Hardcover(1)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Landscape of Desire examines the plight of the western landscape. It discusses a wide range of issues, including mining, grazing, dams, recreation, wilderness, and land management. Since recreation has replaced extraction industries as the primary use of wilderness, especially in southern Utah, Gordon addresses its impactful qualities. He overviews the history of the conflict between preservation and development and places these issues in a cultural context. The text is presented in a narrative format, following the individuals of one field course Gordon lead that explored Muddy Creek and the Dirty Devil River from Interstate 70 to Lake Powell. Though each chapter focuses on the geologic formation the group is traveling through, the plants, animals, ecology, and human impacts are all tightly woven into the narrative. Not only does the land affect the members of the field course, but their attitudes and insights affect the land.
In Landscape of Desire Gordon achieves a vision of wholeness of this popular and contested region of Utah that centers around the implications of being human and also stewards of the wild.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874215663 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 220 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Landscape of Desire
Identity and Nature in Utah's Canyon CountryBy Greg Gordon
Utah State University Press
Copyright © 2003 Utah State University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-566-3
Chapter One
MANCOS SHALE
Formed by silt slowly settling on the floor of an immense inland sea that covered most of the interior West from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean and east to the Great Lakes, these deep waters, low in available oxygen, prevented organic matter from oxidizing and thus created the black and grey of shale and siltstone.
Perhaps no portion of the earth's surface is more irredeemably sterile, more hopelessly lost to human habitation. -Captain John Macomb, Corps of Topographical Engineers, trying to find the junction of the Green and Grand River in 1859.
Just north of Moab, Utah, the River Road meets Highway 191. A line of RVs and pickup trucks towing chrome-studded Jeeps funneling into Moab creates a long wait before we can turn left onto the highway. Entering Moab I feel a constriction around my heart. Another multi-story chain motel has appeared during my absence, bringing the total to thirty-three in this town of seven thousand souls.
With the discovery of uranium fifty years ago, Moab was transformed from a sleepy Mormon outpost to "The Richest Town in the U.S.A." with twenty millionaires for every 250 citizens. By the 1960s, the uranium boom went bust and Moab, like Aspen, Taos, and Telluride spiraled into the post mining-town depression. Like these towns, Moab clawed its way out of economic doldrums by soliciting the tourist dollar. In the 1980s mountain bikers discovered Moab. (Or was it the other way around?) Suddenly it seemed like the old uranium days had returned. Only this time, people were buying bike tires instead of jeep tires, shifters instead of shovels, and odometers instead of Geiger counters.
Driving into Moab, you are barraged with billboards enticing you on raft trips or jeep tours. You can rent a mountain bike for the world famous Slickrock Trail or go rock climbing. And of course there's recreational shopping. You can buy T-shirts portraying lizards you will never see, books about places that don't exist, and just about anything from earrings to lawn ornaments adorned with Kokopelli, a mythological figure sacred to the Puebloan peoples. Everyone seems like they are on vacation. A teenage girl break dances in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn while her dad fiddles with the mountain bikes on the roof of their SUV. A young couple sits on the curb drinking the milk from a coconut. A playground for the hip and idle, Moab seems like a town designed by Outside magazine, shamelessly advocating the outdoors as a playground and portraying nature as a commodity.
Moab's annual Jeep Safari transforms "mountain bike Mecca" overnight. The squadrons of spandex and lyrca thighs pumping up and down Main Street from smoothie shop to brew pub are replaced by Jeeps. Traffic slows to a virtual stop as Jeeps are unloaded and paraded up and down Main Street. Many bumper stickers proclaim, "It's a Jeep thing. You wouldn't understand." There are Jeeps jacked up on monster tires, Jeeps painted blue camouflage (or a black and white camo that reminds me of a Holstein), and even a '58 Chevy station wagon on a Jeep chassis.
