Showing posts with label San Juan County. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Juan County. Show all posts

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Greater Canyonlands National Monument - It's Now or Never - 2013

 


Delicate Arch - Symbol of Arches National Park and Moab, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)

Greater Canyonlands National Monument - It's Now or Never

Recently, Ms. Sheri McLaughlin sent information about natural gas and other mineral exploitation in San Juan and Grand Counties, Utah. Sheri’s friend, Kiley Miller lives in San Juan County and keeps close tabs on gas leases, illegal off-road vehicle activity and other threats to peace, quiet and a natural environment. Following is Kiley’s email to Sheri.

From: Kiley Miller
Subject: Oil & gas leases sold Moab, UT BLM
Date: Saturday, March 2, 2013, 10:00 AM

Less than fifteen miles from all three arches pictured below, large-scale "fracking" of underlying rock structures threatens the stability of all natural arches and balanced rocks - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)The BLM did not defer many protested parcels including the hotly contested Parcel 042 just above the Moab Valley, which threatens numerous watersheds. The Moab area is under threat of massive industrialization from oil & gas development along with a proposed tar sands mine, potash mine, Green River Oil Refinery, & Green River nuclear facility along with a 24-mile oil & gas pipeline - starting at the gates of Canyonlands National Park, and then down to U.S. Highway 191 just north of Moab.

If you want to get involved, please get in touch with the groups I have listed below along with Utah State political figures, President Obama & write letters to the editors of newspapers & news publications.
Thanks so much-
Kiley Miller
Moab, Utah


Delicate Arch - The symbol of Moab, Utah is vulnerable to nearby oil & gas exploration and production - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)Following is the resource list that Kiley Miller provided. Wherever possible, I have provided links to an appropriate internet resource or email address.

A recent article in the Moab Sun News – “All BLM Oil & Gas Parcels Leased”.

The website of the Canyonlands Watershed Council – at FarCountry.org

The website of Living Rivers – at LivingRivers.org

The website of – Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance -at SUWA.org

Balanced Rock at Arches National Park, Moab, Utah is vulnerable to nearby oil & gas exploration and production - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)Letter to the Editors of – the Moab Sun News – at publisher@moabsunnews.com

Letter to the Editors of – the Moab Times – at editor@moabtimes.com

Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
Juan Palma: Utah State Director
email: jpalma@blm.gov
Jeffrey Rock Smith: Moab Field Office
email: jeffreysmith@blm.gov
Beth Maclean: Moab Field Office
email: bmaclean@blm.gov

Grand County Council – Through unilateral action, the current council is on record as opposing Greater Canyonlands National Monument.
email: council@grandcountyutah.net

Landscape Arch lost a large section of structural rock in an earlier rock fall - Click for detail of thinnest spot - (http://jamesmcgillis.com)San Juan County Commission:
email: bbadams@sanjuancounty.org
email: plyman@sanjuancounty.org
email: kmaryboy@sanjuancounty.org

Thank you to Kiley Miller and Sheri McLaughlin for sharing this valuable resource list. Now it is up to the reader to get involved. Without your help, Greater Canyonlands will remain unprotected from gas drilling and fracking, tar sands and potash mining and the watershed effects of nuclear facilities. Please help secure a future for Greater Canyonlands National Monument. If you contact any one of these resources, please tell them that Kiley Miller, Sheri McLaughlin and Moab Jim sent you.


By James McGillis at 04:54 PM | | Comments (0) | Link - 2013

Monday, October 25, 2021

The Majestic La Sal Range Overshadows the Desolation of "Poverty Flat" - 2012

 


The La Sal Range, as viewed from the Spanish Valley in April 2012, with fresh snow clearing - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)

The Majestic La Sal Range Overshadows the Desolation of "Poverty Flat"

On April 15, 2012, I spent my day to revisiting special locations in and around the Spanish Valley, near Moab, Utah. By midday, I had completed an ecological survey of Behind the Rocks, ten miles south of Moab. After lunch, I depart the Moab Rim Campark, heading south on U.S. Highway 191. Although I did not know exactly where I might find it, I was looking for an unobstructed view of the La Sal Range.

