The Patio Drive-In: Blanding, UT

Scenes from Spring Break

 


Burgers First…
We decide to begin, rather than end, our adventure with the “eats”; to shore ourselves up against the exertion to come; to set off into the wilds with bellys (hopefully) full of Trifecta. And because in Blanding, if you’re hungry, there is little else to eat but burgers, fries, and shakes, we decide on the burgers, fries and shakes at “The Patio”.
  Just inside the door, we are met by a wall sized map of the world, stuck full of pins marking the countries that guests have traveled from. There have been burger enthusiasts from China, the Sudan, Germany (lots; too many to accommodate all the pins), Cote D’Ivoire, Iran…and on and on.  Next to the map is a huge laminated poster with the shiny figure of a smiling dude on a bike above a partially filled-in pie chart, colored with red permanent marker. I ask the cashier and am told that the dude is their manager who’s riding in a fundraiser race that weekend, cycling from Blanding south to Bluff.  I can, if I want, donate money to the cause—which cause exactly, I’m not sure. I’m sure she told me, but as she is talking, a waitress passes a raspberry shake and onion rings under my nose and I get a little distracted.
The entrance to the Patio is draped with a massive banner proclaiming that this is the home of the “Big B!”: signature 1/2lb. patty with all the fixens, topped with special sauce (this usually means fry sauce, which is fine with me) on a sesame seed bun. Standing at the counter, I can see that the “Big B” sandwich is just the beginning. Behind the counter is a laminated sign with several sections. Each section is labeled with a header and divided into little boxes.  Reading the headers, I learn that in addition to the “Big B,” the Patio offers a double, triple and quadruple “B.” The sections are divided by sandwich and the boxes are filled with the names of people who have managed to down one or more of these sandwiches.  The double is no big deal. Lots of people have managed a double. The triple is apparently not worth competing for because it seems that if you’re in this tournament, you’re in for the gold. Under the “Quad,” ( I can’t help but laugh and think of the Mormon slang for their holy books: the Book of Mormon, Bible, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price=a Quad), fourteen hearty souls have their names written—wait, nope…one guy has his name three times. I wonder how “hearty” he is now?           

 We order, (just a regular B for me, thanks…maybe after the trip…) and have a seat in a miniature red plastic booth beneath shelves filled with random stuff meant to recall some broadly defined olden days: Betty Boop lunch box, a hand mixer, small records of Elvis and the Beatles, a bunch of license plates. When the food arrives we are more than pleased. I, in fact am shocked and awed as I lift my toasted sesame seed bun and discover a drive-in burger joint miracle: Romaine lettuce. Romaine lettuce! on my burger! And Bermuda Onions! Thick and zesty and flavorful (as opposed to white, filler onions).  The patty is flame broiled and, I am assured by employees, made from locally raised beefs. Man. A total treasure.

The fries are hot and crisp and made with fresh oil so they taste pretty good, though nothing out of the ordinary, and the shake (Banana Raspberry) has heaps of bananas and fruit, not just fruit syrup. A winner, (the burger quite simply, rocks) if not necessarily a Trifecta champion. Well fortified (my burger is so big, I wrap it to go—I’ll be hungry again in an hour), we head South to the real beginning of our trip…        

  



 

Within Sight of Sleeping Ute Mountain…

The Ute’s head points rorth. He lies supine with his hands folded gently across his soft body; his legs spread out to the north, relaxed.  The figure is clear; looking at the mountain, I would have thought of a sleeping person even without the moniker. When I look at this looming figure though, it doesn’t occur to me to identify him as a “Ute;” lately, my imagination has been steeped in all things Anasazi.   

His is a superbly lonely place to doze. The Mountain is sacred to the Utes, and consequently off limits for any development or habitation. All around, the high gray plains of the Colorado Plateau roll out wide and empty; great sage plains, a seemingly limitless horizon.  A smattering of junipers scent the air and attempt to fill up all this space. The San Juan Mountains hover to the South East, so indistinct as to appear inconsequential. The closest town—not counting the secluded polygamist compound we passed on the drive in—is 30 miles away and has less than 200 people.

This is what I know about the island mountain: I know that a ceremonial Anasazi road runs South of it and if I were to follow it, it would lead me to Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon; depending on how far I felt like walking. I know that there is another island, also to the south, this one a totem in the desert, whose top is ashen with the remains of signal fires—circles of stone wrapping heaps of charred and nearly petrified juniper and bits of broken pots—cold now for more than 800 years.  I know that on the Eastern slopes of the Mountain, there is a dizzying concentration of Anasazi ruins; vestiges speaking of violent ends. There, there is an Anasazi stone storage chamber, empty but for a single human defecation. Once studied, the waste was found to contain four different types of human DNA. Whoever left these remains, was a cannibal.

 

 
Walking along a gorge—maybe 100 feet deep—in Hovenweep National Monument, we lose the trail for a minute and find ourselves at the doorstep of a two-story Anasazi structure. The stones still fit snugly together, sticks are still embedded in the top of the door frame. Having merely skirted the several ruined sites we have looked at thus far, my sudden proximity to this ruin leaves me a little dizzy.  This house dates from around 1200 C.E., one of the last Anasazi settlements built before they “disappeared.” Reading Craig Child’s, House of Rain for the last few weeks, I have been following their mystery as Child’s explores Anasazi settlements from Chaco Canyon, North and West, to the limits of their empire.  Just as we drove into the monument, I read the section on Hovenweep aloud to my dad:

Anasazi towers frequently show signs of extensive burning, and not necessarily the kind seen in ceremonial departures. One excavated tower revealed the remains of more than thirty infants and children, who appeared to have burned alive (Childs, 169).

Although this particular house has no charred walls, no flame licked windows, the air around the house feels thick with the web of Anasazi fate.  The web, laden with mystery and violence and devotion, is double for me.  The remains of this culture have the draw not only of the unknown, of a great puzzle or treasure map, but are literally drawn up from the elements of the land—the land to which I am addicted, the land that has given me a sense of home for the first time in my life.

