Highlighted Route
The story behind one man’s vision to cross Utah on dirt, through the middle of America’s most rugged desert treasures
“It’s the roughest country you or anybody else ever seen,” wrote Elizabeth Decker to her parents in 1880. “It’s nothing in the world but rocks and holes, hills, and hollows. The mountains are just one solid rock as smooth as an apple.”
Not much has changed in the topography of southern Utah in the century and a half since Decker put those words to paper, when she and the other Mormon settlers of the San Juan Expedition spent six months traveling east by wagon from Paraganoh, Parowan, and Cedar City on a journey they had expected to take six weeks. It’s cussedly rugged terrain, a “bad place to lose a cow,” as the ranching saying goes, with not much water, lots of sun, and little for shade other than gnarled juniper and twisted pinyon pines.
It’s also a heck of a landscape in which to set a road trip—home to some of the country’s most celebrated national parks, its newest and most controversial
2,600 words to go
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