Monday, April 30, 2018

A desert discovered: Utah's House Mountains





MOST FOLKS catch sight of the House Mountains from the vaunted "loneliest highway in America," U.S. 50-6, as they approach Skull Rock Pass, either from Delta, 45 miles to the east, or the Utah-Nevada state line to the west.
Their gaze might initially be attracted to the glaring playa to the south that signifies, at this time of year, the bed of Sevier Lake. After all, catching sight of a leftover puddle, a fleeting mirage or some sorry case who's, on a lark, gone and gotten his pickup truck stuck in the near-shore mud can break up a long stretch of driving.Then there's that curious nick atop an elongated hump off to the north. Wondering about it can be diverting, if only momentarily. For overall, the House Mountains, of which this peak is a part, seem rather undistinguished. The desert range does not loom from afar so much as sit there like a lump.
"It doesn't look like there's anything to it," admits Lynn Fergus, outdoor recreation planner for the Bureau of Land Management.
But as Fergus knows well - for this is part of his "beat" - appearances can be deceiving.
This landscape makes up a fascinating chunk of Utah's outback.
The alluvium fanning out from the serrated peaks - Notch/Saw-tooth, Howell and Swasey most prominently - underlies gravel roads that are kept up pretty well by Millard County crews. "Often you can zip along as if on pavement," Bill Weir and Robert Blake note in their "Utah Handbook," "but watch out for loose gravel, large rocks, flash floods and deep ruts that sometimes appear on these backcountry stretches."
                        The north side of Notch Peak.
The roads allow access to hidden canyons, springs, stands of aged bristlecone pines, wildlife (including a herd of wild horses), old mining claims and outcrops harboring trilobites and primordial invertebrate life forms. They loop around the mountains, climb to high vistas like the Pine Peak and Sinbad overlooks, and wiggle through Marjum and Dome Canyon passes.
Scenic characteristics from other Utah locales come to mind when you get up close: "Lion King" prows on the eastern approach to Marjum Pass echo tilted buttes near Flaming Gorge; narrow box canyons and pink cliffs have relatives in Canyonlands and Zion; the high, green Amasa Valley surely belongs in another string of mountains altogether.
The House Range is hard wilderness country: dry, contorted - and often dramatically vertical. Camping is primitive, and hiking can be challenging, with no markers to speak of. A guidebook - or better yet, a guide - may be a good idea.
Nevertheless, more and more people are discovering these surprisingly accessible mountains.
                     The final approach to the top of Notch Peak.
Notch Peak in particular, Fergus says, is gaining a reputation.
David G. rhapsodizes: "It's not heaven, but you can see it from here."
Carl B. takes in the view then decides to "sit back, close my eyes and imagine Lake Bonneville filled to the brim."
Notch Peak, the summit of Sawtooth Mountain, has its own "mailbox," one of those familiar general-issue tin versions embedded in an impressive rock cairn. According to a notebook inscription found therein, the mailbox was first placed there by the Wasatch Mountain Club in 1968. So shiny it looks nearly new, it is often stuffed with notes left by hikers - Scout troops, people in pairs and small groups - who reached the peak.
Notch seems to give just about everyone a tingle of acrophobia.
"Wow! Dang," Erick, Lisa and Sue succinctly exclaim.
"It gives me the heebie jeebies," notes an unknown scribe.
Sheer, steep, lofty, abrupt - adjectives don't do this escarpment justice. John Hart, in his book "Hiking the Great Basin," writes that a Notch Peak climb will refine your use of the word "cliff." It is, he says, "the ultimate drop-off."
A hike to the top begins at the mouth of Sawtooth Canyon, on the mountain's southeast side. A shot-up sign meant to direct motorists to nearby Miller Canyon (the placard on the main unpaved road heading north says " 'er Canyon") sends adventurers west; at a Y intersection, the road on the right heads to Miller, while the one on the left bumps toward Sawtooth.
Sawtooth itself opens with dramatic cliffs. The drainage leading toward the peak turns west then north. The canyon becomes quite narrow, with brushy sides, fallen conifers and a barely discernable trail. Finally hikers head up a ridge toward the peak. Before they get there, though, the mountain suddenly breaks open and YIKES! A massive cleft opens up, a yaw that certainly contributes to the notch visible from scores of miles away. The mountain's limestone foundations swirl in a sequence of sedimentary layers.