  The house that I stand so close to now is made from the dirt at my feet and the stones piled against the hillside to my right. These people lived with their hands always against the land. Their feet always dusty with it, their ears pressed to it; listening.  Their landmarks—Chaco, Chimney Rock in Colorado, Mesa Verde—show that this culture lived attuned to seasonal change and in tune with the movements of moon, sun and stars. Houses and temples are built so that on the solstice, windows and doorways are illuminated, light cast through each room of the house.  In this way, the houses become communion made material.

   Each community here is built around a spring.  This choice was made both functionally and devotionally. Each house and tower face the spring, bowing in devotion to this ancient emanation from the deeps of the land, this element on which the Anasazi entirely relied. When the water was gone, it was time to leave.

Living with this sort of awareness, literally inside this kind of awareness of land and sky is something I am constantly hungry for.  Hikes and backpacking are not enough. How would it feel to live in a house that felt continuous with the earth around me rather than a harbor from it? To feel that I move with the flow of sun and moon and birds and water rather than as an observer of distant phenomena?  To take major life choices from indications in the land, to feel that I myself was—through every gesture (creative, functional, casual)—expressing my own devotion and connection to the elements, would be to more deeply recognize that I am made up of these elements; a tuning fork. I want this.

  A tower built just outside the monument sits in a gorge. At the mouth of the gorge, a seep spring still produces enough moisture to foster a huge cottonwood to maturity.  In the middle of the gorge, a tower of rock juts out of the ground, the boulders that once connected it to the walls of the gorge have long since crumbled and now lie scattered all around the gorge floor.  Atop the tower of rock, the Anasazi built a three-story tower of their own. The contours of this tower fit precisely with the contours of the rock, the walls flowing seamlessly from manmade structure to stone, fitting the lives of the Anasazi exquisitely to the confines of their natural environment.
***************************************************************************  
 Standing at the doorway to an Anasazi house, profound longing and jealousy impel me closer. I lean forward and place my hands on the sill of the doorframe and look inside...     



   

Teapot Rock…
I have been assured that high clearance, full sized vehicles can make it to the Doll House. I have even checked on Youtube, knowing that if some knuckle head had rolled his truck down into the Maze, his buddy—walking down the broken slick rock track in front of the truck— would have caught the whole thing on his cell phone and mobile uploaded it the moment he reached satellite service.  And I did in fact see a few videos of long-bed farm trucks successfully creeping along narrow banks of sandstone. 

I have looked forward to coming into the Maze District of Canyonlands for years—ever since (of course) I followed Hayduke and Doc and Miss Abzug through its twists and turns looking for slow elk and water.  I love it when we drive into the deserted Hite ranger station to fill out our backcountry permit. I love it when we leave Highway 95 at a turn-off I have somehow never seen before, although I have driven this highway dozens of times. I love it as we loop in and out of sandstone drainages, circumambulating towers of dark red rock, crossing grassy meadows backed by hundred foot striated walls, following the Colorado North. I am nervous when we trundle up a bank of slickrock to find that the road is now less of a road then a heavily scratched and dented mound of sandstone, plunging downward and turning a sharp corner at the head of a dry fall.  This is where low clearance vehicles stop and camp, backpackers and climbers continuing on foot.

The country ahead of us is all rocks and boulders and twisted junipers sucking at seeps of water in one layer or other of sandstone. To the West, enormous headwalls tower; Kayenta, Chinle, Moenkopi. To the North East, the Golden Stairs lay below me, and beyond that—the river.  There are no buildings for miles. No park visitor center. No real roads. Only the most remote country in Utah.  We see no people on the way in.

Passing a “4x4 required beyond this point” sign, we follow slips of slickrock shelves perpetually interrupted by heaves of rock.  The road around Teapot (really) Rock is filled with abrupt hairpin turns with room for little or no maneuverability. Holding our breath, we creep over the arched and bucking ground, listening to the railgaurds running at the base of each truck door, screeching across the stone. I wonder if their sturdy metal presence is enough to lever us over a cliff, as we tilt acutely from one side to the other between boulders and mounds. I wonder what else is being scraped from our undercarriage. I wonder how long it will take for us to walk until we run into someone else who could or would run us up to Bullfrog or Ticaboo to get help. How could a tow-truck even get in here to pull us out? Helicopter? I start to close my eyes as we shoot down a narrow, steep trench in the rock, but stop when my Dad nearly shouts, “How is that gonna to help me?” It's not going to help him, it’s going to help me.

The Doll House…
The light is leaving. My hands, pale against the white pages of my sketch book, take on a blue hue and I can no longer discern the black smears of charcoal across my knuckles and between my fingers. Warped faces in striated totems of rock become, for a moment, even more exaggerated before losing distinction, features blurred by shadow. An elongated nose blends into a forehead and then becomes just a rounded stone hummock.  I turn an infinitesimal amount to the left and try and catch the next face, the light continues to recede. I turn again, sketching three scapes at once: austere and commanding, an erect figure with an elongated face—stern chin, thin mouth, precise nose and straight back—bows out; fleshy cheeks, mouth slightly open as if in ecstasy, bulbous nose tipped slightly backwards becomes a smooth silhouette; a cluster of spindly minarettes darken into the solid wall at their back. 
    

  I am drawing because…I like to. I am drawing because when I do, all of the disparate streams of my mind—like frantic tendrils of electricity—coalesce into one solid, slow moving course. A river of mind, wide and peaceful like the Mississippi— rather than say, the Cataract Canyon section of the Colorado.  Which, as it happens, rushes, slips, sluices,(invite me on a river trip please!) rages, tumbles, explodes, froths and generally celebrates its wild riverness hundreds of feet below where I sit in my littleass camp chair, sketching. (“Littleass” because it’s sized for a child-butt. I didn’t know this when I bought it on sale at REI 8 years ago and am grateful that despite the weight I continue to accumulate in that region of my body, I still manage to fit in my chair).
Then, just as the figures in front of me finally pale in preparation for taking on stars, a stream of blue moon light hits my left shoulder. I turn and hurrah! the sky, the scape, my dad’s tent, the giant juniper at the edge of our camp, the vaguely creased tower we saw two boys climbing on today—hanging from harnesses, grappling for hand or finger tip holds hidden in the darkness of iron and manganese streaks on otherwise pink rock—are all flood lit; silver and cold, bright and crisp. I flip to a new page and start again.  In the morning, I have to leave.

