The Parashant Monument Defines 'Way Out There'

A MONUMENT TO LONELINESS THE EXPANSIVE PARASHANT STANDS PROFOUNDLY Wild AND INHOSPITABLE FOR THE UNPREPARED

A thick brown dust cloud riding a tailwind boils up from the pickup truck's tires, half-blinding me as I jolt down a washboard road on the Arizona Strip through Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. Ahead, some windpropelled tumbleweeds rolling down the road look like the rumps of fleeing animals. A map lies beside me on the seat of the truck, but it's really pointless since only one road heads the way I'm going, and there's no possibility of becoming lost-provided I stay on it. There are no road signs to guide me, no people and consequently no litter, as I bore deeper on the third day into this raw, parched country. Out front, and out of civilian radio range, Flagstaff photographer Robert McDonald rides inside his own personal dust cloud. We're a full day's drive north of Phoenix.So big and empty is the Parashant, as the monument is known, that it resists casual description. For one thing, it's inseparable geographically from the Arizona Strip, a political anomaly north of the Grand Canyon whimsically referred to around here as "Baja Utah." Arizonans' only drivable linkage to the Strip is across the Navajo Bridge on U.S. Route 89A southwest of Page. The Arizona Strip extends south of Utah and north of the Grand Canyon from the Nevada border to the Navajo Indian Reservation. Two other roads through the Strip enter from Utah and Nevada, respectively. Take any of these roads far enough south and you drift onto the 1,014,000-acre Parashant. Travel farther and you could topple into the Colorado River gorge or Lake Mead. Within the monument's boundaries lie scorched desert, plunging cliffs, grassland prairies, breezy highlands and darn little water. Arizona's largest mule deer live here, and plenty of rattlesnakes.A small spike of traffic occurred after the monument was created in January 2000, but it didn't last. Curious tourists expecting an easy ride encountered instead a profound wilderness without one full-time resident. While beauty marks occur here and There, the Parashant remains grindingly wild and tough. Elevations differ by 7,000 feet, temperatures from sizzling to mountain cool on the same day. The biggest challenge facing government managers, says one official, “is protecting people from themselves” when they arrive unprepared. So mean are the roads on the Arizona Strip and the Parashant that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management warns tourists not to venture out here in low-clearance cars or in low-clearance sport-utility vehicles, or with ordinary tires. I spot a black stain from a punctured oil pan trailing away from a pointy rock, a reminder that only mountain bikers and devoted outback explorers could love the region's 6,000 miles of roads. “This national monument is quite different from any other,” says Roger C. Taylor of St. George, Utah, the BLM field manager for the Arizona Strip and the Parashant, in an interview midway through our adventure. “In other national monuments, there's a feature out there, or a building or pueblo, and routes that are usually paved right to that feature. Anywhere you go out there [in the Parashant] is an all-day trip. There are no paved roads, no facilities—no developments, no gas stations, no convenience stores.”air-conditioned motel room in St. George to start our first day on the Parashant by joining two trucks full of BLM and National Park Service people on an inspection tour to Tassi Spring in the monument's southwestern sector. Because the Parashant incorporates part of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the BLM and NPS-both Interior Department agencies-jointly manage the monument.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 34 AND 35] Windows of an abandoned schoolhouse overlook the Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon, an area 19th-century cowboys called the “high, wide and lonesome country.”

[LEFT] Rugged and beautiful Whitmore Canyon, one of several important Colorado River drainages, provides a colorful vista and testament to the area’s rich geologic history spanning almost 2 billion years.

With lunches and soft drinks on ice, and air-conditioners hissing, we skirt casinos at Mesquite, Nevada, on Interstate 15 near the Nevada-Arizona border, and round onto Grand Wash Road, past a small sign announcing the “Arizona State Line.” The government four-wheel-drive trucks rattle and squeak in protest as we slide downward into the Mohave Desert.

Grand Wash Road is one of the through-routes. The other two are “Main Street,” a settler's nickname for BLM Road 1069 out of St. George to the settlement of Mount Trumbull, and Mohave County Road 5 to Toroweap Point just west of Fredonia through the Kaibab-Paiute Indian Reservation. “Grand Wash was a trade and travel route for as long as people have lived in the area, Native Americans as well as settlers,” BLM archaeologist Diana Hawks tells us. Hawks has traced salt found in Hohokam settlements near Phoenix to a large ancient mine now covered by Lake Mead.

Someone in the lead truck spots a desert tortoise beside the road with “8X10” stenciled on its carapace. Soon we come upon Michael J. Boyles, a National Park Service wildlife biologist counting the Mohave population of protected desert tortoises in the meager creosote desert that comprise the Lake Mead uplands.

“Five years ago we only marked two,” he reports. “This time we know of six others.” Feral burros regularly encroach, he says, devouring food required by the tortoises, further endangering their fragile existence.

Several hours and 96 beeline miles out of St. George, we pull up where Tassi Spring flows from the ground at 1,600 feet elevation beside an abandoned ranch house marked for federal preservation. We're just 3 miles short of Lake Mead's Grand Wash Bay. By the time we finish our Tassi Spring visit, the day is more than half gone and it's time to turn around.

We detour up Pakoon Wash past Joshua trees and across a high pass that looks down on the lake, before doubling back onto Grand Wash Road. Here and everywhere on the Parashant, much of the land is dun-colored open range.

