Tag: Canyonlands National Park

1950: BEFORE ‘CANYONLANDS’ WAS A PARK…The Other ‘Place No One Knew” by Tug Wilson (ZX#96)

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Alan “Tug” Wilson isn’t exactly a household name to most Zephyr readers. But it should be. While he may not be instantly recognizable, many lovers of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks will recognize his father. Tug was blessed to be the only son of Bates Wilson. In 1949, Bates became the first official superintendent of “The Arches,”  when it was still a national monument. Just a year after his arrival, Bates was introduced to the vast untouched landscape to the west of Moab— and north and south of the little town as well. The canyon Country of southeast Utah was still an almost untouched landscape, known only to the ranchers and cowboys of Scorup/Sommerville Ranch, and a handful of intrepid explorers. The land lay empty for centuries…

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“THE HOME OF TRUTH” —– By Lloyd Pierson (For Marie Ogden’s Followers in the 1930s, the Vortex of the Universe was at Photograph Gap) ZX#24

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Visitors to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park may wonder what the three groups of rag-tag buildings are along the entrance road shortly after leaving the Moab to Monticello Highway. The rapidly deteriorating buildings give little indication of the dreams and high holy aspirations of their former inhabitants. It was on this desolate sagebrush plain that a religious colony (some called it a cult) was founded. Its not so modest name? “The Home of Truth.”

Well, Truth theoretically has to exist somewhere and this forlorn spot in the great Colorado Plateau is probably as good a place as any for the elusive deity to reside.

The colony was founded by Mrs. Marie Ogden in 1933, a well educated widow from New Jersey, after she received a spiritual revelation. Mrs. Ogden’s husband, an insurance executive, had died in 1929 at an early age, back in New Jersey. In her grief she turned to serious religious study and, guided by an inner light, began to seek “the truth” and an understanding of life and death. As she delved further into religion she began to preach and to convince others of the correctness of her beliefs. Her religious activities took her over most of the east preaching and lecturing and at least as far west as Boise, Idaho, where she reportedly had the revelation to establish a religious colony devoted to “the truth”.

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