Region:

South Eastern Utah

Contact Info:

The Patio Drive-In
(435) 678-2177
95 N Grayson Pkwy
Blanding, UT 84511

Rating out of ☼☼☼☼☼:
Burger: ☼☼☼☼☼    Fries: ☼☼.5     Shake: ☼☼☼.5

You may want to visit The Patio of you are…

·         Escaping the tourist madness of Moab
·         Visiting Monument Valley
·         Exploring Hovenweep
·         Visiting Edge of the Cedars State Park (the best Anasazi museum around)
·         Fishing or hunting in the LaSals or the Abajoes
·         On your way to run the San Juan river
·         Backpacking Grand Gulch
·         Canyoneering around White Canyon
·         Visiting Natural Bridges National Monument
·         Backpacking Dark Canyon
·         Heading into the Maze!

Mom's Cafe: Salina, UT

Finally leaving…


My cat is not stupid. So when she sees sleeping mats piled next to the door and sleeping bags laying limply over the back of the futon, she knows she is about to be abandoned. In the past when we began throwing food together in preparation for a camping trip, she would sniff around curiously, occasionally jumping in and out of the blue plastic storage tubs we use for dry good, batting at the small silver packets of Gatorade powder. Now she gets one whiff of dehydrated beans and curls up on the radiator with her back to us. Which is where she sits now. The car is all packed and we’ve doled out her extra food and water. We pause at the door to meow a farewell; she does not acknowledge us.

It has been months since Adam and I wandered around in the desert together, so while I feel a little remorse at leaving my kitty alone for three days, that remorse does nothing to slow my pace getting into the car or stop me from clapping my hands like a little kid when we finally pass the last heavily concentrated area of billboards in Payson; a moment celebrated ritualistically every trip south. A moment that means we are really gone.

The reason it has taken Adam and I so long to get the hell out of here is, as far as I can see, some kind of weather curse. It began Thanksgiving weekend when, after Adam had already taken extra time off for a trip, temperatures dropped around the state to 16 degrees during the day and below zero at night. St George, Bluff, Escalante, it didn’t matter. It was freaking cold. The pattern continued for every trip—including what was supposed to be his birthday getaway—until now, the first weekend in March, spring in site. Which is why, despite the fact that I am sick and uselessly blowing my nose every ten minutes, we are leaving. Outahere. Vamoose. The backcountry of Capital Reef, highs in the 50’s and lows around 20? Seems edenic.

Along the Way…


The asymmetrically slumping sandstone and neverending arches of Upper Muley Twist must wait though, as first we have a side stop to make. Since I started writing for a food column once a month, reviewing little restaurants in the middle of nowhere, pleasure must be mixed with a little business. Today business takes me to Mom’s café and the middle of nowhere for now is Salina, UT.

Doing a little research, I read that Salina wasn’t always the middle of nowhere, but it sure looks like it now. The median income for men here is $30,000 and $16,000 for women. Who knows what they do. Supposedly the current home of over 2, 000 people—very few of which I can see anywhere—Salina has boomed and busted several times since it’s foundation in l864. Or at least that’s when the first attempt at foundation happened. Brigham Young sent a group of Mormons down to settle the place in 1864 but the Native American tribes, who as it happened had already “founded” the valley, would have none of it and for the first decade the presence of white people led to more wars than crops and churches. The 1870’s saw the creation of a militia and a fort and bygod those settlers showed the natives what was what, discovering huge salt and coal deposits as they went, and were on their way to building a more white and delightsome country. Then, after all that excitement, nothing happened for nearly a hundred years.

During WWII, however Salina became the location of a POW camp for Germans and the site of the “15 second massacre.” Apparently being in the middle of nowhere was too much for at least one of our boys, who perhaps had thought war time for him would mean French women and wine and instead found himself womanless, wineless and in Mormon country to boot (where there wasn’t even chance of wine), whereupon he climbed a guard tower and began shooting at random. After that and one more brief flurry of activity when the CCC came to town and built a new town hall and septic system, the city went back to its normal routine. Which is to say; nothing.

In the middle of all the remains of little bursts of somethings and nothings, sits Salina’s current claim to fame; Mom’s Café. I first heard about Mom’s from my friend Noreen. After working in London during the blitz, Noreen sought peace and quiet and the hot nurse she had fallen in love with during the war, in Florida. Florida became Utah in 1974 and Utah meant adventure. At the juicy age of 50, Noreen took up backpacking. On one of her many trips to Grand Gulch and Steven’s Canyon—where she would hike in with cast iron pans, sides of bacon and eggs, and her new hot girlfriend—Noreen stopped at Mom’s. She brought up the restaurant jokingly once when we were at dinner. When I asked her how it was, she shuddered and said no more. Considering we were eating scallops with lavender and drinking Cloudy Bay at the time, I took her declaration of the food’s value with a grain of salt. I had seen the sign for the place along highway 50. Faded and peeling, I assumed the café was long gone. So I was completely delighted when Adam assured me it was alive and well and that he had been there with his mom just a few years earlier. After a scouting trip to assure myself of its existence, I bided my time and planned for a visit. Today is the day.

We coast into town and the streets look dead. Most of the buildings we see are vacant or closed. I start to make note of the “Gator’s Drive-In” for future food hunting visits, then notice that no gator’s have served burgers there for a long time. One shop is open though, the Saddlery, which is even marked on our 7.5 minute map and featured prominently on Google Earth; it’s that important…or perhaps just singular in this wasteland. The two block section of town evidencing the remains of “old Salina,” home to “Mom’s,” is equally empty; the beauty shop still loaded with the kind of hair dryers that encompass your head in a heated plastic cavern while you sit reading magazines, sits across the street from Mom’s, graying with age.

Mom’s is also graying with age. The ceiling is low and the walls are dark wood—well, wood-looking—making the room feel a bit like a cave; the cave where time stood still. On one hand, I like that rather than trying to convey some nostalgic sense of the past by decorating the café like a 50’s diner, Mom’s still is a 50’s diner: big metal soda fountain and shake maker behind the counter, tall once-orange topped metal stools, original naugahyde green booths, off-green paint matching the waitresses’ off-green smockish dresses with clashing seafoam trim. But the result of this packratish impulse is unfortunately dingy and a little sad. The shake maker no longer works.

