Beauty Spots in Southern Utah

Beauty Spots in Southern Utah

By Geo. Stewart, M. S., in cliarge of Field Crop Investigations, Utah Ex- periment Station

Beauty is not always concentrated. Sometimes it is spread out in mere glimpses. These glimpses may be lost to the traveler unless his awareness is keyed up to the expectation point. Such alertness for "New Country" often makes the difference between a pleasant trip, and a toilsome journey that is endured only because of the goal. Zion Canyon is awe-inspiring, partly on account of the grouping around a central point. So compact is the grouping and so concentrated the contributing points of interest that a person is baffled in an effort "to take it all in." When all is over a sense of futility possesses him, and he wishes to spend a month exploring the nooks and corners. Such feelings are fruitful of lasting impressions. After all a man enjoys being made to feel insignificant, provided the cause is not another man.Surrounded by nature this feeling of unimportance lifts him almost to reverence; in a crowd it may become humiliation. Bryce Canyon accomplishes the result in another way, but the imprint is the same. Sometimes, however, a single glimpse that sets the heart a-throbbing may be so well encompassed as to leave the intellect satisfied. The sense of beauty is not intellect alone, nor is it emotion alone. These two great orders of sensation can blend in such a variety of ways as to surprise. It is just this variety that enhances scattered spots of beauty.

///. San Juan

San Juan is so far away and so hard to reach that many who visit it lose all sense of its beauty in their great desire to leave it behind them. Probably this is because its beauty is potential, merely latent, so to speak. In this peculiarly unexplainable quality it excels. The traveler does not gasp at a sudden, extravagant outpouring of grandeur; he is scarcely aware of its approach but shortly he has a feeling of its presence, and when he looks, there it is all around. It is just this sensation of being surrounded, as by darkness, that comes to a person when first he crosses the wide plateau east of Monticello. Rolling and undulating hollows

Top: Beautiful new church at Blanding (Grayson). Center: Notch where the Grand river leaves Moah valley... Taken from a moving automobile. Bottom: Wash, caused by a flood in the summer of 1919, close to the town of Moab.

g96 IMPROVEMENT ERA of would soon pass into monotony were it wot for dark clusters cedar (juniper). To whirl through these patches of dark green and come suddenly on a broad stretch of oats, just beginning to

whiten in the evening sunshine, stirs the imagination. Through half-closed eyes, miles and miles of oats and wheat can be made to replace the sage and cedar, to fill the hollows and spread out over the broad swells. Dry-farm oats are riregular in Utah, an anomaly, the politician would say. In fact, they are so unusual that an agricul-

turist realizes he is not standing before merely potential beauty, but beside realized aspiration. Just last summer San Juan produced a yield of dryland oats that competes with the best in America. It may even win one of the great national prizes if it has not already done so by the time this article appears in print. All, however, are not enthusiastic over the soothing pleasantness of ripening grain. That moderated, yet exquisite sense of beneficent beauty is sent only to the lover of the soil. It is fitting for a man who loves his work to find poetry in unsuspected places. In that is much of his compensation. To such, a bounteous harvest in the midst of sage and cedar brings the great joy of peace and charity. There are times when the great Creator visits his Spirit on fields of grain. Other spots of beauty there are. Half way from La Sal to Monticello stands "Big Injun." A single pillar of red sandstone rises well over the horizon. From a half mile on either side a naturally carved monument is visible. The warrior stands erect with his blanket drawn across his shoulder and held in the hand with arm extended. Head-dress, blanket, chest, shoulders, and body are all distinct. Aboriginal America will never be dead out in that stretch of wilderness. Great dignity and poise never more became a chieftain of flesh and blood than they do this wind-carved statue, seventy miles from the nearest railroad. At close quarters, of course, the monument becomes a great mass of weathered rock as tall as a six-story building. Still another, more intimate, reminder of original ownership is an ancient cave-dwelling three or four miles beyond Bland- ing (formerly Grayson). A road leads across a field and winds through the cedars beyond. It ends abruptly on the brink of a box canyon two or three hundred feet deep and twice as wide. Tucked away under an over-hanging cliff is the ruin of a min- iature village. The upper ledge is the roof but the walls are of loose stone and the door mantles of cedar tree-trunks. A hole and a crevice leading upward have been blackened by hundreds of fires. Some seven or eight rooms, the size of a large bathroom, can be found. Here and there in protected crannies are pieces of corn cobs and fragments of some unrecognizable vessels? Where are the architects? Who shall say whence they

BEAUTY SPOTS IN SOUTHERN UTAH 897

came? Their descendants had passed from mortal vision long before the first white European saw the country. Many such witnesses bear their silent testimony in the vicinity of the great Colorado. It would not be fair to leave Moab unmentioned. From Thompson on the Denver and Rio Grande, a long and fairly rapid descent of thirty-five miles brings the wayfarer to a pleas- ant valley two thousand feet below the surrounding country.

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Top: Dry-land wheat in San Juan near Monticello. Bottom: Dry-land oat field near Lockerley, east of Monticello,

898 IMPROVEMENT ERA

Great ledges of gray and red sandstone loom on either horizon. The canyon of the Grand river widens into meadow and cultivated orchard. The red sand is fertile in a high degree. Peaches, apples, and pears bear the branches nearly to the ground; cantaloups as large as a man's head ripen in endless numbers; corn so tall that Iowaiis look jealously, reaches almost to the treetops. It is truly wonderful, what there is of it. However, it would make just three good-sized farms, two on one side of the Grand and one on the other. Another flood or two will leave even these considerably smaller. Then, as a fitting touch of beauty, the river steals out through a deep notch on the further side of the valley just as it seems to well out betwen two great cliffs on the east. Strange memories are called up of how James White claims to have gone through the Grand canyon in 1869. A person wonders whether he camped in this beautiful little valley, and whether his raft had yet begun to pull apart. Far away to the west, great pinnacles loom up on the very edge of the horizon. Somewhere in that wilderness of box canyons and unscalable buttes, the Green and the Grand unite to form the Colorado. Then from out the shaded past comles the long-lost story of J. W. Powell, and how, in 1869, and again in 1871-72, he twice traversed the entire length of the Grand canyon. It was this party who mapped the canyon, its pools and rapids, its tributaries and mighty gorges. No romance of Mediaeval days is more stirring than this adventure. The glory of the past and the meagerness of the present for a moment clasp hands, and then, phantom-like, disappear.

'Big Injun Rock." The left arm seems extended supporting the blanket.