Back in St. George that evening, the motel room provides an oasis after a day of heat and road bumps.

Next morning, with tanks topped off and two jerry cans of extra gasoline, McDonald and I head out alone for Mount Trumbull, 85 miles south of St. George. We race our dust clouds past the thirsty prairie at Wolf Hole, down to where an American flag whipping in the wind at the one-room white schoolhouse at the old community of Mount Trumbull provides the only bright color in an otherwise drab juniper landscape at 4,000 feet elevation. A mailbox and fire hydrant elsewhere offer touches of humor because neither service is available there. Orvel Bundy, 70, of St. George comes closest to being the only full-time resident on the Parashant, and he even pays Arizona property tax, but he isn't at his place when we drive through. I telephone him and his wife Sally, 69, in St. George later.

Bundy was born at Mount Trumbull and remains firmly rooted in a new house on land homesteaded by his father where the road begins its climb up the Hurricane Cliffs. He runs 140 cattle on the monument and looks after them regularly. On windless days, the silence can be deafening, he tells us.

“The only disturbance are the airplanes. I can just haul back and holler just as loud as I can, and it goes off one cliff to another, and I don't disturb nobody.”

The settling of Mount Trumbull, which

bears the same name of a nearby mountain, coincided with a 1916 homestead act. The Mormon farmers who tried their luck ate a lot of dust before they finally gave up and pulled out. A few hangers-on keep seasonal places. The Bundys were so numerous hereabouts that Mount Trumbull is just as often referred to as “Bundyville.” Bundys fill the settlement's cemetery behind the schoolhouse.

“I went to school there until the fifth grade,” Bundy says. Sally was among the last teachers at Mount Trumbull in 196061. The next year the school closed for lack of pupils and teachers. The schoolhouse, he said, doubled as both church and community center. As a young man, Bundy danced there to piano and banjo music. Sadly, on July 31, 2000, vandals torched the schoolhouse and a church at Tuweep, burning both to the ground. The schoolhouse has since been restored.

Bundy grumbled, “I guess I lay that [fire] on the monument [designation]. It brings a lot more people.” That night McDonald and I throw-down at 6,500 feet in a ponderosa pine forest near a BLM camp below 8,029-foot Mount Trumbull. There's a spigot right on the curve of the road for good, cold water, and 50 yards away a sign marks the trail to the Uinkaret Pueblo, a tumble-down Puebloan village at Nixon Spring, and to a fantastic mountaintop view.

Or, visitors can go left at the Y-intersection by the camp for 3.3 miles to the turnoff to the trailhead for the Nampaweap Rock Art Site. Corn symbols, animal and stick figures stand out on desert-varnished lava rock around a volcanic vent, including what looks like a figure of man kicking a ball.

All afternoon lumber trucks hauling logs culled from the nearby 7,866-foot Mount Logan raise opaque clouds of gray dust that hang like a fog through the forest, causing me to ponder the words of Reed Mathis, a 97-year-old cowboy who's been chased plenty by his own dust out here. Mathis, of St. George, keeps a seasonal place near Mount Dellenbaugh by Twin Spring Canyon in some of the toughest country in the Parashant.

"The Strip's always dirty because that's what it is, dirty country," Mathis says in a telephone interview. "I was out there when we used to get 10 inches of rain in the summertime, and now we get 2."

He's sure that wild mavericks, inbred cattle with large horns and skinned knees from scaling steep canyons, still live in the perpendicular canyons that feed into the Grand Canyon, a fact confirmed by both the BLM and NPS.

"We would take a pack outfit in there, brand 15 to 16 mavericks on a trip," he recalls. "It was fun when you look back at it now."

The wind that whistles across the open spaces of Shivwits Plateau plays a siren song for Mathis, and he keeps going back. "It's hard country," says the old cowboy, "but if I had to do it again, I would."

All I wonder if I would, I ask myself, as dust swirling across my windshield gets thicker. Dust in summer, spring and fall, snow in winter, and gooey mud following the sudden storms that crackle across the highlands make the Parashant a motoring adventure any time of year.

when LOCATION: North of the Grand Canyon you go in the extreme northwestern corner of the state known as the Arizona Strip. GETTING THERE: Due to the extreme remoteness and inherent dangers

of Parashant monument, the BLM urges travelers to obtain a map and updated road conditions and start their journey at its St. George, Utah, office. To get to St. George from Flagstaff, drive north on U.S. Route 89, then follow the fork to 89A over the Navajo Bridge and on to Fredonia. There, drive west on State Route 389, which changes to Utah Route 59, and follow 59 to I-15 and on to St. George.

TRAVEL ADVISORY:

Services and lodging are available at Fredonia; Colorado City, Arizona; St. George, Utah; and Mesquite, Nevada. Maps for the Arizona Strip, including the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, can be purchased from the BLM office at 345 E. Riverside Drive, St. George, Utah, or with a credit card by calling (435) 688-3246. Tourists are advised to call that number before venturing out.

WARNING:

The BLM urges Parashant travelers to equip their vehicles with 4or 6-ply tires and carry two good spares. Bring all the water, food and gasoline you'll need.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Bureau of Land Management, St. George, Utah, office, (435) 688-3200; www.azblm.gov.