From the peak itself, Notch, at 9,655 feet above sea level, drops 5,053 vertical feet on its west side to the bleak but beautiful sagebrush-and-alkali Tule Valley below.
That, as Fergus points out, is nigh on a mile.
Then there's the view from the top: a panorama of desert valleys and distant ranges. On a clear day there are more sights to behold than you may have time to drink in.
"Scenic overdose," two Provo hikers scribbled in a mailbox note.
"I hope you brought your hang glider for an easy descent," wrote Matt and Kristen.
To the east and southeast are Scipio Peak, the Sevier Dry Lake and the Pavant and Tushar mountains. To the south are Utah's San Francisco and Wah Wah ranges. The Confusions are in the immediate western foreground, with the Deep Creeks off to the northwest. Several key peaks can be spotted beyond the Nevada state line - Mount Moriah (elevation: 12,050 feet) and Wheeler Peak (13,061 feet) float far to the west and southwest; Pilot Peak is to the extreme northwest.
And if you hate hiking?
From the northeast, a rugged four-wheel track climbs into the spring-fed Amasa Valley (the locals pronounce it Ama-seh, Fergus adds), past old mining equipment and a collapsed cabin to the Pine Peak overlook. The view toward the Silver State is much the same, without the summit's plunge but with the addition of some nice groves of aspen and pinnacles and boulders of rusty granite.
Near the ridges are enticing campsites, Fergus vouches. His wife loves to stargaze, so he brought her into the area last summer.
"She said she couldn't find the constellations - there were too many stars."
While Notch is gaining a name, some long-time residents of the region are already somewhat famous.
That's "long-time" as in since the Paleozoic, some 400 million years or so ago.
At the S & S Trading Post and Neno's Rock Shop at the west end of Delta, Nina Higgs pulls out a handsome book. There they are: portraits of Elrathia walcott and Ptychagnostus richmondensis (walcott) - two of the 60 species of trilobites found in Utah's House Mountains. Other pictures show creatures found today in such disparate locales as Sweden and Newfoundland.
West-central Utah is famous among rockhounds, Higgs notes. People from all over the world - but especially from the Wasatch Front - visit to seek out topaz near Topaz Mountain to the north, geodes and trilobites. Though long extinct, the latter, small bottom-feeding bug-like animals, are preserved by the millions in Wheeler Formation shale.
The shale is exposed throughout the area. On BLM land, visitors are allowed to chip away at the rock if they want to find a trilobite or two. Collecting is legal, "as long as it's invertebrate" - i.e., no dinosaur bones, which aren't in this vicinity anyway - "and as long as it's not commercial," Fergus says. Technically, then, any discoveries made are not to be for sale, "but it's really hard to enforce; we just don't have the people to do it."
He takes his Blazer off the main track toward gray-green hills. A winding jeep trail leads to a trilobite bed that's semi-secret, though a trench and tons of chipped rock show it has been visited frequently enough. A small pick in hand, within minutes he's revealed a few trilobites: dark, tripartite, scarab-like fossils that look like they could have been embedded there yesterday. Others are found by simply sorting through the debris.
Various BLM and guide maps point the way to such deposits, but few are specifically marked for would-be hounds.
On state parcels - the "school lands" we've often heard about - commercial enterprises are issued permits to excavate. At the U-Dig Fossils pit in Swasey Peak's Antelope Springs drainage, for example, day-trippers are given directions and an opportunity to uncover the ancient creatures.
"That's quite a hole, isn't it," Fergus says. "They've been digging there a long time."
Other beings repose within the rocks as well. Joe Bauman, who writes about science for the Deseret News, heads occasionally to the House Range to look for reddish squiggles that may signify sea life of almost unimaginable age. Trilobites pop out in 3-D; these softer-bodied forms can be more chal-lenging to track down.
"I crack open rocks in hopes of finding some new species of middle Cambrian invertebrate and because I enjoy finding known varieties that are there," Bauman says. The middle Cambrian, approximately 530 million years ago, was a time of great evolutionary diversity.
