Wayne County, Utah
by Ken Allen
Spanning
the spine of the Wasatch Mountains, the western ridge of the Rocky Mountains
and the eastern shore of the Great Basin, is a political creation called Wayne
County. Seen from high above, Wayne County would appear to be an anomalous
trapezoid cut in a Federally decreed map spanning the plateau and reef region
of south central Utah. Created on May 2, 1892 from Piute County, it is
surrounded on latitude lines by Sevier and Emery Counties on the north and by
Garfield County on the south. The mountain ridges of Piute County bound the
west, and the Green River of San Juan County in the desolate wilderness of the
Canyonlands bounds the east. It goes without saying that survival of life in
this high county is challenging. In the western quartile, mountains and hills,
cliffs and canyons, and massive reefs and ledges surround small fertile valleys
and a few hollows along a 7100-foot high plateau above Capital Reef. The region
is laced with fantastic delicately colored rock formations of yellowcake, coal
and iron. A map hardly does justice to the terrain.
The
Fremont River
The Fremont River snakes nourishment worth more than gold
through the western plateau. Like a great spine, it flows from the
elevations of the extreme northwestern corner at Fish Lake southward through
the Rabbit Valley roughly parallel to State Highway 24; it passes the Mormon
farming towns of Fremont, Loa and Lyman, turning eastward beyond Bicknell at
the Bickell Bottoms, where it is joined by Pine Creek. It is then joined from
the south by Bulberry Creek and Boulder Creek, then it winds between Teasdale
and Torrey, along the scree of the south-facing chocolate-colored cliffs of the
geologic Moenkopi formation. This ledge forms the skirt of the 11,300 foot high
cone peak of Thousand Lake Mountain, which pokes like a pyramid in the distance
above a thousand foot high wall. Opposite are the north-facing white, pink and
lavender rock cliffs of the geologic Chinle and Navajo formations. A prominent
ledge of Navajo limestone frames the base of the gently receding slopes and
blue timber-covered ridge of 11,330-foot high Boulder Mountain, its peak hidden
from the floor. of the nearby valleys. Boulder Mountain is the lifeblood of the
valleys below it. Yet its prominence is nearly lost in the surrounding 11,300
foot high Acquarius Plateau, which is large enough to hide the City of San
Francisco. The northeastern corner and the southwestern corner of this
fantastic mesa are National Parks: Capital Reef and Bryce Canyon.
Below
Boulder Mountain, just southeast of Torrey, the Fremont River flows into the
narrowest gorge of the Fremont River Valley. North of Torrey, out of the rocky
hollow east of the bare, brown Torrey Bluff, Sand Creek flows eastward, joining
Sulfur Creek and the Fremont just beyond the gorge above the north-south fold
of Capitol Reef.
Capital
Reef divides the land as if separating heaven from hell. The Fremont
cascades 2000 feet down the fold of the Reef in less than five miles, draining
the whole front of Waterpocket Fold, as the face of the Reef is called. The
river, nearly dry during some parts of the year, passes between treeless mesas,
through canyons and hollows of moonscapes, slowing along the Caineville flats,
and then it flows onward to the oasis of Hanksville. Just beyond Hanksville,
the Fremont is joined by the Big Muddy River to form the Dirty Devil River. The
Dirty Devil meanders southeastward through great mesa-rimmed canyons of
Garfield County to the mighty Colorado River above Glen Canyon, which today is
filling with the silt of Lake Powell.
In
the 1930's, the spectacular portion of the Fremont River Valley east of the
Bicknell Bottoms was known as the "Wayne Wonderland," where fossils
and a petrified forest once evoked curiosity. In 1937, President
Roosevelt proclaimed the Fremont River Gorge and the nearby north-south
Waterpocket Fold in the earth’s crust Capitol Reef National Monument. In
1968, an Act of Congress created Capitol Reef National Park, at the same time
designating the wild country along the far eastern edge of Wayne and Garfield
Counties as Canyonlands National Park.
Teasdale
About one mile south of Highway 24, three miles southwest of
Torrey, is a 7000-foot high circular valley no more than three miles across
surrounded on all sides by hills and rocky ridges. In it is the tiny
village of Teasdale and the remnants of a few small subsistence farms.
Above the light colored Navajo cliffs to the south looms lofty Boulder Mountain
with its broad flattop plateau obscured from the view of much of the valley.
Bulberry Creek flows eastward out of a draw of Boulder Mountain through the
center of Teasdale, providing the water to irrigate garden lots and nearby farm
fields. Black lava rocks are strewn over the sandy red hills from an
ancient flow off the adjacent peaks. The natural vegetation is pinyon,
juniper, sagebrush, rabbitbrush and bullberry. A broad scrub-covered mound
rises a few hundred feet among the eastern fields northeast of the town center.
To the west are red sandstone hills where a water tank once stood full of
culinary water.
A
narrow road cuts a notch forming a portal to Main Street, and a dusty rutted
track angles back to the northeast to the cemetery, where the monuments of
graves in the open desert rise above the scrub. A few fresh graves populate
with those more than a century old.
The
people of the valley of the Escalante River enjoyed relative isolation until
their soil gave out under the stress of heavy grazing and torrential desert
rains. Then a few trudged north over Boulder Mountain, settling with
their sheep and cattle in this valley along Bulberry Creek. Soon it was
renamed Teasdale, after the Mormon apostle George Teasdale who had called upon
them to tame the land and to civilize it.
Teasdale
was settled nearly exclusively by widow Lydia Catherine Mann Adams and her
large contingent of grown children with their young families. Lydia was
an early Yankee convert to Mormonism from Leeds, Ontario, Canada who had
crossed the plains with the Mormon pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois. While
a younger brother stayed behind in Iowa, to die in battle serving in the Union
Army at the Battle of Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee, during the War Between the
States, she married a widower, Scotsman and ironmaker David Barclay Adams,
likewise an early Mormon convert, and answered the call to Zion. She
followed her young husband and took his first wife’s children to raise as her
own, as he assisted in founding Cedar City attempting to establish the Iron
Mission in the region. Lydia came to Bulberry a widow, having buried her
husband on the other side of Boulder Mountain in the well-kept cemetery of
Escalante.
Boulder
Mountain
A state road leaves town to the southeast climbing past Grover,
where for many years it ended in a trail around Boulder Mountain. Back
then, the trails south to Escalante in Garfield County skirted the mountain.
On the east, the main trail, recently paved as Scenic Byway 12, leads up and
over to Boulder Town from Grover, climbing well over 8,000 feet past ponderosa
pine forests, then through true montane forests of aspen and fir, and then into
treeless desert highlands. In places, the traveler looks down sheer cliffs
hundreds of feet in the presence of vistas of endless miles over the
Waterpocket Fold across the eastern desert to Colorado and Arizona.
Looming at a shortened distance of fifty miles of clear air stand the silent
volcanic cones of the Henry Mountains like ancient pyramids 7,000 feet above
the mile-high arid basin below. Dropping down to a plateau to follow a
ridge called the Hogback above Calf Creek, the traveler enjoys miles of an
unsettling and unshielded view down several hundred feet on each side of a
stingy two-lane road. To the west is Hells Backbone far above a sheer
walled canyon known as The Box. Below, the benign but potentially
devastating Escalante River wends eastward through a once fertile valley now
rarely canopied in its trademarked rich blue sky. Today the purity is
marred by the windless haze of a distance coal-fired power plant. No
place on earth compares to Boulder Mountain and its surroundings.