A special report by the Tri-City Herald

Towering arches greet the rising sun at Devils Garden in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Four years after President Clinton created the 1.9 million acre national monument, debate still rages between land-use advocates and environmentalists.

Southern Utah town split over Escalante's legacy

DEVIL'S GARDEN, Utah - Despite its name, this is God's country.

This unquenchable land is what the West once was before strip malls strapped towns together, before tourists overran national parks, before movie stars bought sprawling ranches and before smog obscured the Grand Canyon.

Before there were dams or roads, before cattle and coal mines, there was this - one of the last best places.

And it is a place with lessons for any who will listen - lessons about how to make the most of a monument such as the 200,000-acre Hanford Reach National Monument announced by Vice President Al Gore in June.

On this patch of the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, rabbit trails in the tan sand outnumber human tracks 10-to-1. Coyotes slink in the distance. Rattlesnakes slide along in sideways arcs. Eagles hang in the sky.

Massive red rock outcrops stand inky black against the deep blue sky before dawn. In the morning cool, the exotic formations radiate pent-up heat from the day before when they baked for hours at 90 degrees.

Eons of midday heat, coupled with wind and water, seem to have melted most of the thirsty land - though defiant spires endure to watch another sunrise.

The birds go reverently silent as the sun sweeps warm rays down titanic cliffs in the distance, then marches past sagebrush and piñon trees, striding steadily toward Devil's Garden - a collection of sandstone shapes that some long-ago traveler attributed to the powers of darkness.

Light streams through keyholes of eroded rock, anoints smooth spires and casts ridges across the lone washboard road that leads to this place.

The rock feels like heavy-grit sandpaper. Where cracks have formed, it crumbles like a week-old muffin.

The Escalante is not as mighty as the Grand Canyon or as breathtaking as nearby Bryce Canyon or as immediately stunning as Mount Rainier.

Its beauty rests in its scope - it sprawls across a landscape as large as Rhode Island, Delaware and Washington, D.C., and its untrammeled virtue stands as clear as its air.

President Clinton, who branded this land with the federal monument seal in 1996, says it defies human perspective:

"It is a place where one can see how nature shapes human endeavors in the American West, where distance and aridity have been pitted against our dreams and courage."

When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the Tri-Cities in May, he called the Escalante an example of how well his monument program is working - "a success by almost every measure," he recently told Bureau of Land Management employees.

But don't tell that to the people who live there. They still spew fire at the mention of his name.

The Grand Staircase - a series of pink, gray, white and vermilion cliffs - was the last place in the continental United States to be mapped, and the Escalante River is believed to be the last major river discovered in the United States.

More than a century later, some of the names in these parts - for instance, Hell's Backbone and Box Death Hollow - refer to unholy powers, just one of the many contradictions in a land settled by devout Mormons.

Perhaps the attributions are still appropriate. The residents here all say the devil of the Escalante's declaration as a national monument is in its management details.

And only a demonizing force could have aroused the passions that still haunt this place four years after swift moves by the federal government locked up another vast tract of the Southwest.

Copyright 2000 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hanford Reach National Monument Online | Tri-City Herald Online | Hanford News Online