My brown leather shoes have turned gray with mancos dust. I’ve just driven through the deadliest stretch of highway in the state of Utah, between the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon and Green River, UT. I drive it all too often. It is my lifeline to Salt Lake City. To job interviews and trips to the doctor. Haircut appointments and meetings with colleagues. Over the last few years I’ve started seeing the landscape here as a teamster might, intimately familiar with the twists and bends of the pavement rolling over otherwise empty space. This stretch of US highway six meanders through desert badlands and alpine canyons — wide open vistas with an average of three people to every square mile. It is my connection to family, health, professional life, and everything I loved about the city before I gave it up for the fringe of rural Utah — and I love it.
That’s an unpopular opinion for a wilderness advocate. Roads tend to be public enemy number one. The primary culprit in a long narrative of lost wilderness on public land. According to the 1964 Wilderness Act, and those who wield it as their method of conservation, a road is the death knell of isolation. The final body blow to a land untrammeled. Even still, there are roads that I love. No matter how deadly or how often they’re used. I find them too tempting. Their stories and their power too glaring. A road, especially one like this, is a romance with long-forgotten souls — those who lived in the same landscapes we do, left their mark as we do, made their mistakes as we do, and disappeared into time as we will.
At its highest point in Utah, highway six connects the top of Spanish Fork Canyon with the Price River Canyon, where the old town of Soldier Summit hides in plain sight. Made from a sprinkling of cabins, one gas station, and endless access to roadside jerky, Soldier Summit is a remnant from manifest destiny. A time when European heritage laid conquest to the history, ownership, and connection to the land. In the early 1900s, as Union Pacific and the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad stretched its tentacles across the landscape, places like Soldier Summit appeared all over the map. All at once, they were symbols of conquest, loss, and hope. They rose quickly, and most disappeared just the same. In the late 1800s, the town of Soldier Summit was large enough to support a saloon and two churches, with a handful of satellite towns within walking distance. Today, it’s mostly known for the jerky.
I’ve made it a habit to stop on the side of the road here. Not for any affinity for trains or white colonialism, but for the story of failure. I like to wander past the ruins of the town, the remains of old row houses, square foundations of one and two-bedroom company homes filled with rusting beer cans and broken glass. I walk up and down the grass covered hillside and imagine myself passing through the town as it might have been in 1915 — brown wooden homes surrounded by frozen mud and sage, the smell of soot from the trains and smoke from wood burning stoves. I’ve seen pictures of children, girls in white dresses and hand sewn bonnets playing next to railroad tracks while men in mudstained suits watch close by. Their stories are gone now. Lost in time to the sound of SUVs and pickup trucks who drown the echoes of laughter, drunkenness, and old engine cars lurching up the canyon. Now as it was then, silence is fleeting at the summit.
By almost any measurement, the town of Soldier Summit was a failure, as were so many other towns of its era. Except for a short moment of prosperity, the enterprise built atop this mountain pass couldn’t last. The modern U.S. West doesn’t account for a tick of the second hand on the clock of human history, but these places are a part of us. They’re a part of our story, our public space, and even our wilderness. Their failure is essential to our story.
A few miles past Soldier Summit lies the Price River Canyon, a highlight of this stretch of road and the stories it holds. The canyon separates the summit from sweeping views of wide open desert to the south. It is a deep and open pathway where the highway, the railroad, the river, and the earth make their descent through geologic time and space. Coal seams in the canyon date back to the Cretaceous, and have given extractive industries more than a century of fine dining on the backs of coal miners and their kids. Failed attempts to straighten and control the river are seen up and down the canyon, and their successful counterparts stand in triumph, slowing and filtering the river that supplies water to the valley below. The river, the highway and railroad roll past history — lining the remains of lost camps, entire towns, even a 190 Megawatt power plant. Over the course of twenty miles, it offers a glimpse into the cross-section of both human and natural history, a story that millions of automobiles overlook every year.
