DIRK HANDLEBAR: Beaver County, Utah

While I was out west, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with some friends on their ranch just north of Milford. Thanks Shaun, Tammy, Becky, and everyone else for making this such a fun getaway.

I can't get enough of the desert. Western Utah has a rugged, vacant beauty that defies easy description. So different from the green, closed-in outdoors of Central Pennsylvania, the desert vistas are vast and empty, te harsh landscape barely sprinkled with the detritus of any past inhabitants.

It's a hell of a place to try to make a living, though.

For all the hundreds of years that native and white men and women have tried to survive in this hard land, the dim traces of the past seem very impermanent, as if all of human existence has scratched only a fleeting impression on the desert's tough skin.

Enough of my rantings, though. Here are some photos.

The native Americans - Southern Paiute (probably the Kwiumpus band) and perhaps the earlier Fremont Indians - lived for hundreds of years (at least part of the year) along the shores of the Beaver River (until it was dammed in the twentieth century). For how many unknown hundreds of years, these people made their stone tools from obsidian taken from a nearby canyon. All the little black spots on the ground are pieces of obsidian that were chipped off over the years to make arrowheads, scrapers, and other tools. You can see Ed as a little dot near the horizon. Although I'm sure archaeologists would find more tangible material remains, on the surface it doesn't seem like much to leave behind for hundreds of years of habitation.

This is part of what's left of Frisco, a boom town with a big silver mine that boasted nearly 6,000 inhabitants and 23 saloons in the late 19th century. Apparently, there were many surviving buildings until fairly recently. Now, it's pretty well blocked off to trespassers.

Frisco's cemetery. Many of the inscriptions on stone are still legible, but I imagine the majority of graves used wooden markers that have perished. Many of the graves held infants and children. It would be a harsh place to try to give birth or raise a family.

Near Frisco, in several places, the miners built charcoal ovens to produce charcoal for the mining and refining processes. These kilns are the most visible remains of a booming town, and required a huge amount of lumber to keep them stoked.

In addition to Frisco, there were other many other attempts at homesteading in this little valley. Most of the buildings have been wiped from the earth. A few foundations remain. A rare stone building, like this one that my nephew James is standing beside, lasts longer.

At the end of this little track - called "Schoolhouse Lane" - near the swathe of darker green, was the town of Beaver Bottoms. This was a place where the river could be easily forded. Now, the river is all dried up (because of the dam) so it's harder to imagine.

A lonely building.

James caught a friend - a little lizard.

Tammy and Becky showed us where to see some old petroglyphs. Not as spectacular as those found at the Parowan Gap, they were nevertheless pretty darn cool. [See Ed's blog for some excellent photos of the Parowan Gap drawings] It struck me how these indecipherable scratchings were the most long-lived records of human activity in this desert land. Whatever these symbols and marks meant to the people who made them, to me, living today, they indicate only a desperate desire to leave a permanent mark of humanity on the great desert slate. A defiant urge, to be sure, but ultimately feeble. Already - so Tammy told me - she's noticed that the marks are fading back into the rock's patina. I'm pretty sure the desert is going to win this one in the end.