The Most Beautiful Backroad of Them All

Winter's death-grip has been broken and life is returning to the flowerbeds around my home in northern Utah. I've got spring fever—got it bad—but the treacherous weatherman continues to hit me with wet snowstorms. The white stuff is piling higher and higher in our mountains but it doesn't stick around long in the valleys. Happily, much of the national park country in southern Utah is snow free. Now is a great time to visit the parks.

During the first week of March, with snow in the forecast, I felt like a lizard coming out of hibernation, drawn toward sunshine and warm red rocks. Without a clear itinerary in mind, Capitol Reef became my destination—I can think of no better place to shrug off winter's doldrums and enjoy an early spring outing.

In springtime, Capitol Reef is a feast of beauty. The trees in Fruita's pioneer orchards will soon be in full bloom. A large herd of mule deer can often be seen grazing peacefully under fruit trees in the narrow canyon. Cacti will also start to bloom during the next several weeks, adding splashes of color to park trails.

Spring is the season to hike in Capitol Reef and the park offers a wide assortment of opportunities, ranging from easy strolls to epic treks. This is also a great time to drive the park's backroads. Domes, arches and hidden canyons await adventurers.

For my adventure I chose the smorgasbord—The Burr Trail. Cloistered for decades by its remoteness and rugged topography, traditionally the Burr Trail was a hard place to explore. That changed in the 90s, when all but the 16 miles of road within Capitol Reef was paved.

The Burr Trail now offers something for both the casual automobile sightseer and the hardcore explorer. The road takes the car-bound into some of Utah's most beautiful and extraordinary country, offering glorious views from every direction; it also offers canyoneers and hikers backcountry access to the wild-and-woolly eastern Escalante drainage, one of the world's most spectacular canyon systems, and to the Waterpocket Fold, with its little-explored slots and high slickrock ramparts. (Our Burr Trail video clip provides a good introduction to this backroad.)

Come with me as I drive the road eastward from the town of Boulder, past bucolic green fields and white checkerboard Navajo Sandstone domes. Stately ponderosa pines tower over dry, sandy washes. Off to the northwest the snow-bound bulk of the Aquarius Plateau pushes into the clear sky.

The road wraps around a cliff and swings south, plunging down to the dancing waters of The Gulch, one of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument's most popular canyons due to its easy walking and glorious scenery. I cross over a bridge and enter the Stygian corridor of Long Canyon. Soaring Wingate cliff faces cast long shadows across the road. Pinyon pines, twisted junipers and tall ponderosas grow in unlikely places out of the rocky detritus. With such natural beauty, the canyon is an open-air art gallery or sorts, except that everything's a wild, chaotic jumble. The only regularity in the scene is the mostly-straight road, which I follow until it tops out in the heights of the Circle Cliffs.

The canyon walls fall away and the horizon leaps back several miles. I pull over at a scenic overlook. The sky above my head is 360 degrees of blue. At approximately 6,600 feet in elevation, the air has a good clean bite to it. The overlook breaks on an expansive view of the Circle Cliffs: inward-facing Wingate ramparts that encircle a huge basin of rust-colored badlands and pinyon-juniper woodland. Patterns in the landscape carry the eye past castellated cliffs to distant white peaks on the eastern skyline—the Henry Mountains, the last-surveyed and last-named mountain range in the continental United States.

Wild country. I can't wait to get down into it.

I drop into the Circle Cliffs amphitheater and race across its vast basin. I pass through the Studhorse Peaks (named after the stud horses that stood vigil on the high ground here, guarding their mares) and descend to the entrance of Capitol Reef National Park. Here the pavement ends abruptly, the velvety smooth macadam giving way to slick gumbo mud.

My truck slews in the deep, moist ruts; sticky wet clay thumps in the wheel wells. This is the Burr Trail as it was 30 years ago—well nigh impassable. I shift into 4WD High and slalom along for a few miles toward a break in the slickrock mass of the Waterpocket Fold, and pull off the road at the top of the infamous Burr Canyon switchbacks. A century and a half ago these switchbacks were the crux of the cattle trail built by John Atlantic Burr, a rancher who moved his herds back and forth between the Aquarius Plateau and Bullfrog Basin on the Colorado River.

If Burr's ghost lurks in this country, I'm sure it often stops at this high desert perch to admire the beauty. To the east, honey-colored cliffs frame a phantasmagoric panorama of eroded mesas and snowy mountains. To my right the Waterpocket Fold's knobby ridgeline extends into the wings, the devil's very own backbone pointing south toward Lake Powell and north toward Thousand Lake Mountain. Below my feet the road drops in a series of vertiginous Z's into the cool shadows of Burr Canyon.

Gorgeous, stunning, wild country.

As I climb back in the truck, a snippet of verse pops into my head:

"I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair, a road that is an ordered road, like a nun's evening prayer; but best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where."

Another poet, Shakespeare, said, "All roads lead to Rome." In Utah's desert country, all backroads lead to adventure and discovery. I shift into gear, point my Chevy down the switchbacks, and continue my journey on the most beautiful backroad of them all, sinking deeper into its matrix of geology, history, and raw beauty.

- Dave Webb

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