A special report by the Tri-City Herald

Environmental activist Susan Tixier is a newcomer to Escalante who doesn't want to see the town turned into another homogenized upscale resort. Tixier, executive director of Great Old Broads for Wilderness, says wild places inspire greatness.

Town struggles to merge past, future

ESCALANTE, Utah - Two kinds of people live here: those who see the monument as a threat and those who see it as an opportunity.

Melvin Alvey sees a threat.

"Times have changed here," said the deeply tanned Alvey, who at 92 claims the title of the town's oldest resident. "This is the poorest time of my life."

Before the monument, people here were happier, he said. "Now, everybody is finding fault with everybody else."

There's more to it than bad feelings.

Services in this remote town of 1,000 are considerable - they include Internet access, cable TV, city water and sewer - but they are sorely taxed.

Also, there's a paralyzing fear about how residents should proceed - a hurdle made all the more difficult by the sense that any attempt to make a deal with the hated federal government is bedding down with the devil.

"There are some in the community that have accepted it and are trying to figure out a way to capitalize on the monument," said Stephen Steed, manager of Utah Forest Products, one of the region's largest private employers.

"And there are those who are still trying to make their traditional uses of the land," he said. "Those people, I think, are probably at risk."

From Helena, Mont., to Hoquiam, Wash., the story is the same for resource communities. The copper kings of Montana, the timber barons of the Cascade Range and the famed June hogs - the 100-pound giant chinook salmon of the Columbia River - all are long gone.

Fish, timber, mines, mineral and water rights have either dried up or come under such tight regulation in recent years that the old boom-and-bust cycle is flattened into a steady downward line.

Alvey explains the situation in Utah, for decades the site of land-use battles. "I look at the monument like this - you hand me a $10 bill but say, 'You can't spend it. Keep it. Keep it. Keep it.'

"They say, 'You can have this (land), but don't spend it.'"

Escalante finds downsides

The Escalante region is filled with contradictions - much like the paradox of having a national monument surrounding one of the Western Hemisphere's most polluted nuclear sites.

For instance, the best restaurant in Escalante is a log cabin establishment called the Ponderosa, which advertises "European cuisine."

But there's more.

Locals fear being locked off the monument land, but the most visible sentiments about trespassing are tires spray-painted "Keep Out" and hung from fences along small swatches of private property.

The federal government remains almost universally despised, despite sustaining most life here though jobs, food stamps and school lunch programs.

And the creation of the monument to protect the land has nearly doubled the number of visitors, creating a whole new set of challenges.

At the makeshift Escalante police department, Police Chief Samuel Winkler opened his door to a 20-foot-square room that includes his office, the evidence lockers, the breathalyzer machine, a few file cabinets and a dirty old couch. The closest jail is 80 miles. "You can see, it's not much of a police office," he apologized.

So far this year, Winkler and the town's other officer are on pace to nearly double their citations for DUIs over last year. He blames much of the trouble on outsiders traveling through.

"Everything the big towns have, we have - just in smaller numbers," he said.

People, problems but no money

Winkler cracks open the lockers that once belonged to a school. They are filled with guns and beer bottles and urine samples from who knows when that show positive for cocaine and amphetamines. The lockers don't have locks.

He pulls out a bag that looks like crushed mint. "That's marijuana, would you like to smell it?" he offered.

In addition to normal duty, Winkler is often called into the monument to rescue stranded tourists who don't understand that rental sedans weren't built for the endless rock-strewn trails through the sagebrush.

And, he has the unenviable job of keeping order during protests of government policies - the potential draining of Lake Powell to the southeast is a current hot topic - in a town where everyone knows everyone else. "It's always a concern for law and order," he said.

But Escalante doesn't just struggle with law and order. City taxes have spiked in the last year to help pay for upgraded water and sewer systems - and there's still a lot of concern about having enough irrigation water to get through the summer.

"It's been really bad because we weren't prepared for it," said Alvey, who sits on the city's planning commission. To make matters worse, "It doesn't seem like there is a great deal of money coming with these people," said Alvey, who admits he's thought about moving out. "It will bring in a lot of people who aren't too desirable. ... Why they are here, we don't know."

And the social structure - once based largely on Mormon hierarchy and farm barter - is fractured.

"Now, all of the sudden, we have a pretty liberal type of people coming into our town," said Steve Gessig, a monument opponent who lives on a ranch at the edge of town. "There is more unrest than I have ever seen in my life."

Newcomers bring new outlook

In the eyes of many townspeople, Susan Tixier is one of the undesirables - so much so that when she held the Democratic precinct meeting at her home a few months ago, no one attended. Unfazed, Tixier elected herself precinct chairwoman.

As the founder of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Tixier moved to Escalante more than a year ago. She runs trails, reads and coordinates environmental activists across the West.

She doesn't appear to spend much money in town - in fact, she orders her bread shipped from Ketchum, Idaho - and says the attraction of Escalante is "Something more than money exists there."

"We need a place where you can go where values are not based on anything you can buy," said Tixier, 57, the daughter of a uranium miner.

"Or if you can't go there, you need to know there are places like that. ... Wild spaces inspire greatness."

More lovers of the wild are bound to follow Tixier, just as they followed others to Aspen, Jackson Hole and every other trendy town that's popped up on the Western landscape.

Now that she's discovered the simple beauty of Escalante, Tixier grimaces at the thought of it being overrun. "The worst thing that can happen is a bunch of sterile houses that all look the same," she said.

But almost inevitably, the newcomers will force up land prices in a county that's 96 percent federally owned and the cost of living will force out old-timers such as Escalante Mayor Marjie Lee Spencer, a retired school teacher.

"I see our way of life is being changed," she lamented.

"I don't think they realize that when they move in here and we move out, it isn't going to be the same little town."

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