That’s why my shoes are dirty. At the top of the canyon, just as the road catches up to the steep grade of the river gorge, an old version of highway six is carved into the side of the mountain. The Midland Trail, as it was once called, stands as residue from another reality. Leftover from a time before Canyonlands National Park, before Arches, Ed Abbey, and the industrial tourism of Southeastern Utah. Before silence was transformed into an amusement park, and before the urge to collect, photograph, share and consume all avenues of natural wonder defined our connection to a place. Before all this, the road through the Price River Canyon was a lifeline.
I’ve climbed up a steep grade of shale spotted with rabbitbrush and sage to see what’s left. A hundred feet above the modern route, slowly disappearing back into the earth, the old road is almost invisible to the motorists zooming through the canyon today. It was abandoned in the 1960s for wider lanes and less demanding curves. Engineers blasted sections of the mountainside away in the name of progress — something still happening in Southern Utah today. As I stand on the rubbled pavement, it’s encouraging how quickly the mountainside has retaken the right of way. The grade of the road remains, but even that is fading, and I wonder how long before it will be swallowed up that never ending cycle of deconstruction we call erosion.
A mile down the canyon, twisted and rusting rebar rise from the ground like petrified crab legs, the remains of a bridge that once ushered countless people up the mountainside. Falling rains and melting snow have cut small washes along the roadbase. Boulders plummeting down the mountain side have found a temporary home on the leveled ground of the graded path. I walk through forests of trees and brush that have broken through the pavement, staking reclamation on the landscape. Nature has been at work here.
I don’t know how long it’s been since anyone has walked this section of road. I might be the first in a decade or more. As far as roads go, this one had a short life. Between the 1930s and 1960s, it was the primary route through the canyon. Slow speed limits and less reliable vehicles forced motorists to make a sluggish drive. In those days, travelers would have been much more familiar with the natural features of the mountainside. They’d have known the landmarks and hamlets that dotted the route. Siblings would have cheered with delight when their parents drove through an old highway tunnel that needled through solid rock — celebrating the unique joy of being inside a mountain and the halfway point in a long drive to the Wasatch Front.
To motorists today, that tunnel is like any other point on a highway that most people spend as little time as possible driving. State engineers removed the tunnel and the section of mountain it went through in 1960, and there hasn’t been a car on this pavement for more than fifty years. As I walk along, it occurs to me that the definition of the word road may no longer apply. If the piles of bean-shaped scat and strewed hoof prints are any proof, this path above the modern road is far more functional as a deer trail than a road — even by rural Utah standards.
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Before the Midland Trail and the old highway that replaced it, the path through the Price River canyon had been a thoroughfare connecting the deserts of southeastern Utah with the valleys of the Wasatch range long before we called highway six. Before the boom of automobiles in the early twentieth century, the road was a scattering of horse trails and railroad lines. Before white colonialism, humans had been living in this part of the planet for ten thousand years.
Rock art and other evidence still remains from the first inhabitants of the canyon. The river itself was an important resource for Ute families, providing good hunting and fishing grounds. Modern locals often brag about the pot sherds or ceramics they’ve taken from the cliffs around their homes. A few miles to the east of the Price River, Nine Mile Canyon is recognized for its world class cultural landscape, and for good reason. A historic highway if there ever was one, Nine Mile was the main thoroughfare connecting Castle Valley, where the Price river flows, and the Uinta Basin and Northern Utah. It offers a canvas of human history, culture, and storytelling that exists nowhere else in the world. For centuries, it was home to countless families and travelers, members of the Fremont culture and the Ute tribe, and bears the marks of an archival record painted on the walls and catalogued in stone.