Some discoveries seem downright alien looking, he says, "like a critter that had seven eyes, paddles and a trunk with a spiky grabber on the end of it." He's sent off several examples to scientists.
For those "who don't want to waste precious time getting there," Neno's offers full- and half-day expeditions into the region, says Nina Higgs. The guides know where the deposits are, provide the vehicle and tools, and bring along water, juices and sanitary accessories.
Rockhounding, she says, is a fast-growing hobby, and "something the whole family can do together." The House Mountains have an open, outdoor appeal in themselves, and the fame of the region's rocks is spreading.
"We see people from all over the world, every walk of life, every nationality."
Like other dramatic Utah settings, the House Mountains tend to make you wish you were a geologist, or at least a better student of the subject.
Great Basin block faulting created the mountains, tipped them up, stretched the valleys and cracked the massive rocks to make narrow canyons. Erosion ate away at the peaks and filled the gaps between then.
"The alluvium in these valleys," Fergus says, "is something like 10,000 feet deep."
All this began some 18 million years ago, according to Halka Chronic's book, "Roadside Geology of Utah," when "stretching, thinning and breaking of the Earth's crust began to create the Basin and Range mountains of western Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. . . . In Utah, most of the ranges are steeply faulted along their western sides. Geologists soon likened this region to a pile of dominoes all tilted in the same direction."
Another shaper of the landscape was the Pleistocene's Lake Bonneville, the fresh-water ice-age ancestor of the Great Salt Lake that covered vast stretches of territory. The shorelines remain visible along the mountainsides and on hills that were once islands.
Yet another ingredient is molten rock. At some point millions of years ago, magma seeped into the sedimentary foundations of Notch Peak. The intrusion created a becoming red-tinged granite visible in Miller Canyon, the Amasa Valley and on the western side of Notch. And that granite, to prospectors of the 19th and 20th centuries, hinted at precious metals like tungsten, silver and gold, which tend to migrate to the edges of such rock when it is being formed.
And so there are mine claims in the House Range. Some date back a century; others are on state lands: an old wood-and-rock miner's cabin reposes near Sawtooth Canyon; sluice operations continue intermittently in the gravels of Miller Canyon; the Amasa Valley is sprinkled with mine heads and old equipment.
There's no indication anybody hit a motherlode here, so you have to wonder: Did the mine operators get their investment back?
"No, in a word," says Fergus.
But still people have been drawn to the House Range: There's evidence that Archaic Indians were here 10,000 years ago; the Paiutes and other tribes in more recent times; prospectors, cattlemen and cowboys, sheepmen, freight haulers looking for a way through, road builders - and a hermit. Bob Stinson, a World War I veteran, lived in Marjum pass for years and years. In a side canyon he built a one-room home with rock walls under a sheltering cliff.
"How would you like to spend 17 years of your life here?" Fergus wonders.
But rockhounding, hiking, hunting, cave spelunking (Antelope Cave is open during part of the year), hobby mining (as Fergus puts it) and other recreational pursuits seem to be part of the future for these mountains and valleys.
That makes people like Fergus and Higgs a bit apprehensive.
Old-time miners didn't tend to clean up after themselves much, but modern recreationists can be just as careless: You can't help but notice the accumulation of cans and bottles in prime primitive camping spots. ATVs and four-wheel-drive vehicles can do serious damage in such terrain.
"What you get out in this area is someone will cut out into the brush and someone else will come along to see where they went. Pretty soon you have a `road,' " says Fergus, one of whose jobs is to keep an eye on three wilderness study areas in the vicinity.
Higgs, too, expresses concerns about how people treat it, from traveling across the valleys to finding a place to potty.
"In the past five years I've seen it grow so fast. I'm not sad - I'm trying to make a living off it."
Yet, she adds, "People think the desert is forever, but it is fragile."
-By Lynn Arave and Ray Boren and originally published in the Deseret News, Aug. 24, 1997.


