The Unknown Mountains

Roads in Utah make me swerve across the double yellow. They also make me slam the brakes. Well, not the roads per se, but the windshield-framed views of mesas, hoodoos, chasms, and endless sky. There’s the precipice of the Moki Dugway, where Monument Valley threatens to suck the car over the cliffs. There’s the third turn of the Burr Trail switchbacks, and the fifth, and the seventh, the Waterpocket Fold looming like a giant petrified stegosaurus, impossible to ignore. State Route 14 leaving Cedar City. Scenic Byway 12. And I’d be remiss to forget Exit 116 on I-70, heart of the San Rafael Swell.

Indeed, I have trouble “keeping it between the ditches” in canyon country—what incredible ditches! Of all the desert roads I’ve driven, though, none so badly distracts as SR-276, south of Hanksville, north of Ticaboo. Welcome to the Henry Mountains, last range named and mapped in the Lower 48, a terra that even now remains largely incognita. The five peaks that constitute