Sculptor of the Wastelands

occasional glimpse back at the West Temple-which dominates the whole torn landscape of the Rio Virgen Valley-Utah's Dixie.

Through the village of Rockville, once bowered and picturesque with stately trees. Now, shorn of the trees, this river bank town is without character-like grandmother with a haircut. The same thing has happened to Mount Carmel, on the east end of the Tunnel Road, with an even more pitiable result.

On the way northward to Cedar Breaks the roadbuilders might have given us one more inspiring view of the Kolob country, had they not chosen to make the asphalt hug the base of the long Hurricane Ledge, which obscures any view eastward. It is worth one's time to drive a few miles west on the New Harmony road and look back at the Harmony Cliffs, a strange group of brilliantly red bastians carved out of the shoulders of Cedar Mountain.

Now back to Kanarra, and the highway which leads us finally through an abruptly-climbing gorge to the summit of the Markagunt, to Cedar Breaks.

Cedar Breaks may not seem impressive to the mind exalted by memories of Zion Canyon. Yet it is no mean anticlimax. Here a vast mountainside has been shorn of its mantle of green by centuries of swift erosion, leaving a wide arena striped and splotched and radiant with color. Artists have tried to count its earth colors -a seemingly futile conceit, for its tonal nuances are as indistinguishable as the qualities of a great spirit. This is no happyhunting ground for the collector of statistics. It is purely visual impression of symphonic beauty.

Cedar Breaks is at one end of the emblazoned arc of Pink Cliffs that crowns the ten thousand foot heights of the MarkaguntPaunsagaunt Plateaus; Bryce is at the other end. To reach Bryce the road takes eastward through wide green meadows streaked with flowers and bordered by forests of pine, fir, spruce, and aspen. In the midst of this cool mountain paradise Navajo Lake is a strip of deep cerulean, fed by Duck Creek, whose clear, pleasant water is alive with trout shadows. The alert eye may sight mule deer grazing in the edges of the forest, and with luck may see an elk or two; for this is a land where hunters go in autumn, or when they die.

The infant river of Sevier curves northward through the wide swale that divides the plateaus; and the road, after crossing it, climbs gradually toward Red Canyon, which the stranger may take, for a few excited moments, to be Bryce. The intense red coloring, the monolithic forms, and graceful arches have a scenic value of their own. But the highway climbs up and out of this to a long green tableland, and beyond Ruby's Inn-Ruby is a man -enters pine forests. Nothing but green here, no hint of Bryce, until the way ends abruptly at the rim of the plateau, and earth drops into a netherland of blazing fantasy.

Bryce is all things to all men. Not in any political sense, but because there are few brains so dull that they cannot be stirred to some recollection by its varied imagery. And the richer mind can encompass Bryce but slowly, never fully conceiving, even after years of repeated visits. For always its mood is different, each hour of the day, each month, each season. Now it is blythe arrogance, a scintillating dance, a shimmering torrent of light; another moment the clouds may gather and it is an assembly of the condemned. A temple that stood in summer bathed in incandescent glory is in winter a haunted, tragic ruin on a lonely hill.

The Indians called it Unka-timee-wa-wince-pockich-red manshapes standing in the slopes. They stayed away from it. So did the Mormon settlers; not because they, too, thought it the abode of strange spirits, but because it was danged poor cow-pasture. Therefore it has no human history worth the telling. The geologists say it is the latest page in earth's diary of a billion years. But for most of us its story is wrapped in the enchantment of its forms.

Bryce is a twenty-mile panorama along the plateau-side; in depth a thousand feet or more from the upper rims; and every foot of it vibrant with color and interest. There is the Silent City, a huge amphitheatre of ornate structures, walls, monoliths, temples, bastions, castles, arches, avenues lined with soaring columns. There are Byzantine Palaces, Hindu Temples, Chinese Pagodas, the Great Cathedral, the Mormon Temple, Moon Temple, gothic arches, fairy castles, goblin aisles, Tower Bridge, Wall Street. Imperious Queen Victoria stands upon a frescoed wall. Elsewhere It is Paul Bunyan and Pinocchio and an eyeless Cyclops, Snow White and a thousand dwarfs, and Hagar prostrate in the wilderness. It is as full of images as the mind is of memories. Each beholder will find in it something of his own and will people it himself.

For the symphonist it is an abstraction of light and color spreading into wide areas of repetitive tone, rising in crescendoes of torrential brilliance. For the artist it is a study in prismatic harmonies, its shades running from dark umbres through purples, reds, yellows, creams, orange, white-lemon; the interplay of color, the reverberation of light from surface to surface making the whole seem living, translucent, as though suffused with inner fires. For the poet it is literature in stone. Characters of Shakespeare and Homer and Danté and Milton and Dickens tower on the stage, frozen in grimaces and smiles, and frowns, and in grace and droll and tortured attitudes.