The Jeep invasion swells the valley to more than twenty thousand, and not a parking spot, campsite, nor hotel room remains vacant. The locals grow cranky. The parking lot of City Market overflows with hundreds of Jeepsters outfitting their expeditions for the day with all the essentials: chicken, burgers, chips, pop, beer, and charcoal. The four-wheel-drive trucks, Humvees, Jeeps, and SUVs queue up at each gas station and into the streets. Parked diagonally at the corner for all to see is a Mercedes family personal urban assault vehicle, sort of a cross between a Humvee and a camper. These big hunks of machine share three things in common: 1. They serve no utilitarian purpose and exist solely for recreation; 2. They are all spotless, no mud or dirt anywhere; and 3. As Michelle, my assistant, points out, they are driven only by white males although a woman is often perched in the passenger seat.
Needing refuge, I seek my favorite funky diner at the far end of town. A place where service is excellent, just slow, where you can talk to the cook through a portal to the kitchen, where the waitress casually fills you in on the town gossip, where the breakfast is huge, the coffee strong, and the smoothies divine, and where they play whatever music they want. Grateful Dead and Indigo Girls seem to be favorites. Posters of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean adorn the walls, and the bathrooms are out back. Confusion flows over me as I pull into the parking lot. The Star Diner is gone, replaced by Burger King.
Bereaved, I refuse to eat anywhere else. Surly, deprived of breakfast and caffeine, I pull into the youth hostel to meet eight university students from around the country who have enrolled in a field studies program through the Sierra Institute, an extension of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The program consists of three courses: Natural History of the Colorado Plateau, the Art of Nature Writing, and Wilderness Education. As program leader I'm responsible not only for lectures and instruction, but also for logistics, safety, and general well being, which often encompasses roles as guidance counselor, friend, wilderness guide, confidant, and grumpy old man. Michelle greets the students enthusiastically while I stomp around impatiently, waiting to load the truck so we can escape Moab as quickly as possible.
Instead of heading into the nearby scenic redrock country, we drive northwest toward Green River. To the north of Green River rise the Book Cliffs, a foreboding rampart towering three thousand feet above the desert plain. In erosional retreat, these cliffs form the northern perimeter of the canyon country stretching from Price, Utah, east to Grand Junction, Colorado.
Upstream, the Green River cuts a deep gorge, creating Desolation and Gray canyons, while the canyons of Labyrinth and Cataract form an impassable barrier downstream. Thus, settlers, fur trappers, gold miners, and explorers were funneled into this valley, fording the Green River at Gunnison Crossing. The San Rafael Reef, a shark tooth ridge of upended sandstone, forced the route sharply to the north. Not an actual marine reef, the San Rafael Reef was christened by the early pioneers because this fifty-six mile, two thousand foot high pleat proved a significant impediment to east-west travel. By the 1830s, mule trains were bringing coffee, cloth, livestock, and beaver pelts from Santa Fe to California along this trade route that became known as the Old Spanish Trail.
Crossing such remote and inhospitable terrain, the Old Spanish Trail was also used by rustlers and slave traders. Although Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1812, an illegal slave trade flourished as Indians from the Southwest were sold in California. Fetching up to $200 each, young girls were the most desired for their value as domestic servants in the booming gold rush cities. In the opposite direction, cattle and horse rustlers stole horses in California and brought them to New Mexico. Ute chief Wakara (Walker) played both games; a preeminent rustler, he also traded women and children captured in raids from other tribes to the slave runners for axes, guns, blankets, and metal pots.
The newly arrived Mormon settlers found slavery reprehensible and interfered with Wakara's participation in the slave trade, prompting the outbreak of Walker's War in 1853. However, by this time the slave trade was already fading. In 1870 a mail route was established along the trail and then abandoned thirteen years later when rail service between Colorado and California was established.
