountains, still no sign of red cliffs.
...... Here I entered into a clean, orderly world of Mormon towns, a world I'd later experience when I spent time in Saint George, Utah. But I knew little about the Mormons, only what I'd read in a book by Edward Abbey, the cranky genius of desert poetics, who lived at Arches National Monument in the '60s before it was overrun, near Moab, Utah. He lived among Mormon folks and helped herd their cattle even as he questioned a few tenets, like how did Joseph Smith carry a half-ton of gold under his arms? But Ed said the Mormons deserved respect because they settled a hard, chaotic land with their orderly, sturdy towns built around a church, social welfare and shared irrigation.
...... But that was history, which had nothing to do with the red cliffs. Where were they? I rolled untold miles, rising into the pines and falling onto plains, and it was only after all anticipation had dissipated for hundreds of miles when I glimpsed that first vivid red cliff: gateway to a fantastical world. The road fell to madness along ever higher cliffs until it veered onto a path beside a long gash in the earth called Waterpocket Fold.
...... On my right I saw a bizarre reef like twisted entrails, fifteen hundred feet high, and on my left, stratified, textured cliffs in orange, red, gray and green. Orange pillars like sentries stood watch in a wonderland worthy of gawking crowds, yet there was no one. The hard silence of that scene didn't fit its grotesque visuals, a silence deep within the exposed strata even more intense than on the sagebrush seas. Maybe the best art exposes what is unsettled within.
...... I found a switchback trail through upended rock strata tilted as steeply as the trail, into a twisted theater, its players out of promordial havoc. Near the rim I saw a tapered barrel and fin like a sandstone shark surfacing, and halfway up the next slope I looked back on those strange players on a strange stage, then I climbed onto red dirt with a view of pink pastel cliffs across the next valley and into a narrow canyon as light faded and walls closed in, but I squeezed through before they got to me.
...... In the morning I headed toward Escalante on a nondescript juniper plain, but soon a dropoff crept in from the west, then a dropoff from the east, until that so-called nondescript plain shrank to a hogback barely wide enough for two lanes, high above a jumble of pale rocks on both sides. The road fell into a red canyon, then slalomed up the far side, curling around swirling petrified dunes. Surreal inspiration.
...... I returned to red cliff country a few times, to surreal scenes, hoodoos, arches, boulders balanced atop spires, sandstone flames from torrid earth, meandering stream canyons carved deep in rock by little trickles that couldn't have done the carving; scenes so far over the top that you'd invent them for amusement if only you had the imagination. Scenes in Nevada were sensible, but red cliffs made no sense, steep and chaotic. Some cliffs had names like "The Throne," and I tried to picture how they might look from ten thousand feet straight up, cliff edges more rounded and familiar, like a cell, or a planet.
...... On a plateau above that redrock madness I came to a town called Blanding, which had the standard Mormon street grid mandated by Brigham Young in the 1850s, like all Utah towns from Salt Lake to Scipio, 200 East, 100 North and such. The people in Blanding were friendly except for a crossing guard at a school who gave a death stare as I sped past at 16 miles an hour. Blanding was a fine town, a dry town, no place to get a beer. John, the motel owner, an ex-farmer with big leather hands, told the tale of the 1879 Mormon expedition, how they had to blast a hole in a cliff in order to lower their wagons into Glen Canyon by rope, a place now called Hole in the Rock.
...... So, the next day I headed toward Glen Canyon to find that cliff with a hole in it. The road passed by Comb Ridge's spiky spine shaped like a rooster's comb, and through Red Canyon's blood-colored hue, and I veered south, up to Nokai Dome to rest on a perch high above an orange rock maze forked by strange blue arms of the Lake Powell reservoir.
...... Somewhere on the far side, maybe twenty miles off, was Hole in the Rock, the amazing pioneer feat, though I'd probably never get there because roads in the jumble of canyonlands are their own destinations. I beheld the orange maze and was sure that if I spent enough time wandering through it I'd find hidden folds never seen by human eyes until I came along. Then a sudden whoosh of wings startled me as a hawk pushed off in a burst, black wings rocking, gliding, riding drafts, out on a hunt.
...... I had a perfect ledge, but for some reason I retreated back down the trail into the canyonlands, and just as my eyes began to adjust to that wondrous, weird world of rock, I came around a blind corner and a raised hand appeared in the desert light and my trek was suddenly halted at a police roadblock, a tidy litttle sting operation set up to nab drunken boaters towing their aquatic beasts up from Lake Powell back toward civilization.