We sit at a booth in the corner of the front room. Light filters indirectly through the shopfront window, vaguely illuminating the in-floor planter box at the front of the restaurant. The planter box houses the same sorts of plants you would expect to see in a bank atrium; sansevierias, pothos, a spindely ficas dropping leaves. Above my head is a black and white picture of the building soon after it was built. Someone has hand written “built in 1898” in pen above the roof. On the wall to my left are pictures of Mom herself, several town war heroes, and a series of plaques imprinted with magazine articles that have been written over the years about Mom’s homemade food. Adam recognizes the one from National Geographic as the piece that motivated him and his mom to come here years ago.

While we wait to be served, we read from the “humorous” little flip-books adorning every table. Books with titles like, “Tall tales for Fisherman” and “Understanding Women,” with a caricature of a huge bride and an at-his-wits-end looking skinny little groom on the cover. We open one book up at random and flip to the section on jokes about “animal lovers.” The narrator makes some quip about how he knows a lot of people who are simply incapable of having a sense of humor and how animal lovers unfortunately fall into this category…huh? At this point, out waitress, Kathy, shows up.

The menu at Mom’s features classic diner fare: homemade soups and pie along with dishes like chicken fried steak, steak and eggs, and a Friday-night spaghetti special. I, of course, order a burger and fries (I’m on a mission after all) and pie. Adam orders the chicken fried steak which comes with side of vegetables, salad, what passes for a scone in Utah, and mashed potatoes. Kathy tells us that we can get our own salads or she can make them. Confused for a minute, we look around the corner and find a minuscule salad bar dividing the front room from the back. I think the last time I saw a salad bar was in Iowa at the Ponderosa Steak House, located in the parking lot of K-Mart, in 1992. Because it’s a novelty salad-bar salad, I enjoy it. But the novelty is pretty thin. Everything except for the shredded iceberg comes from a can: canned beats, canned olives, canned waterchestnuts. We are, after all, in meat and potatoes country where “salad” usually means gello salad, so I’m not really surprised.

After eating our salads, we wait. While we wait, I people watch. The room in the back has several families in it; grandpa with his cowboy hat on his knee, kids in matching t-shirts. A table of guys sits next to us. Eavesdropping, I learn that they come here every week together, fathers, brothers, sons and friends from work. They live in several of the surrounding towns—Richfield, Gunnison, etc.— and have been coming here for years. I peruse the community board behind me; Sue is having a birthday party and everyone is invited. Several games of twenty-questions later, our food arrives.

Adam’s chicken fried steak—made with real cubed steak, not ground beef—is covered in creamy, buttery, homemade gravy with chunks of sausage in it. Yum and yum. The side of vegetables was frozen before it was boiled and represents the reason why people don’t like vegetables. The potatoes however, are made with red potatoes and have been whipped to a fine custard. Awesome. The scone is true to form, which is to say, slutty. Utah scones are an interesting phenomenon. They are essentially a bit of dough dropped in boiling oil and then slathered with highfrustosesyropeyhoneybutter. This, at Mom’s, counts as the usual dinner roll. If this town isn’t rife with diabetics…

My burger is…not great. The patty is good; not over done and it tastes of charcoal, no fried. But the bun is squashed and average. They give me a pickle spear instead of sliced pickles. Boo. The lettuce is limp and iceberg. But the tomato is the worst. I know I have a cold and it’s not tomato season, but when a tomato is that mushy and mealy and…grey; throw it away!!! And the fries, which I have read rave reviews about on Urbanspoon.com, are limp and cold. Limp! And cold! Throw them in some more oil for chrisake, more oil isn’t going to hurt anyone here! Travesty.

But we have pie to look forward to, right? Mom’s is famous for their homemade pies. Indeed, the side of the building facing highway 89 is painted with super tall letters celebrating the fact. Today, we have a choice of apple or sourcream blueberry. I have never heard of sourcream blueberry pie so I am in. The mound of whipped topping obfuscating the pie, I have come to expect. But the blue colored, syrup topped, pile of lard underneath, I am not at all prepared for. We ask for a to-go box and smile politely as we leave.

Luckily, this is only the beginning of our adventure, and really, I’m not that disappointed. I wanted to go there, and it was a unique experience, which is exactly what I want out of one of these small town visits, so…were good. As we continue east on state route 24, I am a clapping kid once more. The desert awaits.

Later in Boulder…

Just beyond a sign reading, “Caution: road may be impassible when wet etc. etc…” dating from before the road was paved, towering slick rock domes that I have always wanted to wander around rise and fall. We get out of the car and start up a small wash, snow sticking to northfacing little hummocks and hills, pinions and ponderosas littering the drainage. Just as we turn to walk between two sandstone mounds, a German Sheppard, hind quarters badly wrapped in a bloody old t-shirt, comes trotting up to us and proudly drops a deer’s hoof at our feet. From the brush, we hear someone call out, “be careful!”. At first, I am not sure whether they mean be careful of the dog and I look around trying to find the source of the voice.

Two characters come walking out from behind a tree, looking like they’ve been wandering in the wilderness for days. They haven’t, I learn, they live across the street and apparently always look that way. They are a man and a woman, wearing matching Carhartt coveralls and smoking. The woman has a sort of holster around her waist where she carries a buoy knife the length of my arm. The man, no older than 45, has lost all his teeth and the woman has weathered looking skin and wild redgold hair. “Be careful” she repeats, “there’s a cougar out. Got our dog and our pup. We’ve been out looking for the little one. Found this guy. Looks like she got him so we wrapped him up.” It’s only now that I notice the t-shirt hung loosely around the Sheppard is lamely covering the fact that his side is torn open. I look away. “He found that” she gestures at the hoof, “so we let him have it.” The man smiles toothlessly. “The dogs had been whining about something at night for a few days, so we figured there was a cat out,” he says. By cat, he means mountain lion. “So keep a look out.” Adam assures them we will let them know if we see any trace of their pup. I’m hoping me don’t; if there is anything left of the dog, it won’t be much.