Instead of following the logical route of the Old Spanish Trail, the engineers must have found the prospect of blasting a highway straight through the San Rafael Reef too appealing to pass up. Begun in 1970, it took twenty years to complete this stretch of interstate which opened up much of the formerly inaccessible San Rafael Swell, a vast uninhabited country of nine hundred square miles. Interstate 70 now slices through the Reef revealing successive layers of geologic history. Deposited horizontally, the formations have been tilted on end, so that one drives through the entire Jurassic period in a few minutes.
Gunnison Crossing eventually became the town of Green River, and the old way station can now claim distinction as the world's largest truck stop. Rather than a single entity, here is an entire town dedicated to refueling gas tanks, eating banana cream pie, fixing flat tires, towing SUVs stuck in the desert, and spending one night between here and somewhere else. Green River has two exits, one to get off the interstate, the other to get back on. To the east, only one gas station lies between here and Colorado, ninety miles away. A small sign on the west side of town reads, "Next Services 110 miles."
About halfway through this 110 miles of "nothingness," we turn off Interstate 70 at an unnamed "Ranch Exit." A dirt road off a dirt road leads to Muddy Creek, the only reliable source of water in the southern half of the vast and seldom visited San Rafael Swell. It looks more like an irrigation ditch loaded with cow manure than a creek.
Composed of grey Mancos Shale, the Coal Cliffs loom above us. A cold wind whips the cumulus clouds across the sky like a time release film. Through the low clouds we can see snow in the highlands of the Fishlake Plateau. As we step out of the van after the long ride, everyone replaces their shorts with long underwear and pants and quickly throws fleece over their T-shirts. We park near a derelict trailer, once a cowboy camp of sorts. It sags to one side, the windows blown out. Bits of refuse, old fencing, lumber, and a car chassis lay scattered about. It's one of those rounded post-war style trailers that conjures up visions of Appalachia.
Banjo, my faithful golden retriever, doesn't seem bothered by the unscenic scenery. She bounces around in circles and rolls in a cowpie.
Yet I know what the students must be thinking, so casting aside the stoic wilderness guide persona, I take their side.
"Good God, Abbey!" I invoke the patron saint Ed, and quote the first line of his gospel, Desert Solitaire (one of our textbooks), "This is the most beautiful place on Earth."
"Are you out of your friggin' mind, Abbey? You expect us to spend the next three weeks out here? Where's those red rocks, that famous slickrock you make such a big deal about, and where's those sandstone arches and waterfall grottos? There's nothin' here fer Crisssakes! This is the most godforsaken, uninspiring, and not to mention UGLY place I've ever seen!" The students smile quizzically as I rant.
"You call this good-for-nothing shithole a wilderness? GOOD GOD there's not even a cactus to hide behind out here. Nothin' but cows and cow-shit!" I kick a nearby patty.
"The desert's fried your pickled brain, Ed. A guy would have to be crazy, certifiable NUTS to hike out across that for twenty-one days!" I wave toward the south, a desolate plain bound by low, grey hills.
By now everyone is laughing enough that I can pull out the maps and show them we are indeed headed clear through the San Rafael Swell, from I-70 to the tiny town of Hanksville. A person could easily hike through this county in less than half the time, but our purpose isn't to pass through an area as quickly as possible, but rather to come to know a place, to linger and saunter as Thoreau would have us do. "For every walk is a sort of crusade," he wrote, "We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms."
"It's a big chunk of country, nearly all roadless. I've never been here before, should be interesting," I say, closing the map case.
At least it would be an adventure and an educational experience, which is precisely the point. By combining academic studies with experiencing a place on a physical level, students develop a personal awareness of the environment. Concepts such as evolution, ecosystem processes, geology, and the human's role in nature cease to be abstractions. For many students, this program has completely changed the course of their academic careers and subsequent lives.
We quickly set up camp as snow and darkness begin to fall.
"Find a spot, set up your tents, and try to stay warm," I say.
Michelle moves from tent to tent helping the students figure out how to set up their tents (many have never camped before, much less in the snow) while I fire up the cook stove for hot water. Most crawl into their tents as soon as possible. One of the older students, Jonathan, and I stand around the stove sipping cups of soup and glancing at the sky.
