The Waterpocket Fold

I gained a whole new respect for the BQE today.

To travel the forty miles or so from from Boulder, UT (pop. 180) to Torrey UT (pop. 171), I had to make a choice. Take the obvious, well-paved Highway 12, location of North America’s most spectacular scenic vistas or go the backway via "Utah’s most popular back road", the Burr Trail Road. Highway 12 runs north and then east; the Burr Trail runs east and then north, intersecting with our old friend, the Bullfrog-Notom Road, straight into Route 24 near Torrey. I was torn; Route 12 would take me over Boulder Mountain, elevation 11,317 feet, through forests and canyons. The Burr Trail Road would take me via unpaved roads through the high desert wilderness, leading into Capitol Reef National Park. There I would pick up the Bullfrog-Notom Road and drive for nearly forty miles right up against the wall of the Waterpocket Fold, an amazing geological phenomenon in which the earth split open and created two shelves, one above the other, forming a 95-mile-long wall running north and south. Of course I was tempted by the Burr Trail, but I felt slightly imperiled by descriptions in the guidebooks of the “extremely steep, snaking switchbacks” which are “not for the fainthearted” because of the “vast dropoffs” from their unguarded, unpaved heights.

Hmmm. A young lady working at the lodge suggested that I take the Burr Trail only as far as it was paved, which would allow me great views, and then turn around and drive up to Boulder on lovely Route 12. It sounded like a perfect solution.

I headed out first to fill the tank, clean the windshields (a futile effort just before driving into the desert), and get some breakfast. I went to a little house with several gas pumps out front, called the Hills and Hollows. A truly old-school hippie establishment, they served delicious, homemade breakfast burritos and stocked all manner of organic foods and petroglyph refrigerator magnets in their grocery. I nuked a burrito and ate it at a little picnic table outside in the sun, to the accompaniment of two cats whining for black beans. They got nothing, but I saw them leap into the trash can after I tossed out my empty plate.

Heading out on the Burr Trail, I was filled with a sense of anticipation. It was, as always around here, very quiet. The scenery quickly became spectacular. It must seem like I’ve been gurgling about rocks for weeks now, which is true, but they really are amazing. As Charlie pointed out, it’s a geological wonderland out here. Each place has a different look and feel, even though the descriptions sound like a whole lotta rock.

I drove for about twenty miles to the end of the paved section, where I pulled over and looked over the edge of a mountain pass. The first car of the day, a small RV, chugged up the switchbacks. It seemed to be moving impossibly slowly. The RV made it to the top and the driver gave me a happy wave; it couldn’t be that bad. So I plowed forth, down the mountain, expressing out loud my gratitude that no one approached from the opposite direction, because there was no way I was moving any closer to the edge. From there on out the road was unpaved for a good forty miles. Much to my surprise, I hit a much larger mountain pass, with even more extreme switchbacks – this one called Muley Twist allegedly because even mules could get twisted up in it. An owner of the Boulder Mesa Grill, where I’d eaten yesterday, had told me that when I got to this overlook I had to get out of the car and yell as loudly as I could so I could hear the five echoes. I did as I was told. Standing on top of a big rock, I looked out for what seemed like a thousand miles and screamed at the top of my lungs. As promised, I screamed back five times, once from each facing cliff. It was pretty cool so I did it a few more times. Had I actually been screaming for help, the echo probably wouldn’t have been very reassuring, but in this circumstance it was exciting.

Then I took off down the switchbacks, holding my breath and exhaling after each hairpin.

At the bottom, I turned north onto the Bullfrog-Notom Road and bounced along through stretches of road buried in sand, rough areas that the highway patrol officially refers to as “washboard,” and a few more comfortable miles with gravel. The four-wheel-drive Escape hummed along, undeterred. That's when I had a vision of the potholed BQE, on the Brooklyn side of the Kosciuszko Bridge, and realized how I'd taken it for granted.

At the Notom Road I came face-to-face with the Waterpocket Fold, which I’d heard about but never seen. It looks a bit like a construction site dug by giants. There’s a lower wall on the west side of the fold, a much higher wall on the right, and a narrow opening in between. About 65 million years ago, the earth’s surface heaved and buckled, creating this surface wrinkle that runs almost 100 miles through south-central Utah. The earth opened up, pushed the rocks out, and left them there, This formation is called a monocline, which is a stairstep formation. Apparently, the Waterpocket Fold today is a sneeze compared to what it used to look like, due to the erosion of all these millennia. Billenia. Whatever. (I posted some photos on my Flickr site; they offer an understated idea of what the Fold looks like.)

Eventually a forest ranger passed by, but otherwise I passed only one other car during the three-hour journey. On "Utah’s most popular back road"!

*****

I stopped at the Capitol Reef National Park visitor center (Capitol for the capitol-like white dome monolith in the park; Reef as a name that 19th century pioneers gave to craggy land.) After picking up some maps and trail guides I headed for the Sky Ridge Inn, my destination for the night. The inn is a big house sitting atop a rise overlooking Torrey, and its windows offer glorious views and horizons on all sides. I was shown upstairs to my cozy room, The Pinon, decorated with Navajo rugs, a big animal pelt on the floor, and ironwork hangings representing petroglyphs, popular symbols in these parts. The innkeeper opened a door that looked to be a closet but instead gave on to a hot tub resting on a deck in the open air. Wow! The entire side was open, so that when I took a soak after sunset, I was able to lay in the hot water, locate the Big Dipper (pretty much the limit of my astronomy talents) and enjoy a sky full of stars.

We'd stayed at this inn on last June, when we were driving Rosa from Open Sky Wilderness to Falcon Ridge Ranch in southeast Utah. The innkeepers had seemed uptight and not very friendly, so I was a bit guarded today. The man, who calls himself “Jerr,” invited me to join them for snacks at 5PM.

I did wander down to the dining room a little after 5, where Jerr appeared to be sleeping in an upright position on the sofa, facing the sunset. I said hello, hoping not to startle him, and he showed me to a little sideboard of meatballs and several dips. His wife, Shauna, appeared, looking a bit nervous about having to stir up conversation with a lone guest.

I asked her how long she’d been here, and she said six years – she’d grown up near Salt Lake, left the state at 25, and expected never to come back, yet here she was. I was anticipating one of those glowing “how can you stay away from southern Utah” stories, but to my surprise when I asked her if she was glad to be back she said, “No, I don’t like it here. The inn’s for sale and we’re moving. I want to retire.” I immediately warmed to her. I asked her why she didn’t like Torrey, and she said it's too conservative. “The people here call their church ‘The Church,’ she said, referring to the Mormons. She then spoke scathingly of St. George as a “sweet little Mormon town” that she hated.

She went on to tell me that she and Jerr are a blended family with seven children (none in common) and eleven grandchildren ranging from mid-twenties to eighteen months. Before long, she mentioned that their daughter, mother of the eighteen-month-old baby, has a “partner,” which was code. “Yep,” she said, “this baby has two moms.” I congratulated her on her new grandchild, and she promptly pulled out a picture of little Sofia, mentioning that the sperm donor was Russian, which accounts for the child’s blond hair (?), although both moms are dark-haired.

When I mentioned my daughters having been part of a wilderness program, she asked if I meant Aspen, a wilderness therapy program in nearby Loa. I told her that they’d been at Open Sky, near the Colorado border. “Is this a program for at-risk kids?” she asked. I told her that it is, and she explained that she teaches a parenting class at the local school and God only knows how her children survived her, as she hadn’t the tiniest idea what she was doing while she was raising them.

After a little while she excused herself to attend to her and Jerr’s dinner and I retired to my cozy room with cup of chamomile tea.