It is at sunrise that Bryce clothes itself most in luminous beauty. The air is crisp and cool at these altitudes, even in midsummer, and spiced with pine-scent and the odor of star-flowers when the globe of sun lifts its load of yellow light out of Kaiparowitz in the east and sends it streaming on the tableaus that have emerged somberly out of the dawn. This light is heavy with gold and it plates figurines and colossi in glittering sharpness against their shadows; it brings out the delicate outlines of miniatures, and clarifies the intaglio of the walls. It adds a new dimension to all semblances of living things and seems to make them breathe.

A walk into the Silent City by moonlight is another experience no imaginative adventurer should miss. In this pallid glow the figures become weird, nightmarish, a carnival of ghosts blown up to terrifying stature; seeming to sway perceptibly against the stars, or to stand and gaze out of their own haunted shadows, charging the quiet night with new forms of madness.

It is difficult to admit that all this is not the work of some insane sculptor, but the artistry of erosion; the patient chiseling of frost and wind and rain, which carries away from the surfaces of Bryce the thickness of a cigarette paper each year. In twenty million years, the rangers tell us, the figures will have been dissolved, the massive walls and temples carried away into the Pahria, the Colorado, to spread a film of tinted silt in the furrows of some far-off orange grove, or on the floor of Lake Mead.

It is a tribute to the Colorado that he, the Master, does not repeat himself. His works are devious and strange, sometimes for-bidding, always mysterious and powerful; but never the same. After Zion, Kolob, Cedar Breaks, and Bryce, one might despair of seeing anything more that might arouse a feeling of awe or enchantment. But there is a road striking out northward from Bryce, over Table Mountain, enticing the traveler to yet another frontier of sensuous delight.

As one descends the east slope of Table Mountain he feels that he has left the known world and he is nearly right. There is one Mormon town, Escalante, nestled in the painted hills, by the Straight Cliffs of Kaiparowitz, and then the Unknown. The gravelled road darts through and over a grey cliff and enters into a tossing sea of stone, cut deep with canyons and ravines and crev-ices by the numerous small streams that hurry on to add their abrasives to the tools of the Master far below in Glen Canyon. It is a road that fairly writhes through these tortured depths and heights for thirty miles. Not many years ago it was a pack trail, over which determined settlers brought food, clothing, furniture, stoves-everything they needed that they could not grow or make for themselves. They even packed in the parts of a piano and assembled it, and an organ for the church, and later a Ford car for use in the hidden valley of Boulder Village.

Topping a long hogback ridge one comes in view of this valley-of-floating hills. If it is evening, as it should be when one arrives, the scene below will be indistinct in a mist of cuprous gold, and it will be thought that here, surely, is a landscape from another world. As in all this graven country there is the ineffable peace and stillness of a holy dream; and it is felt that if a word be spoken the vision will fade away. One asks himself: do mountains drift like vapor in the breeze? There below are white mounds of iri-descent stone floating on emerald lakes of grass. After an ecstatic space of hypnosis one leaps into his car and hurries down to prove it. But then the sun has vanished, the mounds are clothed in dusk, the emerald lakes of grass are spotted with the moving shadows of real cattle and horses. And there are houses here, far apart and difficult to find, but inhabited by humans; sturdy, wholesome, friendly people actual enough to cook a supper of thick steaks, with light-bread fresh from the oven and great slabs of butter, and plum preserves.

Another morning, and the road goes on, climbing up the mountainsides to a high summit, where a pause to look reveals a wild, tumultuous desolation of color-streaked stone. In a vast field south and eastward is the unmapped, almost undiscovered Glen Canyon area; a realm of secret gorges, hidden grandeur, lonely altars to the Great Solitudes. One wishes now for a strange new power of words to tell with tinted sounds the glory of this stillness.

Far across the catastrophic scene, holy Navajo Mountain lunges over the rim of the earth, and beyond its shoulders are the tips of Monument Valley's shafts, dimly visible above the horizon.

Now the way is northward, to follow the crest of Aquarius Plateau, through lanes of sumac and chaparral and thickets of snow-twisted aspen, and all the while a changing view of canyons and buttresses spread out below to the feet of the Henry Mountains and then some; with colors hurled about lavishly everywhere. Only one pinch of bright blue-Bowen's Lake-provides a dissonance in the wild harmony of earth colors. This is Wayne Wonderland, this turmoil of stone that dashes about the bases of the mountains.