The Origin of the Names of Utah's 29 Counties




Here are stories behind the names of Utah's 29 county names:
Beaver County: Recognizes the plentiful beaver in the area.

Box Elder: Box Elder trees east of Brigham City apparently inspired the name.
Cache County: First called Willow Valley by a trapper. Also referred to as Logan's Hole in memory of Ephraim Logan, who was killed near Jackson, Wyo., by Indians in the mid-1820s. The Cache name is said to have been applied after a trapper, employed by the Rocky Mountain Fur Co., was killed during a cave-in while excavating for stashed furs (caches).
Carbon County: Named for coal deposits in the area.
Daggett County: Ellsworth Daggett is the source of the county's name. The first Utah surveyor general, he surveyed an irrigation canal in the county.
Davis County: Named for Daniel C. Davis, a captain in the Mormon Battalion, who died in 1850.
Duchesne County: The source of the name is uncertain. The word supposedly came from the Duchesne River, but before 1875 the river was known as the Uinta River. So, there are six other possibilities: 1. Du Chasne, possibly an 1830s French trapper in the area; 2. an early Indian chief in the region; 3. Rose Du Chesne, founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart in America; 4. Fort Duquesne, built by the French in 1754 in what became Pittsburgh, Penn.; 5. the Ute Indian word,"doo-shane," meaning dark canyon; 6. Andre Duchense, French geographer and historian.
Emery County: Named for George W. Emery of Tennessee, who was appointed governor of Utah Territory in 1875. (Some residents wanted to name it Castle County.)
Garfield County: Received its name in 1892 in honor of U.S. President James A. Garfield, who was assassinated in 1881.
Grand County: Established in 1890 and named for the Grand or Grande River, now the upper Colorado River in the area. It was in 1921 that the name "Colorado" was extended upriver beyond the confluence with the Green.
Iron County: Originally called Little Salt Lake Valley County, the name was later changed to Iron County as a reminder of the iron mines west of Cedar City, which was the Mormon Iron Mission.
Juab County: The name comes from what Indians called the valley, apparently meaning level plain or flat. Another variation of the word is said to mean thirsty valley.
Kane County: Named for Col. Thomas L. Kane, friend of the Mormon settlers.

Millard County: Honors U.S. President Millard Fillmore.

Morgan County: Jedediah Morgan Grant, father of LDS President Heber J. Grant, is the source of the name.

Piute County: Recognizes the Piute, or Paiute, Indians who inhabited the region.
Rich County: Originally created as Richland County, the name was later shortened to Rich. The name came from Charles C. Rich, an early Mormon apostle and prominent settler in the Bear Lake region.
Salt Lake County: Named for the nearby Great Salt Lake.
San Juan County: There's a slight dispute on this county's name origin. Most credit it to the San Juan River, in turn named for one of two early Spanish explorers in the area. Both Don Juan de Onate and Don Juan Maria de Rivera are credited as sources for the river's name.
Sanpete County: The name is a variation of San Pitch, who was a Ute Indian chief who lived in the area.
Sevier County: Named for the Sevier River. The name is a variation of Rio Severo, a Spanish word meaning severe and violent. The river also had other names, such as the Ashley River. Some incorrectly believe the county was named for Brigadier Gen. John Sevier of Kentucky.
Summit County: This name came from the county's high country. Summit encompasses 39 of the state's tallest named peaks - the most of any county in Utah. (Second is Duchesne, with 28, but Duchesne also has Kings Peak, the state's tallest at 13,528 feet above sea level.)
Tooele County: Spelled "Tuilla" at first and later changed. The origin is a subject of dispute. Some believe it came from a Goshute Indian chief named Tuilla. Others say the word refers to the rushes and weeds so common in swampy areas of the valley.
Uintah County: Named for the Ute Indian tribe that lives in the basin. Early maps put an "H" on the end of the word. John Wesley Powell left the H off in his writings, and as a result both variations are in use.
Utah County: Apparently Anglicized from "Yuta," which is what the Spanish explorers called the Ute Indians. The name probably means meat eaters.
Wasatch County: A Ute Indian word meaning "mountain pass" or "low place in a high mountain." This Ute word was a general reference to Weber Canyon, the lowest cut in the Wasatch Mountains.
Washington County: Named in honor of George Washington, the first U.S. president.
Wayne County: Supposedly named for Wayne Robinson, son of state legislator Willis E. Robinson. A counterclaim for the name's origin indicates it honors Revolutionary War Gen. Anthony Wayne.
                       Weber County sign in lower Weber Canyon.
Weber County: This is the name with a very uncertain origin. Consider some of the different possibilities:
- The book "Utah Place Names" indicates the name probably came from John W. Weber, a trapper killed by Indians near today's Weber River in 1823.