Adam and I wander further up the drainage, cross a brush fence, and then begin scampering straight up the slickrock. I make my way up the incline, looking for little edges in the corssbedded layers of sand to follow up the dome’s sides. Adam follows a slightly wider, golden shelf to a small pour-off which he clambers up. The apex of the mound is broken, creating several peaked tops. Reaching one, I can see over the Ponderosas, across the Burr Trail, to the valley on the other side. There are one or two small houses backed by another slickrock mound, rising easily 50 feet above the tallest roof. The houses have springs and ponds, making their yards green and marshy. Man, I want to live in Boulder. Looking east, I can see pretty far along the Burr Trail towards the Circle Cliffs; mesas and mesas of red and white. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and a cold breeze starts up, biting my face. The sky, which has been sort of hazy all day, succumbs to the wind and clears, so blue it’s practically shouting. I breathe in and feel I am actually here, feet shaping themselves to the sandstone below me, body conforming to the curve of stone so that I can maintain my balance as I make my way around the dome’s roof with measured steps.

After 20 minutes or so, Adam and I nod at eachother and begin to find our way down, leaning our bodies against the sides of the dome as we walk slantwise to its base.

Upper Muley Twist…

We are creeping along the bottom of a wash in Adam’s truck Snorry; creeping because the wash is choked with boulders and flood-wrecked tamarisk. The wash cuts behind the Waterpocket Fold, a monocline tilting gently upward through millions of years of silt and sand deposits. At times, the walls of the wash narrow and rise above us, smooth sandstone pocked with concave little holes like bubbles that have burst. We pass below a massive arch, high up to our right on the reef formation. On our left, the rock wall runs in fits and starts, blobs of stone dripped down in 200 foot scallops and ridges. We pass below a set of intersecting arches. Sinuous chutes cascade from the top of the rock formation. Water running its course through these chutes softens the sandstone, leaving it vulnerable to the wind. After millions of years of this intense exposure the rock opens, forming these arches. Adam wanted to come here for his birthday trip explicitly to explore slots like these, but there are quite a few and he’s not sure how much time he will actually have for exploration. There’s no beta on these curvilinear chutes, as far as we know no one has descended them, so who knows how involved they will be.

After 4 miles of cutchunking over boulders and winding between hunks of fallen wall, we reach the Strike Valley Overlook Trail Head. Technically, we shouldn’t camp right at the trail head, but it’s early days and I doubt the ranger’s out. In a lame attempt at tempering our transgression, we set up our tent in the “parking lot,” a round of dust with relatively fewer boulders than the rest of the wash. An abbreviated deep red wall, about 40 feet tall, reaches up behind us. A single juniper crags out from the cliff, jutting hauntingly out into space. Behind that, the gold walls of the reef formation split and loom hundreds of feet up.

The last time Adam and I were in Upper Muley Twist was October 7th, 2006. I was in school and had come down for a break to go backpacking and see Adam who was living in Escalante. We had tossed around the idea of going into Coyote Gulch, when it started to rain. Then we thought about heading into the Gulch; a wide canyon, approachable by paved road, less chance of getting flooded out. And then it rained harder. And so we didn’t really go anywhere. On October 6th, we holed up in our tent along a spur road leading nowhere from the Burr Trail. We cooked under the vestibule of our tent as it poured and read John McPhee until water was running through our tent. Because there was really nothing to do about that, we just scooched to one end of the tent until the water subsided later that day. When the deluge let up, we wandered out across the sand dunes to a few red domes of slickrock. Climbing to the top, we found potholes brimming with clear rain water. Lying belly down, we dipped our faces, drinking our fill and then some. We barely made a dent in all that water.

We found out later that that storm had caused Hundred Year floods all over the Escalante area. Cozy in our tent, we had no idea that an area usually receiving 8 inches of precipitation on a good year, was receiving 4 inches in 6 hours. While hikers were stranded down Hole-In-the-Rock Road for three days, while roads were washed into oblivion all over the area, we drove to Upper Mulley Twist where the wash cutting the reef in two flooded torrentially. We listened to it flood all night, accented by the sounds of rock falls and coyotes howling, and in the morning it was gone.

We set up our tent in the receding sunlight and listen to…nothing. There is no water in the wash now. Very little life around. Too early in the season for bugs. The loudest sound is our own breathing and the crinkling of nylon as the rain fly flips in the breeze.

An invalid holiday…

The next morning, Adam loads up his backpack with helmet, harness, webbing, o-rings, rapedes, 400 hundred feet of rope, a sandwich and an emergency whistle. “If I’m not back by the time the light hits that rock,” he gestures across canyon from our camp, “come looking for me.” He leaves me his spotting scope so I can watch his descent from the opposite side of the wash if I get bored…or if he gets stuck somewhere. I kiss him, he tells me he’ll see me later. The wind whips in my ears, dragging wispy vales of clouds across the sky. I turn towards the truck for a second where I’ve been cooking breakfast. When I turn back, Adam is already 100 yards down the wash, his boots kicking up sand and gravel as he walks.

I have been in bed all week, so my plan for the day is much less adventurous. I also pack a bag: fleece blanket, sketch pad, Craig Child’s novel, enough food for two days (not that I’m planning on being gone that long, I just always bring that much food), cushy pillow and Crazy Creek chair. My hike is short but steep. I follow yet another wash—so much evidence of water in a waterless place— from our camp up towards the top of the reef. The reef splits here, folding back on its self to form a wide slickrock lip perched above a deep gash in the east side of the Fold that is Strike Valley. Ascent to the lip is meandery; dozens of little dry washes spill in clear sandstone slicks from the lip down into a shallow basin a quarter of a mile across. The basin has a few pinions and sage brush but is mainly open. Flat pools of rock smooth out at intervals like dance floors in an expansive ballroom. Then the sandstone leaps up a plane, distending in fractioned bulges before it eases into the sloping lip. I wander up and down the lip before finding a flat spot with a good view. I unload my stuff, wrap myself in my fleece blanket, try not to worry about Adam, place some tissue within easy reach and settle in for the day.

Below me, the valley floor spreads out like a wide processional, running north and south from Notom to Halls Crossing. The Waterpocket Fold and Tarantula Mesa form walls to the east and west. The valley is a paradox of color. A ribbon of red dirt bisects a basically flat and regular beige floor. To the west, scalloped waves striped in deep purple, bright magenta, pale lime green and white erode off the side of the Fold. To the east, Tarantula Mesa seems austere. Where the landscape to the west is round, undulating, the Navajo sandstone and Wingate skirted by the wildly colorful Morrison formation; Tarantula Mesa stands straight up from the valley floor at sharp corners. Iron gray and painfully bare. A badland. Even the points at which erosion works its way into creases seem as though they’ve been incised with a thin wire; sliced decisively down from the top by a sculptor sheering into a mound of clay.

