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.
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