Near the eastern end of the Spanish Valley, I turned left on to a rough gravel road that leads to Pack Creek. With jagged gravel the size of golf balls, the road was not favorable to travel with my fully inflated road tires. Limping along at a slow pace, I finally found an unobstructed view of the La Sal Range. There, in mid afternoon, the sun shone down on the mountains and reflected off fresh snow that fell the previous night.

Utility poles stand like energy beings, stretching from Price, Utah to the Spanish Valley and beyond - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)After pausing to photograph the mountains, I turned my attention to the power lines that hung overhead. From earlier discussions with Moab residents, I knew that these high voltage lines originated at a coal fired power plant near Price, Utah to the north. From where I stood, I could see what looked like a series of energy beings carrying the electrical cables up the valley from Moab. After passing overhead, the lines continued their climb up the Spanish Valley and then over the mountains of San Juan County. Where they ended, I had no idea.

Here I shall explain the difference between the Moab Valley and the Spanish Valley. Other than there being a name change near the San Juan County line, there is no geographical difference between the two valleys. Anywhere near Moab, residents call the drainage the Moab Valley. To the east, in its upper reaches, most people call it the Spanish Valley. The most beleaguered area of the valley, around Ken’s Lake also carries the historical name, “Poverty Flat”.

Pueblo Verde Estates in the Moab Valley, near its transition to the Spanish Valley, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)Having experienced the most prolonged overgrazing of any area near Moab, Poverty Flat is apt moniker for that area. Today, it supports only sparse seasonal grasses and a particularly thorny species of cactus. With a large swath of the valley teeming with cactus spikes, no one would dare to graze cattle there now.

Even for a hiker the Poverty Flat landscape is like an ankle-high low forest of knife blades. Consequently, the area just west of the Ken’s Lake Dam is now a no man’s land, bereft of greenery and populated only by the hardiest desert dwelling species. In the 1890’s, grass in the Moab and Spanish Valleys grew so high that it hid from view horseback riders who approached town on the Old Spanish Trail. Current visitors to the Spanish Valley realize that the area near Ken's Lake is an inhospitable place, but most have no idea that just over one hundred years ago, this was a Garden of Eden, not the current rock and cactus garden.

Historical "Poverty Flat", near Ken's Lake Dam, Spanish Valley, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)Since it once held the Old Spanish Trail, I believe that early visitors, ranchers and miners referred to the entire valley as the Spanish Valley. Later, as Moab became a more prominent feature, residents and outsiders alike began calling the lower, western reaches the Moab Valley. Today,  the Google Map of the Spanish Valley as the portion of the greater valley inside the border of San, Juan County. Given the importance of Moab and the remoteness of the eastern part of the valley, Google’s dual designation of the Moab Valley and the Spanish Valley seems like a good one to me.

After viewing the extreme environmental destruction in the Spanish Valley, I headed for the human made creation called Ken’s Lake. You may read about that visit in my next article.


 


By James McGillis at 05:08 PM | | Comments (0) | Link

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

A Sense of Entitlement No Longer Serves Us - 2009

 


Agathla Peak (El Capitan in Spanish), a magma landform rising above the eroded plain north of Kayenta, Arizona - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)

A Sense of Entitlement No Longer Serves Us

Since Navajo National Monument is so peaceful and quiet, I stayed on the morning of October 7, 2009 to enjoy the otherwise empty campground. It was over two hundred miles to my next destination, at Moab, Utah. In order to visit all my favorite places along the way, I would have to stretch geodetic verisimilitude. Today, my intention was to see it all and still be in my Moab camp before the sun descended behind the Moab Rim.
 
Grazing Navajo sheep, herded by dogs at Monument Valley, Arizona - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)
I stopped first in Kayenta, Arizona, a city within the Navajo Indian Reservation, or “Res”, as the locals call it. Kayenta is also the southern gateway to Monument Valley, via US-163 Scenic Highway. While US Highway 191 North will get you to Bluff faster, it is a bone-jarring road through unredeemed scenery. Every time I go the fast way, I wish I hadn't. Passing through Monument Valley is now my right of passage to the Four Corners and the High Southwest.
 