"Still snowing," I say.
"Yep," replies Jonathan who apparently isn't much for lengthy conversation.
"Hellava way to start a program," I say.
"Yep," replies Jonathan.
"Sure hope it clears up tomorrow."
"Yep," says Jonathan. We finish our soup and head to bed.
It does indeed clear the next day, turning the grey dirt into gumbo that sticks to the bottom of our boots like wet concrete. We dry and warm ourselves in the sun while Michelle explains the basics behind minimum impact camping and safety procedures. By the time everyone figures out how to pack their packs, it's well after lunch. Packed long before anyone else, I notice Jonathan sitting against his pack, already halfway through Desert Solitaire. It turns out that two years ago he hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail.
We shoulder our heavy packs and navigate through futile attempts at alfalfa fields. We aim toward the interstate, sighting our course along the creek by the low greasewood growing on the banks, the only green, albeit dusty and pale, in a grey landscape. Overgrazing has created a severe cutbank along the torpid creek, and we claw at shadscale and tamarisk, hoisting ourselves up and down the banks. We trudge slowly in a perpendicular line, unwavering as a missile, so as to intercept the highway. I wonder if anyone notices a line of backpackers threading their way through a maze of barbed wire, old tires, and car parts to the highway, passing beneath it and heading south into a landscape as desolate as the moon?
We could have parked on the other side of the highway and begun our hike farther downstream, but I wanted us to walk under the interstate, having spent so much of our lives traveling over it. This ribbon of asphalt superimposed over the landscape defines our movement and which places are important and which are not. It gets us from here to there with little concern as to what lies between. We build our highways with near total disregard of the land and its inhabitants.
I also wanted to experience how animals move through the landscape. Driving along Interstate 70 from Grand Junction, Colorado, to Moab, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of ground squirrel carcasses littering the pavement. Are we simply oblivious to the lives of animals in our rush across the desert?
The Humane Society estimates more than one million animals are killed every day on U.S. highways. This includes not only large and small mammals such as deer, bear, raccoons, hares, and rodents, but also reptiles, amphibians, birds, and untold invertebrates. Over half a million deer alone are killed every year by traffic. Roadkill is the leading cause of mortality for most large mammals and several endangered species, such as desert tortoise, Houston toad, brown pelican, ocelot, northen long-eared bat (whose only known breeding location is bisected by the Transcanada), American crocodile, and key deer (of which 80% of all known deaths are attributed to traffic). Highways act as wildlife mortality sinks. For example snakes are attracted to the road to sunbathe and get run over; then ravens and jays come to feed off carcasses and in turn are killed. From salamanders to grizzlies, highways prove lethal barriers to wildlife movement, preventing amphibians from reaching their breeding grounds and bears from finding mates. Many animals avoid highways altogether. Elk spurn areas up to half a mile from a road. Small mammals find many roads too wide to cross. A study of a four-lane highway in the Mojave Desert discovered that rodents hardly ever crossed the road. This is of a special portent to the Colorado Plateau which is home to more than thirty species of rodents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Landscape of Desire by Greg Gordon Copyright © 2003 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface: The Rim....................viiiAuthor's Note....................xi
i. Mancos Shale....................1
ii. Morrison....................11
iii. Summerville....................21
iv. Entrada....................30
v. Carmel....................37
vi. Wingate....................51
vii. Chinle....................61
viii. Moenkopi....................72
ix. White Rim....................78
x. Moenkopi....................86
xi. Carmel....................92
xii. Asphalt....................101
xiii. Unconformity....................109
xiv. Carmel....................120
xv. Navajo Revisited....................127
xvi. More Navajo....................137
xvii. Navajo....................147
xviii. Kayenta....................156
xix. Wingate....................168
xx. White Rim....................179
xxi. Organ Rock Shale....................187
xxii. Inundation....................198
Bibliography....................206