Open Range
As you all know, I chose to call my blog The Old Lone Ranger when I launched it in 2019. The reference is not so hard to figure out. Most men of my age probably watched a lot of TV cowboys, and few titillated us more than The Lone Ranger. There was both an air of mystery about him and a strong sense of righteousness. He was open-minded enough to have a Native American partner in Tonto, which seemed cool. And he taught us the value of humility by never sticking around for a thank you. Cowboys were altogether favorites for Baby Boomers. We are now learning that someone vastly over-romanticized the reality of cowboying. It was actually a pretty lowly form of labor and after the Civil War, the majority of cowboys were black men, who had few alternative ways of making a living and a life for themselves. Cowboys were more gritty than dashing. Their chores were more arduous than glamorous.
If you’ve ever seen the Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner movie, Open Range, you probably get a more accurate idea about what that life was really like. Those guys live under a tarp tent and are pretty much subject to the whims of nature and the whims of prairie justice in a land that was struggling on the border of public and private ownership of the range. The concept of “open range”, where cattle can roam freely to graze on public land is one of the great economic enigmas. On the one hand, free grazers believe in the ultimate freedom that all property belongs to God and not to man. That makes them radical socialists in the extreme, where even “real” estate is far less real than the chattel of cattle. On the other hand, the freedom and drive that drove this country West into the inhospitable nether regions of the wide open spaces, was all about the quest for property as the ultimate basis of prosperity that could be held and transferred linearly from one generation to the next. This was America, the home of the brave and the LAND of the free.
Today, we rode from Torrey through Capital Reefs National Park, which, unlike most National Parks has no gates or toll booths to cause us to stop and pay homage to the National Park Service. This probably didn’t matter much at this point since we have over-bought National Park Passes and have thrown enough money collectively at the NPS that we could have fumbled our way through. But the reason this situation is so “open” is because Rt. 24 is about the only way, short of ferrying across manmade Lake Powell, to get from the Western to the Eastern half of Southern Utah and vice versa. For all the regulatory and taxation powers of the federal government, it is anathema for it to prevail on its citizenry to the extent of physically preventing migration across its lands by its citizenry and in the absence of alternative reasonable routes (say, one’s that detour 500 miles or so due to natural or manmade wonders, which abound out here in the form of canyons, lakes, mountains and rivers). What a strange inalienable right that might seem to our founding fathers, but it evolved that way for one reason or another and so it stands to this day.
The ride through Capital Reefs has always been spectacular, with sights and waypoints all along its ten mile width. You can find hiking trails, historical manmade monuments including old prairie schoolhouses, and indigenous artifacts like petroglyphs, all within feet of the road. On the other side heading East, the landscape then turns from vibrant to somber as red and gold are replaced by grey, grey and more grey. It almost seems that man has mined the color out of the land, but this moon-like coloring is the result of nature churning up a wide swath of dullness seismically and then letting the millennia further drain it of life, shape and definition into a random wave after wave of grey sedimentary deposits. That unworldly and contrarian beauty carries on until Hanksville pops up at one juncture where water found its way close enough to the surface to allow plant and animal life to return.
Hanksville south on Rt. 95 begins the 133-mile West to East Bicentennial Highway, so designated by the Department of the Interior in 1976. This wonderfully maintained road is a main artery through canyon country, and yet it is thankfully spared the traffic of the Interstates to the north and south. It is one of the great American thoroughfares that too few Americans have seen. Every few miles you encounter signs highlighted with orange flags that depict a cattle and simply say Open Range. Yes, it still exists and while the Buffalo (more accurately called American Bison) no longer roam across it in vast herds that dig up the earth as the Tatonka did in Dances With Wolves, apparently the cattle are allowed to forage the range as they have since the days of the Old West before the invention of barbed wire fencing. The vastness of our great land is hard to ignore when hurtling across this great expanse at 90-100 m.p.h., and then the blast of a law enforcement light bar reminds you ever so gently and politely that this land is, indeed, your land, but it is also my land in the words of the immortal folk singer Woodie Guthrie, father of Arlo.
As the land starts to take on more color and shape from streams and rivers that cut into the rock and slant towards the mighty Colorado River, fed from the snowmelt of the great Rocky Mountains, the road adopts that form and sweeps back and forth rhythmically. It’s fascinating to see the way the red rock clings and then heaves in monstrous scale at the sides of the cliffs, leaving great vertical couloirs that are as dramatic as any natural carvings one will see. At one turn in the road there appears an oasis called Hogs Springs, which leads one to believe that this seam in the aquifer was discovered by animals before man. The A.F.M.C. has used this waystation for many a picnic and photo opp. From there on down to Hite’s Landing, the road twists and turns in a motorcyclist’s dream blend of tarmac, red rock and blue sky. We stop at the overlook to remember twenty-five years of pilgrimage to this spot which shows the insignificance and futility of man as he tries to control rather than simply revere nature. The power of damming the mighty Colorado created Lake Powell and the combination of climate change and a little push from the Sierra Club has caused it to recede to the point where the boat landings look ridiculously displaced far from any semblance of navigable waters.
If the great man, Arthur Einstein, were with us for this ride, he would be pleased to find that the A.F.M.C. oral history still credits him with the wisdom to recognize that all this open range was once under water and that long before man made his feeble attempt to control the earth, Mother Nature had washed her hands in this vast inland pond and wrung out the countryside in a near perfect vista that is still here for all of us to enjoy and marvel at. In the words of everyone who has ridden this open range, “Ride on, Ma’am.”