...... I knew I'd done nothing wrong, but a natural sense of doom sets in when one is so abruptly corralled by the law. Maybe I should've seen it coming at the end of a holiday weekend and only one paved road out, so do the math, except the desert was never about math, only its silent, eternal being.
...... Three cops leaned on their cars until the most barrel-chested of the three approached.
...... "License and registration."
...... Check, and check.
...... He went back to run a check to see if I was a threat to society, and after a long time he returned and told me to get out of my truck so he and another cop could search it, and I'm not sure why. My hair was getting long, or maybe he noticed a reggae tape on the dashboard.
...... "If I find pot, you are going to jail."
...... "I don't smoke pot."
...... Which was true. But a mild panic set in as the cops searched my truck; a friend back home was into pot and I hoped he hadn't left any damning evidence lying around. But nothing came of it. They took what was left of my legal whiskey and wrote a ticket, and I took off with a vague sense of guilt because a barrel-chested cop did his job.
...... So I turned back toward Nevada. I knew I'd return to cliff country someday, to those bizarre canyons watched over by unseen canyon gods, but I needed to get back to Nevada's more gradual rise and fall. Near Hite I saw a round red tower butte and rows of cliffs beyond, each row in a bluer haze with distance, and the Henry Mountains' soft purple outline above, like a bit of Nevada floating above rock chaos and steep cliffs, those vertical aberrations like the Las Vegas towers except created by earth forces, not temporary folly.
...... At the Nevada line I came to the Salt Lake Desert, a dirty white flat to forever, nothing visible across it. I climbed up a side trail, and as I reached to shut off the truck I heard voices in the engine noise and I froze. But it was only the radio. A signal drifted in across the void, followed by others, and they became a weird mashup of political rants, sports and country songs all talking over each other in rhythmic throbs, amid an Antarctic sort of desolation, where beaten slopes made one last stand before they melted into the sea, and the nubby remains of an old Pony Express station did the same.
...... Over the next pass a dark brown ridge appeared, like a hundred others in all directions except topped by a steep cliff shaped like a submarine fin. Was it the edge of cliff country? No. I still had oceans of subtle rise and fall to go, sea after shining sea of it, and after what seemed a thousand miles, when I finally reached the Wasatch Mountains, still no sign of red cliffs.
...... Here I entered into a clean, orderly world of Mormon towns, a world I'd later experience when I spent time in Saint George, Utah. But I knew little about the Mormons, only what I'd read in a book by Edward Abbey, the cranky genius of desert poetics, who lived at Arches National Monument in the '60s before it was overrun, near Moab, Utah. He lived among Mormon folks and helped herd their cattle even as he questioned a few tenets, like how did Joseph Smith carry a half-ton of gold under his arms? But Ed said the Mormons deserved respect because they settled a hard, chaotic land with their orderly, sturdy towns built around a church, social welfare and shared irrigation.
...... But that was history, which had nothing to do with the red cliffs. Where were they? I rolled untold miles, rising into the pines and falling onto plains, and it was only after all anticipation had dissipated for hundreds of miles when I glimpsed that first vivid red cliff: gateway to a fantastical world. The road fell to madness along ever higher cliffs until it veered onto a path beside a long gash in the earth called Waterpocket Fold.
...... On my right I saw a bizarre reef like twisted entrails, fifteen hundred feet high, and on my left, stratified, textured cliffs in orange, red, gray and green. Orange pillars like sentries stood watch in a wonderland worthy of gawking crowds, yet there was no one. The hard silence of that scene didn't fit its grotesque visuals, a silence deep within the exposed strata even more intense than on the sagebrush seas. Maybe the best art exposes what is unsettled within.
...... I found a switchback trail through upended rock strata tilted as steeply as the trail, into a twisted theater, its players out of promordial havoc. Near the rim I saw a tapered barrel and fin like a sandstone shark surfacing, and halfway up the next slope I looked back on those strange players on a strange stage, then I climbed onto red dirt with a view of pink pastel cliffs across the next valley and into a narrow canyon as light faded and walls closed in, but I squeezed through before they got to me.
...... In the morning I headed toward Escalante on a nondescript juniper plain, but soon a dropoff crept in from the west, then a dropoff from the east, until that so-called nondescript plain shrank to a hogback barely wide enough for two lanes, high above a jumble of pale rocks on both sides. The road fell into a red canyon, then slalomed up the far side, curling around swirling petrified dunes. Surreal inspiration.
