Messing with Maps: Best roads of Utah edition

Plus: Random Real Estate Room (sorta); Land Desk Out and About

In honor of Labor Day weekend, I’m keeping this dispatch a wee bit light and non-laborious — for me and for you. Next week I’ll have some thoughts on the Bureau of Land Management’s newly released Western Solar Plan, its revised resource management plan for the Rock Springs Field Office in southwestern Wyoming, and the final management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Have a great weekend.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Back in the 1930s, Althea Dobbins and Robert Marshall sat down and pored over maps of the United States in search not of roads, but of the absence thereof. They wanted to find the remaining swaths of land that had not seen a bulldozer’s blade or asphalt or road base.

A portion of the “Best Roads of Utah” map of 1927 showing the nine-million-acre roadless area. Note that the only route to Natural Bridges National Monument was a “trail” (See next photo for a key). Also, Natural Bridges included two outlying “units” at the time: Snow Flat Spring Cave and Cigarette Spring Cave on Cedar Mesa. But in 1962, President John F. Kennedy added about 5,000 acres to the main monument, while removing the two caves, “which no longer contain features of archeological value.” I’m guessing that’s because they were looted. Also: The cartographer calls Mexican Hat “Medicine Hat.” Whoops.

One of the largest roadless areas they found was a nine-million-acre swath in southeastern Utah straddling the Colorado River. It was the same rugged landscape the Hole-in-the-Rock party had crossed in 1879 (building a road of sorts in Glen Canyon) and where Everett Ruess went missing in 1934.

I don’t know which maps Dobbins and Marshall used, but they might have looked at this one, published in 1927, called the “Best Roads of Utah.” It doesn’t purport to show all of the roads, and it leaves out things like stock trails that might have seen an automobile or two and seldom-traveled routes that dead-end at an oil well or mining prospect — but those didn’t void an area’s roadless status for Dobbins and Marshall, either.

Even then, the southwestern corner of the state was relatively road-covered.

It’s a remarkable map to me because you can clearly see that nine-million-acre chunk of un-roaded area in southern Utah, stretching from Blanding all the way to Boulder and containing some of the most spectacular, rugged country in between (which of course just shows up as a big blank spot, demonstrating the inadequacy of maps).

It’s also a bit sad, though, because if you were to compare it to a new road map, you’d see that in the decades following the Dobbins-Marshall survey, roads proliferated across the landscape, especially during the Cold War uranium boom spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s. Now a San Juan County road map looks like a chaotic, 7,700-mile spiderweb laid down over the land or one of those anatomical diagrams of the human circulatory system, and Kane, Garfield, and Grand Counties are pretty much the same.

This shows much of the Uravan Mineral Belt before it was a uranium hotspot (though there had been mining there in the late 1800s and early 1900s). And I-70 didn’t exist yet, either, so there were no roads big enough to map crossing the San Rafael Swell. Also, Hanksville was the end of the road back then .

Indeed, ever since the LDS church had sent a band of Mormons to the southeastern corner of the state, requiring them to forge the Hole-in-the-Rock trail, old-guard Utahns have had a sort of obsession with roads. They will spend oodles of taxpayer dollars or even venture into illegal acts to keep a dead-end cow-path open to motorized travel and now, down in St. George, they’re hoping to lay a five-mile strip of asphalt across desert tortoise habitat and a national conservation area. Why? Because they like building roads.

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🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑 

Democrat Monica Tranel is challenging MAGA-Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke to represent Montana’s first congressional district. And a new ad shows she’s not messing around. Turns out Zinke — who was Trump’s Interior secretary until he resigned under a cloud of scandal — has been buying up properties in Montana and turning them into short-term rentals. This is problematic because Montana, like much of the West, is experiencing a housing affordability crisis, one that’s exacerbated by housing being taken out of the long-term rental market for the higher profits a short-term rental can offer.

In her new ad, Tranel takes a little tour of one of Zinke’s Whitefish rentals. The decor is tacky and the price is outrageous: More than $16,000 per month. Watch the ad:

monica.tranel

A post shared by @monica.tranel

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🚅 The Land Desk Out and About 🚴🏼‍♂️

If you love the desert, especially the Mojave, and you like good writing, you gotta subscribe to Chris Clarke’s Letters From the Desert e-newsletter. And if you enjoy podcasts, check out his 90 Miles from Needles. I had the pleasure of joining Chris on the podcast to talk about Utah’s public land grab attempt. Listen if you’d like:

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📸 Parting Shot 🎞️