But in the history of conquest that is the U.S. West, white America sets places aside on which they filter the stories of those whose land they took. Today government entities and community partnerships work in tandem to preserve the history of Nine Mile Canyon. It has become the chosen preservation site, a place we’ve given to history in an attempt to separate modernity from conquest. But Nine Mile was not the only place where people lived before white America. Cultural sites abound in central Utah. Range Creek Canyon, a few miles to the southeast, is a place where the cultural impact of native civilizations has rivaled any other archeological site in the U.S. West. To the south, the San Rafael Swell contains hundreds, if not thousands of rock art sites and cultural artifacts that tell the history of the Fremont people and this land. All of it is Ute land, a familiar home and place for hunting, fishing, religious ceremonies and simply living for centuries.
There is no question that the Price River canyon is a part of this story, but it remains untold. This small and winding alpine river offered a home to families and travelers. But the speed with which white immigrants gobbled up the canyon and turned it into a place for industry is likely the reason we know so little about its early inhabitants. Still, there are artifacts. In places where engineers haven’t blasted the mountain side away, rock art panels from Fremont cultures remain. Like small bungalows standing against the growth of a cancerous urban skyline, these few panels preserve the story of what used to be.
Years ago, a county employee told me they wished they could connect with native communities in the area. They expressed disappointment that it wouldn’t be possible, however, because there was just no history of them being around. This is a common sentiment among people living in this region. The idea that any evidence of non-white human history belongs to ancient civilizations without any connection to the modern political tribes who thrive todya. It’s an idea that is not only false, but a failure of our community, of telling our history and connecting to the world around us.
Working in a history museum in a rural town, the question of who was here before white immigrants often comes up. Over time, I’ve simplified my answer — this is Ute land. Not because it is part of a political boundary drawn up by nineteenth century bureaucrats, but exactly the opposite. This is land that was taken. Land that bureaucrats actively kept Utes from visiting. Land that, despite centuries of hunting, fishing, grazing, and living on, Utes were arrested and jailed for continuing to do just that. The road through Price Canyon tells that story, most people just travel too quickly to notice.
By comparison, the speed limit through Nine Mile Canyon often slows to twenty five miles an hour. Wayside picnic areas and scenic turnouts dot the roadside. We are encouraged to slow down and connect with the cultural impact of the human beings who lived in the canyon for centuries. As the chosen site for preserving the history of this land, the managers of Nine Mile ask visitors to slow down, take their time, absorb the canyon and the stories that it tells. The Price River Canyon, in contrast, is a place to get through as quickly as possible. A place with no discernable story worth telling to the hundreds of thousands who travel through it each year.
…
There is a concept by renowned sociologist and peace scholar Elise Boulding called the 200 year present. It advocates for a perspective of time that places the individual in the center of an era, as opposed to the beginning and end. Viewing the world from the perspective of a 200 year present, where the oldest individual you have known reaches back a century and the last babies you will know reach a century into the future, we allow ourselves an opportunity to take ownership of that span of time. We afford ourselves a chance to connect to the events of the distant past and the deep future in profound ways. Suddenly the events of the nineteenth century, removing a culture from a land and jailing them for visiting it, are not a distant and disconnected story. Suddenly, those events are a part of our present.
From top to bottom, the Price River Canyon is home to signs of conflict, tragedy, and failure that are all part of our 200 year present. In the heart of the canyon lies Castle Gate, a high rising sandstone feature that once overlooked a bustling mining town by the same name. Like Soldier Summit, the town of Castle Gate was a company town owned by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Thanks to a nearby coal mine that turned into a major producer, the town boomed. Before long, active coal mines numbered the mountains like connect the dots, and an army of miners descended on the heart of the canyon. Mine owners preferred to recruit immigrants. Their cheap labor and willingness to work in dangerous conditions made them ideal employees. Families hailing from Italy, Greece, China, Finland, Japan, Slavic countries and others arrived with a vision of a better life.
But a better life wasn’t always the outcome. In the early morning of March 8th, 1924 a mine supervisor investigating a gas leak near the opening of the Castle Gate Mine set off an explosion with the spark of a lighter. As he lit his lantern to see what might be causing the leak, he inadvertently ignited the thick coal dust that filled the air. Two explosions followed, and one hundred and seventy one miners died in a single morning. The entirety of the population of Castle Valley felt the death toll personally, with over four hundred family members of the deceased struck with tragedy. Every community within a labor commute of the canyon endured the impact of loss.
