I drift back to my days as a kid and my journeys into The Woods and realize I can still find that same mystical connection to the land when I’m picking through the ruins of an old mining cabin in the Yellow Cat, north of Arches, and I look up through the darkness to the exposed rotting rafters and find myself eyeball to eyeball with a Great Horned Owl, who never blinks, and out-stares me, and backs me out the door with his fierce glare. Isn’t that a wilderness experience?
Once, while driving cattle up Salt Wash, Toots and Marv came to a place where the horse would have to jump. “Dad didn’t want me on the horse when it jumped, so he scooped me off and sat me on a ledge. All of a sudden he grabbed me back. Well, there was a big rattlesnake right there between my feet…it had 14 rattles on it.”
In the evenings, Marv demonstrated the art of making flour sack biscuits. “He never used a pan. He’d roll up the sleeves of his long-handled underwear which he wore year-round. He’d scrub his hands and he’d get this sack and roll the top down and make a hole in the flour and smooth it out just like a bowl. Then he’d put in some baking powder, some salt and some shortening and mix it all around. Then he’d start adding water, a little drop at a time, and just keep working it with his hand. When he got enough he’d pinch it off and when he was through, you couldn’t find one lump left in that flour sack.”
One could make the argument that without the invention and development of the travel trailer, Moab’s Uranium Boom of the 1950s would have been even more chaotic than it was. Until Charlie Steen’s life altering discovery of uranium at Big Indian, 30 miles south of town, Moab was a sleepy little village most noted for its orchards. And it’s a good guess that many of those original settlers were appalled by the mass migration to Moab. Others welcomed the excitement and the prospects of a more vibrant economy. Moab has never been a town to agree on much of anything. The debate still rages.
In any case, would-be miners and prospectors flocked to Southeast Utah, only to find a community that was not in any way prepared to handle the Boom.
Delicate Arch…the name sounds familiar. In its online literature the National Park Service at Arches National Park calls Delicate Arch “the best known arch in the world.” In years past, the State of Utah considered the arch “so iconic” that it stamped the arch’s image on all state license plates. Visitation to Delicate Arch has recently become such an event that it is virtually impossible to experience the arch alone, or even with a small group of fellow tourists…
…As far back as the late 19th Century, ranchers and cowboys and maybe a few sheepherders had come across the arch. None of them were impressed; tourism was still an industry that had only occurred to a few. Even the uniqueness of this sandstone span failed to attract many visitors.
John Wesley Wolfe moved West from Ohio for health reasons. His doctor thought the desert air might extend his life. He and his son Fred found their way to Southeast Utah, to the Salt Wash area below the arch and established a ranch there in 1898. He built a primitive cabin and eked out a living. When his daughter Flora Stanley and her husband Ed visited him in 1907, she was appalled at the living conditions and made him build a new cabin. At some point he mentioned the arch to his daughter who made the two mile trek and is credited with the first known photo of what was then called “The School Marm’s Bloomers.” According to early Park Service reports, the arch sported a variety of nicknames, from “Pants Crotch,” to “Mary’s Bloomers, to the less colorful “Salt Wash Arch.” It most likely depended on which name the various ranchers preferred.
I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard, almost twenty years ago, that there were plans to tear down the historic Prospector Lodge and replace it with a hideous chain motel.
By all accounts, the Prospector was built in the mid-1950s fast on the heels of Charlie Steen’s uranium discovery and the unprecedented boom that followed. The little hamlet of Moab swelled to ten times its size, from just a few years earlier, and the construction of the Prospector was in response to that demand.
My knowledge of the Prospector’s history was pretty thin, so I turned to a facebook page dedicated to Moab’s history and asked for help. As always the response was immediate and full of details that I would never have known without their help.
How can we continue to condemn the irresponsible and unacceptable behavior of people that we believe are damaging our irreplaceable natural resources, while ignoring or playing down the ever-growing destruction caused by us! Non-motorized recreationists–hikers, group hikers, bikers, climbers, rafters, kayakers, runners, action tour groups!–all those enlightened sportsters who wrap themselves in the environmental flag and send money to the Sierra Club while wreaking their own kind of enviro-havoc?
But that is the route we took–instead of taking the noble route and simply stating that the designation of wilderness was the right and courageous thing to do, we tried to promote the economic advantages of wilderness. Wilderness Pays in Spades! Since then, the cumulative effect of billions of footprints and tire tracks, and the transformation of rural communities into ‘tourist towns’ from millions of ‘amenity migrants’ have left an indelible mark. In short, the natural beauty of our land was packaged and commodified and sold. By us. We’re not just talking “surface rights” anymore. This goes right to the soul.
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