Other than an Anglo insurance adjuster assisting a local resident, everyone I saw there was Navajo, or Dine’, as they call themselves. Although Navajo facial features differ from those we might see elsewhere, the youth of Kayenta wore attire indistinguishable from their suburban brethren across the country.
A hogan-style building once served as an open-air Navajo Indian jewelry store, Monument Valley, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
While visiting Kayenta in June 2009, I located a field north of town from which emanated the vortex of a regional dust storm. Driving south towards Kayenta that day, I traced the point of origin to a field across Highway 163 from Chaistla Butte. I was amazed to find that a dust storm covering hundreds of square miles could have its origin in one empty field.
 
Ten minutes later, in Monument Valley, I observed ongoing destruction of the landscape. Along Highway 163, several dogs herded a flock of sheep southward toward that fateful field. With no humans in sight, the dogs kept the sheep moving down that parched valley. As it is today, when ancestral Puebloan Indians first inhabited Monument Valley, there was no year-round running stream.
View south toward Monument Valley, Utah landforms, with storm clouds approaching - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
For over one hundred years, Anglo ranchers’ sacred cattle and the Navajo’s sacred sheep have eaten the West. Left unchecked, sheep will eat low lying plants down to their roots. One needs to look no farther than the fence lines along Arizona highways to see the damage. When compared to the overgrazed landscape of the open range, the protected area along the roadside is lush with vegetation. Shifting sand and blowing dust have been part of their lives for so long; locals of all ethnicity now take it their moving landscape for granted.
"The Mexican Hat" or "el Sombrero Mexicano", with convoluted and eroded landform behind, near Mexican Hat, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)
With an extended dry cycle in the West, we must control and curtail grazing in wind-sensitive areas. Allowing further destruction and dissipation of the land will encourage even earlier seasonal dust storms, with attendant early snow-melt in the high country. The issue no longer centers on sacred grazing rites or cattle ranching traditions. Now, the issue is the survival of the Western landscape and all of us who live or play within it. Only when all humans abandon their sense of entitlement will this endangered land begin to heal itself.
As we enter another
A view of Comb Ridge, Utah, from Comb Wash, looking north - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
On this October day, a cold front had cleared the air in the Four Corners region. As I approached Monument Valley from the south, I caught a glimpse of the Abajo Mountains, over seventy miles to the north. Before reaching those mountains later that afternoon, I would cross the Arizona - Utah border in Monument Valley, then on through the towns of Mexican Hat, Bluff and Blanding.
 
During my 1965 visit to Monument Valley, I had discovered a favorite scene. Now heading north, capturing that scene required me to stop and look back. From a mesa top, I had a long view toward the buttes and spires of Monument Valley. Here, the movie character Forest Gump stopped running and returned home. Over forty years after my first visit, the spot was just as majestic and unspoiled as it was in my youth.
View of U.S. Highway 163 North road-cut at Comb Ridge, from the bottom Comb Wash - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
After departing Monument Valley, I traveled across a narrow bridge that spans the San Juan River. There, serving as the northern gateway to Monument Valley is the town of Mexican Hat, Utah. Home to about one hundred hearty souls, it was there; in a roadside diner, that author Edward Abbey set the scene for the climactic chase in his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Since Abbey set his scenes with geographical accuracy, a now abandoned diner In Mexican Hat may have served as his model.
 
The actual Mexican Hat Rock is a disk of sandstone sixty feet in diameter. Perched as it is on a much smaller boulder, one must invert the image to see the hat. In the background, stand convoluted and eroded landforms of fantastic proportions. With only the San Juan River to carry away the products of erosion, one can only imagine how many thunderstorms in the desert it took to create such fanciful shapes.
Ancient Spirit Kokopelli and Coney the Traffic Cone at the old Cow Canyon Trading Post in Bluff, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
The next Utah landform of note I encountered was Comb Ridge. The large, tilted-block monocline divides much of Southeastern Utah along a north – south axis. Named for its resemblance to a cockscomb, one can see how the eroded ridge top inspired such a name.
 