These cliffs are made up of mudstone, sediment laid down by a prehistoric river. Millions of years of fish shit. It is interesting to me that a massive pile of mud should put up such resistance to change, should sheer off so angularly rather than simply melting away like the Wicked Witch at the first sign of water. It’s also unfathomable to me that there should be ranches and prized buffalo hidden away in the ashen labyrinth between myself and the Henry Mountains, which surmount the Mesa to the east. But there are. In the 40’s, 18 buffalo were released in the Henry Mountains where they continue to thrive, wandering down onto Swapp and Tarantula Mesas in winter. To the north, a well graded road veers off its central north/south trajectory to wind back behind a limy wall and right up to the outbuildings of a ranch that has been active since the 1800’s: madness? Obsessive drive for aloneness? A passion for collecting rain water (all 8 inches) in rain barrels only to see how many months you and your hundred head of cattle can go before you are sucking on rocks? As beautiful as I find this subtly colored landscape, it is exactly because it seems beyond use that I love it.

The greatest-hits-drive-home…


Because my thirst for deep red is barely slaked, we drive home the next morning via the central gorge of Capital Reef. There, the Moenkopi formation is layered between the Morrison and Wingate like thick chocolate fudge in a 12 layer dark chocolate cake. In winter, when deep ground seems inaccessible, I sometimes feel starved for richness like this. Today is not the first time I have felt on the verge of pulling over to feast; face slathered, fist over fist of loamy, musky, dark scented earth.

Adam’s descent of what he has christened Cheerio Canyon was a success. After a day spent sketching, reading, and generally staring off into the seemingly neverending distance (Canyonlands, Moroni Cliffs, The Swell, the Book Cliffs…), I left my nest to check on Adam’s progress, arriving just in time to see him free-rappel the last 60 or so feet of his descent. I shoulder his bag and we walk back to camp to make an illegal fire, using our cast-iron pan as a fire pan.

We follow the swollen Fremont, past my favorite swimming hole, out of the canyon, and west towards Torrey. Stop to play in Cohab Canyon—named for the mormons who hid there from federal officers hunting polygamists just as Utah was becoming a state—and then turn away from the red, the river, and head up onto Thousand Lakes Mountain. Snow blows over the road, forming drifts several feet tall, attempting to pull the truck into its banks. Otherwise the range is gentle, easily sloping and filled with springs and creeks and reservoirs. Moment by moment we leave the southern desert behind, leaving me aching for more.

Authors note:


The reason for the loooong interval between my last post and this one is a reason for celebration! See the Outdoor Utah Adventure Journal for my published work!


http://www.outdoorutah.com/adventurejournal/

A bit of useful info…


Region:


South Central Utah

Contact Info:


10 East Main StreetRating out of ☼☼☼☼☼:



Salina, UT 84654-1332


(435) 529-3921





Burger: ☼.5 Fries: big fat zero


Other:


Chicken fries steak and gravy: ☼☼☼☼ Mashed Potatoes: ☼☼☼☼☼

You may want to visit Mom’s (where you will not order fries or pie) if you are…


* Visiting the cheese curd factory in Loa


* Hunting in or riding around on ATV’s or horses in the Tushars


* Tubing down the Sevier River near Big Rock Candy Mountain


* Heading to Colorado along I-70 to rock climb or hop on a river


* Camping/climbing in Buckhorn Wash

* Kayaking the Chute in the San Rafael Swell

* Heading to or from Capitol Reef!

Sunglow Cafe: Bicknell

“But the restaurants closed.” I look up. “It’s closed?” I almost wail. “That’s the whole reason we came down here!” Ethel looks at me questioningly. “I’m a food writer and I came down specifically to review the restaurant…all those homemade pies and soup…” Ethel is the maker of the homemade pies—thirty a day in the summer time— and despite pictures the name “Ethel” might conjure of a sweet and tubby little baking grandma, she’s long and lean. A cowboy’s daughter in wranglers and flip flops. She has worked at Bryce Pines since she was 16 and now owns it with her husband. In response to my outcry she looks at me a little helplessly. Her waitress cut her hands. It’s impossible to find help this time of year. It’s been slow anyway. The time of year, however is exactly why I chose to come. I’ve driven past Bryce Pines easily a hundred times, seeing the huge “Homemade soups and pies!” banner draped exultantly down the front of the building. But I usually drive past in Summer, and while any time is a good time for pie, blazing gold and red desert summer days don’t really motivate me towards soup.

And so I’m here now, two days after New Years, fresh snow on the ground and a forecast low of seven degrees, hoping to eat soup and pie. I’ve been gazing rapturously at the list of pies on the website of the hotel restaurant for a week, making lists of all the kinds I was going to try: blueberry- banana, rhubarb, sour cream peach. And now I am here. I finally escaped the totally depressing, binding, blinding, chocking inversion of Salt Lake… and the restaurant is closed. We have already suffered one disappointment, driving past the Circleville Cafe hoping to try their celebrated cobbler, only to find it and the entire town of Circleville—birthplace of Butch Cassidy— dark, hibernating. Resisting the urge to have a temper tantrum, to blame myself for not having called in advance, to feel as though the entire trip no matter how beautiful was now going to be a shade less than perfect, to cry, I instead firmly tell myself that Bryce Canyon National Park will be red and sunny and iced with snow and that can’t be bad and then I try to swing us a room with a fireplace for our troubles.

Through persistence, my traveling companion Heather’s charm, and looking really pitiful (something I mastered the knack of in grade school) we are upgraded to the 3 bedroom, two bathroom, fully stocked kitchen, fireplace bedecked cottage at the edge of the property for the same price as our previously booked single room with two queen beds. If we can’t be eating homemade soup in the restaurant, at least we don’t have to cook our replacement dinner over my camp stove out of the back of the truck.