- The Weber River and Weber County could have been named for another trapper, Pauline Weaver, who became a frontiersman in Arizona, according to "Weber County . . . Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." The name Weaver was corrupted to Weber. The book also refers to the story of John Weber, indicating he was killed by Indians near the river in the winter of 1828-29.
-Some have suggested the name came from a member of Peter Skene Ogden's trapping party. However, Weber is a not a French-Canadian name. So, it may be Capt. John G. Weber of Danish nativity who is the namesake. He is said to have died in 1859 in Bellevue, Ill., according to an undated historical sketch of Weber County.
- John H. Weber was in the Ogden area from 1822-27 and discovered the Great Salt Lake, Weber Canyon and the Weber River, summarizes the book "Beneath Ben Lomond's Peak."
- Weber County, says "A History of Ogden," was named for Capt. John B. Weber, who was with trappers in the area until 1827. He died in Iowa in 1859.
- Several other books, such as "Utah: A Guide to the State" and "Ogden: Junction City," simply state the river and county were named for "Capt. Weber." John G. is listed in the first of those books; John H. is named in the second.


-By Lynn Arave and originally published in the Deseret News, Jan. 5, 1996.



Utah Highway Facts and Fancy


                Highest paved road point in Utah, Bald Mountain summit.

OVERALL, Utah's highways provide a pleasant contrast of geography for sightseers, with paved and unpaved roads traversing some of the nation's most spectacular scenery.
Besides U-143 being Utah's steepest paved road with a 13 percent grade, the following tidbits about other Utah highways have been gathered from Utah maps, the Utah Department of Transportation and other sources:
·         Highest paved road in Utah — Mirror Lake Highway (U-150), which crosses Bald Mountain pass, 10,759 feet above sea level. The road is usually open June to early November, depending on the weather. Its latest-ever opening was June 29, 1995.
·         Highest paved road along the Wasatch Front — The Mount Nebo loop road that reaches 9,353 feet above sea level at the Monument trailhead.
·         Highest gravel road in Utah —From Big John Flat to a high ridge in the Tushar Mountains, between Beaver and Marysvale, at 11,500 feet above sea level.
·         Highest gravel road along the Wasatch Front — Skyline Drive in Davis County between Farmington and Bountiful. A spur road that heads north to the Francis Peak radar domes above Fruit Heights tops out at almost 9,500 feet above sea level. The road is passable by cars in the summer.
·         Lowest elevation paved road — River Road in Washington County south of Bloomington Hills and St. George at 2,697 feet above sea level.
·         Lowest elevation unpaved road — Several jeep roads in the Beaver Dam Wash area, west of St. George, that approach 2,500 feet in elevation.
·         First Utah roads to be hard-surfaced — Richards Street, in downtown Salt Lake City, from South Temple to 100 South and also State Street, from South Temple to 400 South — both in 1891 and probably paved with a combination of granite blocks, asphalt and brick. Main Street, in Salt Lake City — from South Temple to 300 South, was the next street paved.
·         Longest straight stretch of road — I-80 on the Salt Flats between Wendover and Knolls with an approximately 50-mile straightaway.
·         Longest tunnel — Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel (U-9), 5,613-feet long, the nation's fifth-longest land tunnel. It opened in 1930 and is in Zion National Park.
·         Worst paved road test for acrophobiacs — Probably U-12, between Escalante and Boulder, where the highway traverses a knife-edge with high cliffs on both sides of the roadway and no guardrails.

-By Lynn Arave and first published in the Deseret News, May 26, 2000.


What Salt Lake City was like in the 1940s


                          Downtown Salt Lake City in the 21st Century.

