Best of the Southwest – Canyonlands – Day 4 – Price, Utah; The Wedge; Buckhorn Wash; San Rafael River; and Green River, UT

Overview

Our fourth day on the road was going to be a very special day indeed. We were going to get WAY off the beaten track and see places that no tourists ever visit. The weather was dry and we would be driving on all-weather gravel roads appropriate for any vehicle other than those with low clearance or during and after a bad storm. But there would be very few road signs, and nothing with the name of a road on it, so we would usually be wondering where the hell we were. Google maps wouldn’t work. This would be the kind of day that would put most people a little outside their comfort zone. It was definitely not for the faint of heart. But I had done some of this route in a Toyota Corolla passenger car a few years back and I knew that as long as we paid very close attention we’d be fine. The ending was still a bit sketchy but I had plotted the approximate distances between crossroads, using Google Earth, and I also knew that the BLM posted signs to our three primary destinations: The Wedge Overlook, Buckhorn Wash, and the historic San Rafael Bridge. So, if we took our time, and made sure that we were closely following the road log directions, our little foray into the back of beyond would be well worth the effort, and would definitely be one of the days we would remember the most vividly from our Southwest trip.

Price, Utah

The oddest thing about Price was that it had several highway interchange overpasses. Yes, I know, they are all over a lot of urban America, but not in rural Utah. In fact, the closest interchanges from us would have been far to the north up in Provo. And what made it doubly odd was the fact that there really wasn’t that much traffic. In fact, other than the ore mills, the whole town looked abandoned.

The highway was lined with the usual chain motels like Super 8 and Motel 6. We stayed at the National 9 on the south end of Price in a dump of a suburb town called Wellington. I have no idea why the hell I booked it. Probably because it had a pool. But the pool was broken. The room looked and smelled like it had been the scene of an a long time come murder. The TV only had ten fuzzy channels – two in Spanish and three of a religious nature. The hot water setting in the shower required pure luck to operate properly. And there were few plug-ins for our electronics. Basically, we stayed in the “Bates Motel”. By morning we were quickly on the road, heading back north to check out Price, hoping it would look better in the daylight that it had at night.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. In fact, in the light of day Price was butt ugly: grid-numbered, wide as a runway, streets lined with concrete drainage sluices for when it flash floods; parched cottonwoods wilting in the broilarama sun; shitbox shacks and houses of brown brick dripping with incredible poverty; untended yards of brown vegetation doing their best to smother the toy-littered porches and yards; desperate trailer parks; a noisy train rumbling through the heart of the sleepy city center at all hours; dusty pickups; many structures adorned with large American flags; the war memorial statue honoring the fallen dead who served their country with honor; and shuttered stores that looked as if they were abandoned in a hurry, like the Anasazi fleeing some unforeseen disaster. The people moved slow, were exceedingly friendly and courteous, loved to jabber away, and always asked us where we were from. It was just a thoroughly depressing picture, like life in a sun-baked quicksand limbo.

But Price did have it’s redeeming qualities, starting with Big Moe’s Eatery and Bakery, located on a quiet side street. The Carbon County Fair was is full swing and apparently the whole town was over at the fairgrounds for breakfast because we were literally the only people in the place.

The owner, a very nice lady named Jeanne, seemed happy the place wasn’t busy. “Lunch will be the usual mob scene,” she predicted as she served us our very tasty breakfast and then let us be. We took advantage of the free Wi-Fi and caught up on our Facebook posts and e-mails.

I picked up a copy of Utah’s Castle Country Visitors Guide at Moe’s and noticed they had a museum. Jimmy and I had become addicted to Mormon Museums by this point, so we proceeded to get our daily fix at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum. The museum, a large ornate building with snarling dinosaurs and Indian sculptures outside, was hard to miss.

On-street parking was free, but they charged us $10 per person to get in. It was well worth it.

They had two floors with archaeology on the right side of the museum and two floors covering paleontology on the left.