The cottage is in a little white outbuilding reminiscent of CCC camps from the 30’s. Inside, the fire place is stone lined, wood is stacked next to our door, the sheets are high thread count cotton, and the pillows are down. I used to believe that stoicism was the higher virtue, that when heading to the desert, I needed to prove I could survive with basically nothing. Wanting to be comfortable made me weak, a liability; a girl. After years of camping and backpacking, I know I can “golite”, I know I can make do. But if I don’t have to, if the situation doesn’t call for it, why? I look over my cozy little house and think, “F#&k it” and flop down on the bed, propping my feet up with some of the half dozen pillows stacked against the wooden headboard. A little flyer on the bedside table inviting me to visit the hotel restaurant mocks me silently. After building up a commendable fire in the fireplace, Heather disappears into her room and I snuggle down to watch the logs transform into embers, shooting off sparks that flit through the air before extinguishing.


The next morning I wake up early, rolling over in bed to peek out my window. The sky is blazing, the sun just beginning to illuminate the tall pines, flocked and glistening. After making tea, I step out onto the porch and look around. I’ve never been here in winter and the usually beige and stone landscape of John’s Valley and Monte Cristo is softened and crystallized by snow, an angular landscape made round. The plateau where the hotel is situated is a blank canvas, sparsely vegetated, riding the back of a cretaceous seaway, where the reds and yellows of the Claron Formation bloom out from purple and grey badlands. The newly blanched plateau gives nothing away about its red interiors. One could drive past the turn-off for Bryce Canyon National Park and have no idea blushing spires and cardinal totems stand eroding exquisitely below the lip of this austere covering.

An hour or so later, we head into the park. I have never been to Bryce, Winter or Summer. The vast wilderness that is Escalante has always drawn me over this plateau, past the turn-off for the park and into its sinewy and secret embrace, away from crowds and entrance fees. But it’s snowy and freezing. Hole-in-the-Rock road is impassible and I feel the need for something new, a slightly gentler adventure that doesn’t entail being potentially stranded by mud and patches of wet and sticky bentonite. And I had wanted to try the soup.

After a short drive through thickly wooded flats and a brief pow-wow to decide where we should go, Heather and I find ourselves poised at the edge of a steep and icy descent into a fiery valley. From the tip of the Navajo Trail, I can see north to Powell Point, jutting out from the Aquarius Plateau as it rises up, stunningly green. And below us: red, red, red.


We descend slowly, iron stained ice impeding quick movement. It’s part way down this first stretch that I slowly begin to feel I am actually here, smooth skin-toned walls rising up around me, natural arches and peep holes revealing shattering blue sky behind, above, beyond. I spend all winter tucked away in the city, usually a bit hindered by diminished between-semesters-income, aching for this color, this texture, this landscape and now I’m here. I could lick the walls.


The complex geologic formation making up Bryce National Park (dolomite, limestone, mudstone, etc.) is an amphitheater of red towers, spires, and minarets clustered together like a pipe organ. This steepled wall begins high up on the plateau, extending semi-circularly for several miles and descending to a labyrinthine valley, open in areas and steeped with ponderosas in others, green specks in the sea of red. As the formation spreads out along the valley floor, some sections extend as blank walls between towers, stretching along to connect to one another, the wall between a flesh toned arm hikers have to climb up and along and over to descend into the next valley. Today, everything is frosted, making each collection of irregular shoots appear as though they have been iced like a cake.

Despite the few numbers of hikers out this time of year the trail is packed, so we don’t’ need snow shoes. I wander down in a dazed rapture. Heather, meanwhile chats up everyone we meet along the way. She has a gift. People just want to talk to her. The first people we meet are a thoroughly sexy Belge couple from Antwerp (or was it Ghent?). Probably in their late fifty’s, the woman wears an off the shoulder cashmere tunic, a bit of lace from her camisole peering out at her bosom, skin-tight jeans and knee-high boots. Smokin’. I look down at my men’s nylon pants, stained and cut from backpacking, and my poly-pro top and smile. Nearly everyone we meet throughout the day are from somewhere else: Swiss boys on Holliday, a group of New Zealanders, and finally a nervous sounding guy from Queens. In all my time hiking in the back country and National Parks of Southern Utah, I’ve never actually met anyone from Utah.

After a brilliant and blindingly blue day we begin our ascent, chasing the sun as it sets. In order to maximize day light hours and because we set off on a series of connecting trails that have wound us away from our initial trailhead and car, we set up the Bryce Point trail rather than the Navajo. The park trail guide describes the route as “extremely steep”, we will gain 1,555 feet in elevation in the next mile. Beginning to hike, I decide the trail description is insufficient. The steepness doesn’t bother me. The fact that the trail ribs along a narrow shelf halfway up a sheer wall, a trail that is currently snowed over in mounds, sliding down from chutes where it was piled this morning before day time temps warmed to forty degrees; that bothers me. Yes the trail is steep, but it’s the exposure and the ice and the potential for avalanche that has me doubled over, hyperventilating. I might be over-reacting, but the shelf of ice I just crossed groaned and the edge is so snowed over there isn’t an edge and the abyss that is the canyon is right there. So I make Heather cross long after I do so that our combined weight doesn’t bring down the mountain and I cry when we reach a solid stone saddle. Still, the view is stunning, all the way to Navajo Mountain and Lake Powell. And I’d rather be here hyperventilating then in Salt Lake, unable to see out my window.

Upon reaching the top, we petition an elderly couple from South Dakota to shuttle us back to our car. Heather chats as I scarf the remainder of my snacks in the back seat and soon we are driving back towards our little home, our fireplace, a hot shower and bed. Stoicism be damned.


In order to redeem the culinary aspect of the trip, I have decided to drive home the long way. Besides, I can’t be this close to Escalante and not stop. The Haymaker Bench and Escalante River Gorge are like siren song to me. I would happily drown. A trip the long way will then allow us to visit Bicknell, where we can sample the specialties of the Sunglow Motel—Sweet Pickle Pie—which we are both sure will be disgusting, but which we cannot help trying.