WHAT was Salt Lake City like in the mid- to late 1940s?
Looking at old photographs, downtown streets were much busier than today, with most men wearing hats and women in dresses. However, unlike today, most people didn't seem to be in a rush.
Also, a maze of trolley-car tracks crisscrossed the mall-less downtown. Cars had running boards, where hitchhikers often stood while the car was in motion. Angle parking was the norm.
Sorensen Furniture, Chandler's Shoes, Wards, Rotisserie Inn, Sutton's Cafe, Mayflower Cafe, Western Pacific, Scott Hardware, The Burger Barn, Kress's five-and-dime store, Paris Company, Slim Olson, Keith O'Brien, the Rainbow Randezvu dance hall and Richards Candies were some of the businesses of the late 1940s to eventually disappear or rename.
The Bamberger train depot stood where Symphony Hall now is. Anyone living beyond 2700 South was in the sticks.
With World War II over in 1945, there were two full days of merrymaking and dancing in Salt Lake City. Saltair Resort — closed since 1943, was planning to reopen. Lagoon was the other popular seasonal attraction in northern Utah.
By 1950, there were 274,895 Salt Lake County residents, which means that in 1945 there were about a quarter of a million people in Salt Lake County.
"Residents lived in a more crowded, aware and experienced populace," according to Linda Sillitoe, author of "A History of Salt Lake County.... Military industry had bloomed as the economy's darling."
She said the postwar period brought subdivisions and commuting-to-work conditions.
However, although blacks and other minorities often fought side-by-side with whites in World War II, the war didn't end racism. The black population in the county was about 1,130 by the end of the war.
Segregation still existed. Hotel Utah didn't normally accept blacks but referred them to the Newhouse Hotel.
With the war over, working women — who filled jobs previously held by men who had joined the armed forces — were encouraged to give up their jobs.
Sillitoe said newsreels, military service and expanded travel opportunities had helped link Salt Lakers to the once distant world.
University of Utah enrollment surpassed 5,000 in the late 1940s. The birthrate in the valley was considerably above the U.S. average.
Salt Lake City was facing a shortage of 6,000 housing units, and the public schools, and the University of Utah began to find a shortage of space with many new kids coming to class each year
In September 1946, the Salt Lake Seagulls played their first game — on a Sunday. The Seagulls were Salt Lake's entry in a pro football league (It folded in 1948).
Sam Weller told KUED for its "Salt Lake City — Once Upon a Time" documentary that downtown Salt Lake City had it all in the 1940s. Beverly Frank said that everything was within walking distance for those who parked downtown.
The Crystal Palace at South Temple and 200 East was the first super grocery store to open downtown.
Main Street and 200 South was considered the busiest Salt Lake intersection 60 years ago. Most people didn't own a car, but streetcars, trolley buses and trains picked up the slack. Also, unlike today, "exact change" for a fare was NOT required.
For a 10-cent admission, movie houses, like the Center or Uptown, flourished and also offered newsreels, along with movies, like "Pinocchio" or "Cheaper by the Dozen." Public elections were many times held at theaters during the day.
Things began to flourish after World War II. That's because ration stamps were needed to purchase most items during the war. Red stamps bought meat; green was for groceries. Even some of those who didn't drink coffee would hoard it and then sell it — even though this was against the law.
Coal-burning stoves were common, and on many winter days the smoke cut visibility to a block or less. Soot and grime in homes gave extra urgency to "spring cleaning." Home iceboxes relied upon 50- or 100-pound blocks of ice.
Without television, radio was a fixture, and people had to imagine the action of a World's Series.
Prices were, of course, much lower in 1946 than now. Catsup was 15 cents for 14 ounces; potato chips were 25 cents a package; Wheaties were 11 cents per box; luncheon meat was 36 cents for 12 ounces.
Salaries were lower, too. Pay for a master sergeant was $165 a month. Miners could earn $8.93 per shift.

-Sources: "Salt Lake City — Once Upon a Time," by KUED, Ch. 7, with Elizabeth Searles as its development producer; "A History of Salt Lake County," by Linda Sillitoe; and the Deseret Morning News archive files and photographs.

-By Lynn Arave and first published in the Deseret News, Feb. 3, 2006.