The archaeology section featured: fascinating exhibits and dioramas showing prehistoric life through a multitude of artifacts; Paleoindian migration panels; a pack rat midden from Dutch John that showed how the climate had changed over millennia; a mockup of the Archaic dwelling at Polar Mesa dating back to BC 2040; an amazing replica of a Fremont pithouse; medicinal and edible plants; a hide teepee; a Kennewick Man skull from a middle-aged guy who died 9,500 years ago; a very rare mud granary found on the Wilcox Ranch in Range Creek, Utah; a model of Hovenweep Castle; the “Vision of Washakie” elk skin painting by the Shoshone Chief Charlie Washakie; relics from daily life, like baskets and sandals; weapons like bows and arrows; a very interesting display showing the time sequence for projectile points, starting with a Clovis Point dating from BC 12,000; and realistic paintings made to look exactly like the Great Gallery rock art panel in Horseshoe Canyon.

The paleontology section was equally intriguing with real and imagined turtles; the steel trap Dunkleoteus that possessed the most powerful bite of any fish ever known; the armadillo-like, super-sized Glyptodons with their body armor and stone tails with sharp spikes; big-foot, duck-billed Hadrosaurs that lived along the western coast of the Cretaceous Seaway (where Utah sits today) and whose massive footprints were found deep in the coal mines of Carbon County, giant clams, snails, and oysters; a huge assortment of dinosaur eggs; a host of different spike-horned and armored Ceratops; the monstrous Deinosuchus, known as the “Crocodile King of Utah”, which was not related to crocodiles or alligators; armored grass eaters like Ankylosaurs; a giant blue sea scorpion that roamed the ancient seas 450 million years ago; a thirty-feet-long behemoth Alisaurus meat eater that terrorized what is now Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument 72 million years ago; and, of course, the razor-clawed Utahraptor, a velociraptor like the pack of gangbangers that brought mayhem and carnage in the movie “Jurassic Park”.

They also had some great exhibits about the 1927 excavation of the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry; the science of paleontology; how the earth and Eastern Utah was formed; and twisted geology.

The coolest thing about the museum was that whether it was an old Indian pot or a dinosaur they were showcasing, most were discovered in Utah.

The Wedge

We drove south on UT 10 to the little farming village of Cleveland, Utah and headed east on Center Street which quickly turned to gravel when we left town. But the drive to The Wedge turned out to be a piece of cake. At every big intersection there was either a wooden BLM sign with the mileage to The Wedge, or, when in doubt, we just stayed on the main dirt road. It took us about forty-five minutes to get to our destination and there was only one van of campers lounging in the shade of the bushy Juniper trees in a primitive camping spot near the rim.

The views from The Wedge Overlook were breathtaking. We stood on a the edge of what is referred to as the “Little Grand Canyon” looking down into a world of multi-colored, tortured redrock. It was like a layer cake that had been sliced by God with a really big knife. Way down in the canyon bottom ran the twisting ribbon of water known as the San Rafael River.

Jimmy and I decided to go for a several-mile walk along the rim to the end of the plateau that resembled the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in the clouds. There was no sign of human ANYTHING as far as the eye could see. And the silence was all encompassing. We felt like the only people on the earth.

After a few hours scoping out the stunning views and talking to the local ravens, we retraced our drive back to the Buckhorn Well Rest Area at a major intersection of dirt roads with bathrooms and about fifty flashy color panels inviting us to visit many local attractions around spectacular Utah – even places like Zion National Park that was like a million miles away.

We used the clean compost toilet, checked out the old Buckhorn Well water pump exhibit, and Jimmy posed in front of a metal art installation standing off in the sagebrush flat that depicted a string of pack horses heading to god only knows where.

We never saw another car or person the whole time we were there. And it was hard to understand why the state or the county had built such an expansive (and expensive) rest stop and picnic area in what was by any standard the absolute middle of nowhere. I guess hope springs eternal.

Buckhorn Draw

The Buckhorn Draw Road (County Road 322) quickly began dropping into a magnificent gorge. We were essentially through the canyon we had been gazing into from the rim of the Wedge. The road followed the bone dry Buckhorn Wash, twisting like a bobsled run, the red and brown sandstone walls closing in on us the deeper we went. We were listening to the London Symphony Orchestra playing Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them Suite” and we opened the sun roof on the Forester to let in the light.

I turned to Jimmy and screamed “Though Gods they were!”, which was a line from an old Donavan song.

Jimmy howled like a coyote.

We were having us some fun!

And I can say without hesitation that Buckhorn Draw rivaled any national park I have ever seen other than the Grand Canyon. It was stunningly majestic.

And we never saw another soul the whole drive.