...... I returned to red cliff country a few times, to surreal scenes, hoodoos, arches, boulders balanced atop spires, sandstone flames from torrid earth, meandering stream canyons carved deep in rock by little trickles that couldn't have done the carving; scenes so far over the top that you'd invent them for amusement if only you had the imagination. Scenes in Nevada were sensible, but red cliffs made no sense, steep and chaotic. Some cliffs had names like "The Throne," and I tried to picture how they might look from ten thousand feet straight up, cliff edges more rounded and familiar, like a cell, or a planet.
...... On a plateau above that redrock madness I came to a town called Blanding, which had the standard Mormon street grid mandated by Brigham Young in the 1850s, like all Utah towns from Salt Lake to Scipio, 200 East, 100 North and such. The people in Blanding were friendly except for a crossing guard at a school who gave a death stare as I sped past at 16 miles an hour. Blanding was a fine town, a dry town, no place to get a beer. John, the motel owner, an ex-farmer with big leather hands, told the tale of the 1879 Mormon expedition, how they had to blast a hole in a cliff in order to lower their wagons into Glen Canyon by rope, a place now called Hole in the Rock.
...... So, the next day I headed toward Glen Canyon to find that cliff with a hole in it. The road passed by Comb Ridge's spiky spine shaped like a rooster's comb, and through Red Canyon's blood-colored hue, and I veered south, up to Nokai Dome to rest on a perch high above an orange rock maze forked by strange blue arms of the Lake Powell reservoir.
...... Somewhere on the far side, maybe twenty miles off, was Hole in the Rock, the amazing pioneer feat, though I'd probably never get there because roads in the jumble of canyonlands are their own destinations. I beheld the orange maze and was sure that if I spent enough time wandering through it I'd find hidden folds never seen by human eyes until I came along. Then a sudden whoosh of wings startled me as a hawk pushed off in a burst, black wings rocking, gliding, riding drafts, out on a hunt.
...... I had a perfect ledge, but for some reason I retreated back down the trail into the canyonlands, and just as my eyes began to adjust to that wondrous, weird world of rock, I came around a blind corner and a raised hand appeared in the desert light and my trek was suddenly halted at a police roadblock, a tidy litttle sting operation set up to nab drunken boaters towing their aquatic beasts up from Lake Powell back toward civilization.
...... I knew I'd done nothing wrong, but a natural sense of doom sets in when one is so abruptly corralled by the law. Maybe I should've seen it coming at the end of a holiday weekend and only one paved road out, so do the math, except the desert was never about math, only its silent, eternal being.
...... Three cops leaned on their cars until the most barrel-chested of the three approached.
...... "License and registration."
...... Check, and check.
...... He went back to run a check to see if I was a threat to society, and after a long time he returned and told me to get out of my truck so he and another cop could search it, and I'm not sure why. My hair was getting long, or maybe he noticed a reggae tape on the dashboard.
...... "If I find pot, you are going to jail."
...... "I don't smoke pot."
...... Which was true. But a mild panic set in as the cops searched my truck; a friend back home was into pot and I hoped he hadn't left any damning evidence lying around. But nothing came of it. They took what was left of my legal whiskey and wrote a ticket, and I took off with a vague sense of guilt because a barrel-chested cop did his job.
...... So I turned back toward Nevada. I knew I'd return to cliff country someday, to those bizarre canyons watched over by unseen canyon gods, but I needed to get back to Nevada's more gradual rise and fall. Near Hite I saw a round red tower butte and rows of cliffs beyond, each row in a bluer haze with distance, and the Henry Mountains' soft purple outline above, like a bit of Nevada floating above rock chaos and steep cliffs, those vertical aberrations like the Las Vegas towers except created by earth forces, not temporary folly.
...... At the Nevada line I came to the Salt Lake Desert, a dirty white flat to forever, nothing visible across it. I climbed up a side trail, and as I reached to shut off the truck I heard voices in the engine noise and I froze. But it was only the radio. A signal drifted in across the void, followed by others, and they became a weird mashup of political rants, sports and country songs all talking over each other in rhythmic throbs, amid an Antarctic sort of desolation, where beaten slopes made one last stand before they melted into the sea, and the nubby remains of an old Pony Express station did the same.