The drive along highway 12 from Bryce to Torrey (and then along 24 to Bicknell), is one of my favorites in the world. Here, the country is bare, revealing each intimate curve, each subtle crease. In addition, the road rises and dips through a series of geological strata so varied that at one moment I find myself staring across dun colored hills hiding oil rigs, and in another mile I am deeply entrenched in the golden embrace of a canyon. A rocky escarpment like a ship’s prow breaks out from solid wall. Junipers twist out from miniscule cracks, half way up red sand stone cliffs. And at the top of each climb, evergreen forests clothe the skin of all this abundant fleshiness, this revelation.

We stop before long to take in the view. Just before the high desert plateau we’ve been driving along plunges down a layer towards the Escalante River, there is a hill with a radio tower to the south and a worn BLM road to the north. The area is called Head-of-the-Rocks. The old road leads through pinion and juniper flats to a curious collection of Hoodoos, leaning over one another, resembling Stonehenge. The hoodoos stand erect, just at the edge of a cliff, just before the valley floor drops out from under us. Walking along the cliff band, I can see Boulder Mountain crowning the skyline, an island of igneous up-thrusts and intrusions, quiet now after years spewing black boulders across the salt water remains of an ancient sea. Pouring down from Boulder Mountain, Sand Creek, Calf Creek and Death Hollow slice through a city of gold and red domes. The slices created by these waterways reveal iron stained inner walls and offer up lush riparian oases from their depths. I could scamper down the cliff, crisscrossing its domed sides, from ledge to slickrock ledge, and disappear into the twisty, turny, sliced-up landscape below me. I want to. Instead, I walk back through hoar frost three inches deep to where Heather is lying like a lizard in the sun. My feet shatter the frost as I walk. The icy formation tinkles lightly as it breaks apart. With each step, I am scattering diamonds.

Bicknell, population 340, is located right at the foot of Fish Lake National Forest, in sight of Capital Reef National Park. The Sunglow was opened in the 1960’s by Cula Ekker, developer (inventor? evil genius?) of the sweet pickle pie. The Sunglow Restaurant is the only thing open for miles and it’s Friday night, so even though it’s empty when we arrive, we are soon surrounded. Young families (very young…too young) with kids and babies climbing all over each other, couples in tight wranglers out for a date, fathers and sons in camo pants and orange vests just down from hunting in the national forest and a couple of LDS missionaries, which I can’t help wondering over. What do they have to do here? Everyone here’s great granddaddies were sent to this desert wilderness by Brother Brigham himself and have stayed here, irrigating their little hearts out, ever since…just who do they think needs converting?

I, true to form, order the “Sunglow burger” which, thank god ‘cause I’m starving, is good. Here, they make their own patties. The “Sunglow patty” is specially stuffed with jalapenos and covered in a smoky, mayoish sauce. The bun is toasted and plentifully sprinkled with sesame seeds. The lettuce, tomato and onion are not really worth mentioning. The pickles however, are homemade and awesome. The fries are run-of-the-mill but not bad. But all that is not really what we’re here for. Just before I completely stuff myself with burger and fries, I stop to leave room for pie.

As if sweet pickle pie was not enough, it turns out that the Sunglow is famous, or infamous, for several irregular pies. An order of the “pie sampler” will get you a half slice of oatmeal pie, buttermilk pie, the famous sweet pickle pie, and the less famous but equally….well, equally something…pinto bean pie. We try them all. The pinto bean and oatmeal pies are served warm, buttermilk and sweet pickle pies cool or room temperature. They arrive drowned in totally superfluous whipped topping but otherwise look fairly innocuous. After a moment’s hesitation, more for dramatic build up than anything, Heather asks me which we should try first. I go right for the gold: the sweet pickle. And………………..it’s good. I’m serious! It’s good! The texture is something like mince. The first taste I get is cinnamon and allspice. That taste gets stronger as I chew and then finishes off with a noticeable tang. The tang is obviously the pickle, but if I didn’t know I was eating pickles in a pie, I would never be able to guess that that is where the tang is coming from. Seriously.



The pinto bean pie is a lot like pecan pie without the crunch of pecans. It’s filled with the same nondescript, sort of mealy filler that holds the pecans together, or in this case the pinto beans. The beans themselves are just sort of warm and earthy and blend in with the basic mealy texture of the rest of the filling. It’s incredibly, incredibly sweet. Heather tries it and comments that this pie just stands as a testament that you can eat just about anything with enough sugar. I am not so sure being able to get down two experimental bites constitutes eating. The pie crust is the same for all of them, reasonably flaky and thin. Really, the fillings are so singular I barely notice the crust. The texture of the buttermilk pie is sort of a blend of custard and bread pudding and tastes primarily of lemon…and sugar. And the oatmeal pie is….well, exactly like you took some left over oatmeal and cooked it up in a pie crust with some coconut and a lot of sugar. And then some more sugar just for good measure. Is this degree of sacrination normal? Am I the weird one?


We make a reasonable dent in our pie sampler and then stumble in an engorged sort of way to the car. I take some vitamins to prevent against glycemic shock and then drive off into the sunset, leaving the diners, towering scalloped red walls, and juniper covered plains behind.




For your baking pleasure, the recipe for sweet pickel pie:



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Sunglow_Motel-Cafe_Pickle_Pie

A little usefull information...

Region: South Central Utah

Contact Info:
91 East Main Street
Bicknell, UT 435-425-3701
Rating out of ☼☼☼☼☼ :
Burger: ☼☼☼                    Fries:☼☼             Shake: N/A








Pickel Pie: ☼☼☼        Buttermilk Pie: ☼☼           Oatmeal Pie: .5         Pinto Bean Pie: nada

You may want to visit the Sunglow if you are: 
* Climbing in, canyoneering in, hiking in, camping in, checking out petroglyphs in, picking fruit in,    
   Capital Reef National Park
* Hunting or boating or hiking or snowshoeing or skiing in Fishlake National Forest
* Hunting or riding ATV's on the Seveir Plateau  
* Riding horses or ATV's, skiing, snowshoeing, hangin out with lucky friends who have a cabin,  fishing,  or hiking on Boulder Mountain
* Checking out the Torrey Music Festival, or the Women's music festival in Torrey
* Backpacking or riding the Great Western Trail
* Swimming in the waterfall off Highway 24...east side of Capital Reef
* On your way to Lake Powell via Bullfrog Marina
* Tubing the Fremont River
* taking the lomg way home from Bryce...where you were cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, hiking...