About eight miles from the Buckhorn Well Rest Area, we came to the football field long Buckhorn Wash Petroglyph Panel where the weirdly cool rock art figures had been pecked and painted over the course of millennia by a host of Anasazi artists. There were two distinct cultures and art forms at work across the shiny brown face of the smooth Wingate Sandstone walls.

People of the Fremont Culture had used small stones to chisel their symbolic drawings of bighorn sheep and spiders about a thousand years ago. But most of the panel was comprised of pictographs that had been painted by artists of the Barrier Canyon Culture onto their rock canvas more than 2000 years ago. These drawings were like something from an acid flashback, space men and spirits, some with large holes where their hearts or crotches should be. What the hell were these boys and girls trying to say? Their meaning remains a mystery.

The Buckhorn Draw Road continued to wind ever deeper as we passed through Furniture Draw and Calf Canyon. And we stopped several times to just get out and spin circles in the road, completely in awe of the colossal beauty towering around us. We were but tiny specks in this giant world of redrock buttes.

The San Rafael River

About five miles from the rock art site we came to the historic San Rafael River Bridge which had been erected by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1935 and 1937 under the direction of the Division of Grazing. It is the last remaining suspension bridge in Utah.

At the dedication ceremony, the Utah Governor Henry H. Blood, was joined by 2,000 people, and the local paper heralded: “Mystery lands now opened.”

The wooden and steel-cable bridge was constructed to give the local ranchers a safe way to get their cattle and sheep across the often treacherous San Rafael River. The 167-feet-long bridge opened up thousands of acres of land for winter grazing.

We were pleasantly surprised to find out that grazing permits had been discontinued in order to maintain a healthy desert bighorn sheep population that were there long before the goddamn cows.

We parked by the bridge and walked around. There was a Mormon church group of teenagers frolicking in the muddy river. We were hot and the water would have definitely felt good and cooled us off, but when we dried, we would have felt like mud monsters. So, after a few minutes, we returned to the comfort our air conditioned SUV.

I was still unclear about how we were going to get from the Buckhorn Draw Road onto I-70. And the Google Earth map I had looked at before the trip had shown a zillion other dirt roads in the area, and no obvious way out other than what appeared to be a large corrugated metal pipe under the interstate. I was really hoping that we wouldn’t have to backtrack all the way to Cleveland where we had started the day. I concentrated on the road and tried not to think about it.

We drove slowly through a moonscape land devoid of trees, bushes, or any sign of humans other than the little dirt road we were following blindly, and after about twenty miles we came to the Temple Mountain Road and Exit 131 off I-70.

Jimmy and I both began howling with relief and joy.

Green River Utah

It was another thirty miles east to Green River, Utah. It felt really weird to be driving eighty on a big highway with monstrous trucks after our long gravel road trek through Wonderland. It was like the whole world had suddenly shifted into high gear.

We checked into the Motel 6 on the east end of Green River and then immediately headed over to Ray’s Tavern, a casual local hangout where the thermometer by the front door read 96 degrees at seven o’clock. And to be perfectly honest, it was quite comfortable. You know what they say, “It’s a dry heat.”

We ordered fresh salad, grilled meat, and cold Coronas. There were no tourists in the place. It was mostly river runners, cowboys, and bikers. The walls were decorated with pictures of wave-crashing, boat smothering, Grand Canyon river trips.

I headed for the back to wash my hands. There were two pool tables in use. On my way out of the bathroom I noticed a curious sight along the back wall There was an old phone booth, and inside there was a Super Man outfit hanging from a metal hanger. I laughed out loud and then snapped a picture for posterity.

After dinner we drove out of town and took a dirt road that led to the south. The moon was about half full and lit the high desert like white neon. We could easily see without a flashlight. Cresting a sun glow ridge we were greeted with a view that went on forever.

We were obviously on federal BLM land, which meant we could pretty much go wherever we liked and do whatever we wanted to do.

So, we carefully drove out onto the edge of a slickrock bowl overlooking a dry wash, facing the setting sun. We pulled out our lawn chairs and the cooler of beer and proceeded to watch the light show.

The Milky Way soon made its grand entrance and then we used the Star Chart app on our cellphones to figure out the constellations. It was the end of the Perseid Meteor Shower and we squealed like little kids whenever one cut the heavens. Every once in a while one of us would spot a satellite. It was invigorating to be back in the Southwest where the night sky is not polluted by light and you can see our little piece of the universe in all of its splendor. And for the first time on the trip, I felt like I was finally home.