The diversity of the accident is striking. Of the miners who lost their lives, fifty came from Greece. Twenty five from Italy. Black and Japanese miners lost their lives, as did Welsh, English, Austrians and Scots. More than three quarters of the workforce were immigrants, with forty-five U.S. born miners lost under the weight of a mountain as well. This is what the town of Castle Gate looked like. Overflowing with languages and cultures born from communities thousands of miles away. This is what Soldier Summit looked like, Cripple Creek, Leadville, Salt Lake City, and Denver. This is what the U.S. West looked like. The legacy of a mine or a town like Castle Gate was not only the pain of loss, but the families and traditions that continued in the wake of their death.
In the 1970s, yet another energy company in a long list of energy companies purchased the the town of Castle Gate. In an effort to squeeze any coin that might be left under the couch cushions of a worn down community, they relocated residents to nearby communities outside of the canyon. They tore down buildings and removed tenants. Anything that could be moved was — a place where hundreds lived their lives and lost their loved ones. A place where Butch Cassidy was born a trainrobber, where one of the worst mining disasters in the history of Utah left a hundred children orphans, and a place where all that remains is a cemetery that no one visits and a sprinkling of stone walls.
But the presence of the Castle Gate mine disaster still hangs heavy on the communities of Carbon County, Utah. Mining history has not been relegated to the attic of collective memory, and extraction continues to be a major industry in the region despite its obvious and steady decline. In the town of Helper, situated along highway six just below the mouth of the canyon, giant billboards advertise “Utah’s largest coal miner” — a towering fiberglass statue painted jet black as if covered in coal dust. Stories of miners and railroad workers dominate local museums. The labor of the miner and energy producer has grown into a myth of romantic heroism. The type of work fables are made from. In the center of the canyon, a long row of roadside plaques overlook the edge of the river on the shoulder of highway six. Each tells its own version of the extraction legend, doing its part to elevate an industry in the minds of highway travelers who have no connection to this place.
But their mission is doomed from the get and their execution is problematic at best. They don’t tell the story of labor disputes, of striking miners in opposition to unfair working conditions, the time that Mother Jones spent a month here, fighting for the rights of the working class; the round up of union men and eviction from their homes, the death of John Tenas, a Greek miner striking for better working conditions, shot by company guards; or the death of Arthur Webb, a company guard who was killed by strikers as they shot into a trainload of strikebreakers. The roadside ignores the presence of the United Mine Workers of America, the declaration of martial law, and the heavy handed presence of the National Guard. It ignores the stories that are still written on the landscape, stories that thousands of travelers pass by every day like flies through a cathedral. Unless you’re predetermined to give a damn about coal mining for the sake of coal mining, to long for the myth of the hero miner, covered in coal dust and earnest vision, freely offering his body and spirit for the sake of a light bulb and a running television, the roadside interpretation in the Price River Canyon is irrelevant.
The depth of this canyon offers more than the boundaries we’ve built around it. And yet, like most landscapes we’ve painted on a map, this canyon has been relegated. In June of 2015, the Carbon Power Plant was retired. A 190 MWe power plant built in the 1950s, it had become the main feature on the landscape. Motorists coming down the canyon were welcomed with a view of billowing steam rising from the riverside. On cold days, the white puffs of moisture consumed the canyon and dominated the landscape. Proud locals viewed it as an advertisement for their community, a landmark for the culture and heritage of energy producers. When it was retired, the owners dismantled the facility. An entire powerplant removed from the landscape. I remember hearing comments during its removal about how sad it was. People were angry. Not just that it was being retired and that families were losing jobs, but that a landmark was being removed.
