Outside Magazine

Let us now praise southern Utah!

I moved here the high-water spring of 1993, everything I owned in the car and my savings whittled to three hundred cash. The hitchhikers said Moab, so I dropped anchor in the red-rock oasis and spent the next decade dowsing: mossy seeps, wind-chime waterfalls, pollywog potholes. I guided the rivers—the Green, the San Juan, the Colorado—splashed up the slots of Canyonlands and Escalante, and finally bought my own acre of promised land along a lazy creek sweet with Russian olives and fluffy with cottonwood duff. I loved the small scale of the desert towns. The Mormon pioneers did not develop the land for tourists, loading it with bars and resorts, but for themselves, placing a premium on self-sufficiency and community. The sandstone labyrinths, swaths of public land, and fine-just-the-way-it-is locals precluded it from becoming the California I had fled.