As in most of the canyon country one gazes here on the dynamic silences with a possessiveness fiercely personal; resenting any trail or road that may lead the public here in great numbers. Not that one would deny them the experiences that have enriched his own time, but that a priceless quality of the panoramas will be destroyed with their coming, perhaps a quality that is in the stillness, in the sense of remoteness and inaccessibility; an impalpable quality of spirit that seems to put one in communion with the Presences that move unseen among the rocks. It is Something that does not hover over gas stations, hamburger stands and auto courts, no matter how necessary these things may be to the mortal traveler.

Yet it may be many years before the asphalt goes slithering into these regions. For a long time after that the explorer will find areas off the roads and trails that satisfy the primitive man in him. With this comforting thought, one moves on. The road hurries down from the Aquarius, heads toward an exciting, jagged bastian of burgundy red that stands up mightily out of the Canyon of the Dirty Devil (now called, with more tact, less vigor, Fremont River). This wall of lustrous red is a fitting backdrop before the final act in our drama of the canyons. Someone calls it the Cathedral as if we hadn't enough "cathedrals" for one journey.

The Indians would have done better. They would have given it a name with thunderous, shining sounds; to mean something like "Great-mountain-with-green-hood-which-shows-big-red-face."

Down into the pleasant hamlet of Teasdale, and then the road turns westward to Torrey, a lively frontier town that still holds onto much of its pioneer Mormon atmosphere. Outside Torrey a brief flirtation with the asphalt ends, and from here on the road is dirt-mighty troublesome dirt if and when a storm comes up. The way is along the floor of the wide canyon, sometimes follow-ing the flood channel itself. But the coloring of this part of the journey is worth any kind of trouble short of mortal injury.

Capitol Reefs, a long series of striped cliffs lifted up like a surf about to crash in upon a glistening shore, are brushed with striking hues that range from deep cherry red through a blend of browns, earth reds, ochres, buffs and yellows. If you, like the late artist Maynard Dixon and the living artist Conrad Buff, have an earth-color madness you will find, as they did, an answer here to your most earnest prayers. Each turn in the road, each new vista will bring gasps of pleased amazement.

Finally, where the Reef swerves southward and the channel darts through an aperture in its walls, the settlement of Fruita cuddles in the bend. Its vineyards and peach orchards cover the warm rincons and edge right up to the tail of the cliffs, which go up hundreds of feet, sheer and smooth, streaked with buff and lighter shades of red. The canyon here is reminiscent of Canyon de Chelly, without the aura of antiquity that lingers in that ancient home of the Navajo. Yet here, as in de Chelly, the people seem to be inhabitants of a shrine, living in quiet reverence, greeting the traveler graciously and with warm hospitality. Here, as at Boul-der, they have not yet caught the mercenary spirit that comes in the wake of hordes of sightseers. And here, for the purpose of this writing, the journey ends. "I will lay your foundations with fair colors, and your walls of pleasant stones."

This Biblical promise has been more than fulfilled to the Latter Day Saints of southern and southeastern Utah.

BY NATT N. DODGE Throughout much of the 2,000 miles of its winding course, the muddy torrent of the Colorado River flows through some of the most rugged, forbidding, and inaccessible yet spectacularly beautiful wastelands of the West. In contrast to the Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri that formed broad highways of travel for explorers, trappers, and later the cargo carriers of a growing nation; the Colorado and its canyon-hidden tributaries has been and still is a formidable barrier diverting the tide of westward travel to the north and south of its Escalante Wildnerness. Only a few of the most hardy and tenacious explorers have succeeded in finding routes across the almost impenetrable labyrinth of winding canyons, cliff-girt gorges, and slick-rock mazes; the pinyon-covered mesas and even-forested mountain masses among which the Colorado has carved its tortuous course. After establishing a precarious foothold in northern Utah, the determined followers of Brigham Young sent out explorers to comb the rugged and inhospitable land of blue skies and red cliffs in search of possible home sites. These persistent pioneers found that; here and there, steep-walled canyons widened out to form fertile valleys where clear, ever-flowing streams assured vital water for livestock and crops. Hardy colonists established themselves and built homes in the wilderness, communities that have persisted in the face of unbelievable hardships forming the basis for the civilization and development of the Colorado River Basin.