I disagree with the notion, but I also understand what they were feeling. The removal of the power plant tied it to the larger narrative of the canyon. A history of removal and deconstruction, of rewriting stories that exist on the landscape. The power plant joined the town of Castle Gate, to Soldier Summit and the Midland Trail, to countless Ute and Fremont cultural sites, and the Castle Gate rock formation — a towering rock spire on the mountainside that was blasted away for the sake of an easier curve on the highway. People have been removing or destroying the markers of community and culture in this canyon for more than one hundred and fifty years.
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The problem with roads is not one of people but of speed. When most people spend time in the Price River Canyon, they do it at seventy miles per hour. Over the last two hundred years, we have redefined this place and others like it because we imagined them landscapes without stories or cultural significance. We have devalued or removed any natural and scenic qualities. We have erased history and removed landmarks. We have tried to control the land but have left behind the refuse of human history in our wake. Through our definitions of nature and invention, wildness and urbanity, we have created landscapes across the West that are perceived to be worthy of preservation and those that are only obstacles.
A common marker of colonialism is a process by which colonizers, or settlers, redefine the landscape they have taken — a manifestation of power that erases history and reimagines ownership. Today, very few people have a connection to the stories that are left in the Price River Canyon. It is a conquered landscape, taken many times over. Today, it’s highway territory. Tomorrow, who knows? But there is a middle ground conservationists aren’t fighting for in the landscape of the American West. We have ceded this canyon — to industry, to highways, to travel — because we don’t know what’s there. We see roads and power plants, railroads and mines. We see a mountainside that has been defiled and say this place is no longer pure, but how much time do we spend in it? We see nothing because we don’t know it.
We are never invested in the landscapes we devalue. As a body, we sacrifice unknown places for the heat in our homes, the gas in our car, and the battery life on our phones. But what would happen if we embraced the history, the failure, and the guilt of conquest that make these lands what they are? What would the West look like if we took ownership of our mistakes, asked forgiveness for them, and laid claim to them on the land? Conservationists are willing to gamble their livelihood for the perception of an unspoiled landscape, but not for a place already lost. Our entire concept of preservation is based on rejecting reclamation, but what might happen if we embraced the failures of our past and celebrated the potential of our future?
Can you imagine if rural county commissioners accepted the failure of a historic road? Instead of forcing a narrative of continued use on a barely visible stretch of two track cuts in the ground, what would Southern Utah look like if they embraced the history and death of a road? And can you imagine if wilderness advocates embraced the failure of human history? If we embraced our mistakes and our attempts to tame and extract all value from natural resources. If we had faith in the prolonged narrative of the wild, glacial in its pace and time, earnestly restoring and reclaiming itself from the work of the past. Can you imagine if every highway came with a sidewalk or a trail?
As I walked back to my truck on that old highway in the Price River Canyon, I spotted some dirty glass bottles and a few rusted tin cans left behind on the mountainside They laid as naturally as the stones and twigs beside them, left behind as easily as a gust of wind. My mind wandered as I imagined how they ended up there–thrown out of the window by a slow moving motorist. Or left behind by a laborer, some tired hand taking a moment to eat a quick meal. Or maybe it was a miner, making their way back down the mountain after a long day breathing coal dust. It could have been a volunteer working to maintain the old Midland Trail or an orphan whose stability had been lost inside the Castle Gate mine. Or it could have been a member of the Ute tribe, heading back to the Uinta basin after fishing in the river. It could have been no one–just the refuse of human history left behind as a snapshot in time.
Whatever it was, I was reminded of Ed Abbey and his propensity for litter. “Of course I litter the public highway,” he’d said once. “After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly.” It’s a quote I hear often. Abbey wasn’t complaining of this particular old road, a highway he had likely driven. It was the growing federal highway system that drew his ire. As I stood in the center of that decaying blacktop, a disappearing road buckling from trees, shrubs, and the eroding bed beneath it, I wondered if Mr. Abbey was mistaken. Because from where I stand, it is the litter that has had the most staying power.
