Modern Resources

Dusk has fallen over the Bear River.  Dark clouds hastened its arrival and heralded a malevolent south wind sweeping up the valley.  The wind pounds the side of my truck, which is parked under some power lines where the Bear River passes between the Malad and Wellsville Ranges.  The camper sways; the rods that hold the roof up creak.  The cabinet doors that I have left open swing on their hinges.  Raindrops lash the roof and walls.  The wind howls across the power lines like a cherub blowing on a bottletop.

But driving up the rocky roads of the Salt Lake Basin was harder on the camper than this wind, and I know the camper will hold.  Inside, it is warm and the air is still.  A supper of black beans, turnip greens, and pepperjack cheese sits warmly in my stomach.  Duke lies at my feet, his tail thumping the floor.  I’ve got Peter Jennnings’s A Walk Across America to keep me company, and plenty of mapwork to do.  This is a fine night to not be outside.

Supper on the stove.

I spent most of today talking with people who know more about this area than me.  I talked with Wally Gwynn, a geologist with a cut across his nose who was a month away from retirement.  He looked about seventy, but he knew the area's topography and was adept with his computer.  He showed me how to find NASA satellite images of various regions, uploaded an electronic copy of the 1852 Stansbury Survey of the Salt Lake region to my thumb drive, and gave me a book about the area’s geology.  He was a nice guy, and self-effacing.  “One less book to get off my shelf,” he said.

Around lunchtime, I visited the old Rio Grande Train station, which now holds the Utah Historical Society and a café that serves an excellent burrito special on Tuesdays.  After cleaning my plate, I bounced around the historical offices until I landed in the office of trail specialist Craig Fuller.  Mr. Fuller sat with me for about an hour, pointing out various springs on the west side of the Great Salt Lake and tracing routes of other early explorers – Jedidiah Smith, John Frémont, the Bidwell-Bartleson party.  We read the Zenas journal together, and he helped me guess at a route.  Water availability was a major factor that I hadn’t considered.  He gave me an excellent map of historic trails in Utah, and held up the map while I took his picture.

Craig Fuller.

This chicken taco hangs over the bar in the Rio Grande Cafe.  When I didn't get the joke, my waitress, Ashley, explained that it could be spelled "Chick-In Taco."

Mr. Fuller also pointed out something else: the Walker Expedition probably didn’t follow US 89 through the Wellsville Mountains as I’d supposed when I climbed to the weather station on Mount Pisgah.  The expedition didn’t need to cross the mountains at all.  Instead, upon leaving Cache Valley – a valley well known to the trappers, and named for their tendency to store beaver pelts there – the expedition could have simply followed the Bear River out of the valley and passed between the Wellsville and Malad Ranges.  They needn’t have climbed either.  In his 1852 survey, Howard Stansbury followed the Bear River between Cache Valley and the Great Salt Lake and, after gathering “all the information that could be obtained from the oldest mountain-men,” reported that the route provided easy travelling.

I figure that the Walker Expedition, with their horses for transportation and their buffalo robes for shelter, probably followed the Bear River out of Cache Valley instead of climbing through either the Wellsville or Malad Ranges.  I’m sitting along the Bear between the ranges now, engaged in the important tasks of boiling water for hot chocolate and teaching Duke to hold morsels of food on his nose, then toss them into the air and catch them.  The wind and rain are still beating the sides of the camper.  It is good to live in 2009.

Bear River passage between the Wellsville and Malad Ranges.