One colony was established at a particularly favorable site, at the junction of a broad valley and the Colorado River where it flowed through one of those rare places where, for several miles, its relenting canyon walls drew back sufficiently to make room for a few acres of tillable soil. Center of this community is the town of Moab, Utah; and, as in the case of the man who invented a better mousetrap, the world has beaten a path to its door. This path, U. S. Highway 160, put Moab, in spite of itself, on the travel map of the United States because here was one of the very few places along its interminable course that the Colorado was approachable from both banks and an opportunity was thus provided for the construction of a highway bridge. Over Highway 160 flows the ever-growing tide of travel diverted northward in skirting the hitherto impenetrable Escalante Country. Yet, because of the fortunate cooperation of Nature, the bridging of the Colorado has rendered accessible a scenic corner of this cliffand-canyon wilderness.

Forced by the unrelenting demands of a rugged environment to bend every effort toward wresting a living far from the easing influences of civilization, the early residents of Moab explored the country round about in search of land suitable for farming and grazing. North of the town and across the Colorado, junipercovered plateaulands offered sparse forage for livestock where the thin layer of grass-growing soil had found havens among the bare, windswept patches of "slickrock" typical of this region. But much of this area was rendered useless for grazing by hundreds of parallel "fins" or slabs of brick-red rock, many of them more than 100 feet high, less than 20 feet thick and, like great reefs, stretching for miles across the landscape. Not only did these vertical fins act as barriers, but sometimes cattle wandered in among them and became lost, thereby wasting many days of their owners' time in difficult search. Here and there, perforating these fins, were immense openings or windows offering passage through the barrier or, high in the face of the wall, creating weird and beautiful arches of glistening red rock framing a patch of Utah's deep blue sky mottled and streaked with clean, white clouds. But such windows and arches, no matter how awe-inspiring, were of little interest to a cowman on a footsore horse picking its way across sloping slickrock or over rocky gullies in search of a lost steer or a cow that had hidden her calf.

There were some business men in Moab, however, who were fascinated with the sheer spectacularism of the mighty reefs of perpendicular fins, with the grandeur of the arches, and with the other weird forms, some resembling figures of beasts or men, that erosion had sculptured in the sandstone. They liked to clamber up to the top of the cliffs overlooking the Colorado River and the Moab Valley and wander around among the huge stone battlements lining Courthouse Wash, looking for caves in which still stood the crumbling remains of masonry walls built by prehistoric Indians, or perchance to find in the dry dust a smoke-blackened cooking pot or a worn yucca-fiber sandal. The more spare time exploring they did, the more these men were drawn under the spell of the strange fairyland of arches, fins, and balanced rocks; of caricatures in stone; and of parallel perpendicular walls with narrow canyons between like the skyscraper-lined streets of a great city. They gave these formations names like The Spectacles, Three Gossips, Park Avenue, and Parade of the Elephants. Among these Moab men was Doc Williams. Doc realized that if he found in this amazing land of fins and arches so much of interest, perhaps other people might be fascinated, too. With the aid of "Bish" Taylor, editor of the Moab newspaper, Doc's enthusiasm was spread to others and, as the result of the spotlight of publicity which they turned on the redrock region, an area of 4,520 acres was set aside for perpetual Federal protection as Arches National Monument, by Presidential proclamation, on April 12, 1929.

Creation of the national monument focused more attention on this fairy fin-land north of Moab, stimulating further exploration which revealed several even more spectacular areas of fins and arches. In one area known as the Devil's Garden, 64 individual arches were counted. One of these, named Landscape Arch when discovered by an archeological survey party making a reconnaissance of the area, has a span of 291 feet, almost as long as a standard-sized football gridiron. This is believed to be the longest natural stone arch in the world. Farther east, in an unsurpassed setting of massive slickrock domes, indescribable Delicate Arch commands an inspiring view of the Colorado River Country and the usually snow-capped La Sal Mountains to the southeast. With the realization that the monument, as originally created, contained only a small portion of the outstanding scenic and scientific features of the region, Doc Williams, aided by "Bish" Taylor and Photographer Harry Reed, instituted a campaign to enlarge the monument so that the additional features might be included within its protecting boundaries. Backed by the Moab Lions Club and other organizations, the project was successful, and the monument was enlarged to include 34,300 acres. Since the establishment of Arches National Monument and the paving of U. S. Highway 160 passing but a few miles west of it, thousands of travelers from all over the United States and many foreign countries have left the highway to follow the unimproved desert road into the accessible Windows Section. Others have bumped along the rutted and gullied road down Salt Valley Wash and have found their way on foot or horseback into the Devil's Garden, or have hiked in over the two-mile trail to Delicate Arch. A few more venturesome spirits each year penetrate into the Klondike Bluffs section of the Monument, a region so rugged and inaccessible that it has not yet been thoroughly explored. Photographers, both amateur and professional, have found among the arches and fins such beauties of form and color that the fame of the Monument as a picture-takers' paradise has spread across the whole land. This bold sculpturing, so full of color, is a challenge.