Approaching Comb Ridge from the south, the highway first crosses Comb Wash. With the ridge of eroding sandstone looming above, the Highway 163 climbs over the steep ridge. Partially because of space constraints, highway engineers gave us a strong running start down into the wash then up through a dramatic road cut. From plateau top to the bottom of the wash and then to ridge top again takes less than two minutes. With its changes in elevation, swooping turns and potential for falling rocks, the short transit up and over Comb Ridge is both dramatic and memorable.
A 1949 Buick 8 abandoned at the old Cow Canyon Trading Post, Bluff, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
Heading north from Comb Ridge, Highway 163 briefly shares a route with U.S. Highway 191. In the town of Bluff, beneath sugarcoated sandstone canyon walls, the two highways again diverge. There, at a T-shaped intersection stands a remnant from the past known as the old Cow Canyon Trading Post. Since images of the old trading post serve as “Moab Ranch” in my online novel at JimMcGillis.com, I stopped to look around. A rustic buckboard at that location provided a backdrop for pictures of Kokopelli and Coney, two of the characters in my novel.
 
My next stop was in Blanding, Utah. As did Bluff to its south and Monticello to its north, Blanding began as a Mormon outpost and settlement in the late 1800s. Today, Blanding’s simple, clean appearance belies the angst and anguishes many of its longtime residents feel.
Not twenty-six abandoned gasoline stations, but one very nice abandoned gasoline station, Highway 191, in Blanding, north of Monument Valley, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
The collecting of ancient Indian artifacts, locally called “pot hunting” has been illegal on public lands since President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act of 1906. In the 1980s, arrests and prosecutions of several prominent local citizens had curtailed, but not ended the looting in San Juan County. The arrest of twenty-six Four Corners residents in early 2009 indicates that looting of artifacts from graves is still considered by some to be an “entitlement activity”. If Ute Indians from the White Mesa Reservation were to dig up the Blanding City Cemetery in search of valuables, would townsfolk passively accept such behavior?
Indian jewelry store, downtown Blanding, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com) 
After the recent BLM arrests, the San Juan County Sheriff contacted both of Utah U.S. senators, requesting a federal investigation. The investigation that he requested centered not on possible conspiracy to loot artifacts from our public lands. His main concern was that a phalanx of armed federal agents had arrested middle aged and elderly citizens of Blanding. Included in the arrests was a member of his family.
 
Whether we agree with the tactics of federal agents or not, it is hard to argue against ending what had become rampant grave robbing and desecration of sacred sites. Whether the issue is overgrazing or pot hunting, only when we abandon our feelings of entitlement shall we begin to heal both our relationship with the land and with the spirit of the ancients.
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By James McGillis at 04:15 PM | Environment | Comments (0) | Link

Thursday, September 30, 2021

When "Moderate" Fire Danger Turns "Extreme" At Pack Creek - 2009

 


Wild fire on the slopes below the La Sal Range - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)

When "Moderate" Fire Danger Turns "Extreme" At Pack Creek

On June 24, 2009, we departed Moab, Utah, heading for Navajo National Monument, about 225 miles south.  After viewing the Pueblo Verde Ranchettes, at Moab Ranch, we noticed smoke reaching skyward to our east.  A fire of recent origin appeared to burn across a steep ridge, just below the slopes of the La Sal Range.
 
We motored up Spanish Valley Drive to where it becomes Geyser "Moderate" Fire Danger sign on Geyser Pass Road, Spanish Valley, San Juan County, Utah - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)Pass Road, in Northern  San Juan County.  Since we were towing a travel trailer, it did not seem prudent get any closer.  Noting that it was 1:45 PM MDT, we snapped a few pictures from there, and then headed south on U.S. Highway 191, towards Monticello, Utah
 
During our brief viewing period, we saw neither aircraft nor ground crews heading towards the fire.  Around us, everything was "busines as usual".  To us it seemed that a fast-moving fire was not a problem to anyone in the area.
Wild fire burns laterally across a ridge near La Sal Mountains, and Spanish Valley, Utah. 
When we wrote this article on July 7, 2009, we searched for any news regarding the fire, but no articles surfaced on the subject.  Although we still do not know exactly what happened that day, here are the pictures to prove that it is a dry summer in Moab and Spanish Valley, Utah.
 
As smoke continued to billow, we thought that perhaps it was time for local fire officials to change their signs from “moderate” to "extreme" fire danger.

By James McGillis at 06:09 PM | | Comments (0) | Link