Echo Park felt like the center of the Universe, where the veil between earthbound reality and the eternal world of spiritual truth seemed thin as a cobweb.

Echo Park isn’t even in Utah, it’s in Colorado. Dinosaur National Monument, of which it’s a part, merely sticks its nose into the Beehive State, and in the northeast corner at that, far from SUWA land. That said, I’ll claim a place for it in this blog regardless since it is where I was baptized into the Southwest faith, where it claimed part of my soul.*

One bright summer day, from rolling sage and mesquite and occasional clumps of pinyon on a plateau in northwest Colorado, I began a hellish one-thousand-foot descent—thirteen miles in first gear over washboards and gullies, sometimes careening, then skidding to a stop and sending a cloud of dust and rocks over into an abyss. My uncomplaining truck clutched and braked, from time to time wanting to test its tipping point.

On we went, creeping and tumbling and inching down anew until at last we emerged into a quiet and majestic riverside park—a broad expanse of rolling gardenscape of juniper and box elder and deer brush surrounded on three sides by thousand-foot cliffs. The towering monolith of Steamboat Rock loomed straight ahead, its brawny arms, several million years’ worth of red-stained sandstone, crossed over its massive chest like a colossus.

I set up camp. I staked down my blue two-person tent, tossed in a pillow and sleeping bag, set my camp stove on a fire pit grate, and strung a white rope between two thin pines for shade. Over it, I hung my ever-so-handy orange rain poncho as the weather pattern started to change. Earlier, it’d been hot and still. Later, the wind picked up, loud on its way, before I even felt the gusts. It tunneled down from the mesas far above and swept into the valley floor. A minute later, a different gust sliced up from the river, caught me broadside, and I swayed for a moment like a drunk in a crosswalk.

Just as quickly, the wind stopped, and the midday desert sun disappeared behind a flotilla of black clouds. Like an alien spacecraft, the dark mass paraded overhead—advance guard, it turned out, for an even larger and darker mother ship of cumulonimbus that appeared from behind the escarpment. The cloud mass paused, gauged my insignificance, then drifted on in the ephemeral and unfocused way of clouds.

More than a visual message, Echo Park is history and prehistory. This was the place of refuge John Wesley Powell found and christened in 1869 after surviving the treacherous Lodore Canyon upstream on the Green River. His party rested here before moving on through Whirlpool Canyon and the improbable gorge of Split Mountain downriver. Major Powell’s epic journey of course made history and made his name. Miles downstream from where I sat and not on any map Powell had, the Grand Canyon waited.

At Echo Park, the veteran who fought with Grant at Shiloh rested by a fire and stirred his beans with his only arm. He mopped the broth with sourdough and listened to his men bounce their voices off the canyon walls. Next day, the troop put in and went off down the West’s most adventurous river. A century and a half later, I relaxed amid the scent of sun-warmed boulders and cottonwood. Powell’s presence in Echo Park felt as real as a slapped mosquito.

Before Powell, General William Ashley’s party floated the Lodore chasm in bullboats—dried buffalo hides stretched over willow branches, keelless, rudderless—on the downstream run, as unwieldy as steamer trunks. Ashley hauled out by a rock wall, climbed it, and inscribed “Ashley 1825” in black letters. Powell spotted the graffiti some forty-five years later.

In 1776, Fathers Dominguez and Escalante had sought a way west from Santa Fe, by then a town over 150 years old, to California. They followed the Old Spanish Trail which veered north in order to skirt the Grand Canyon. The intrepid padres continued up the Green River past the present city by that name in Utah, and the party crossed the Green not far below Echo Park where the spent stream flattens out. They named the river “Rio Buenaventura” believing it to be the rumored westward passage flowing to the Pacific. The myth held until the 1840s when John C. Frémont proved conclusively that there was no such waterway.

Before these seekers of Spanish fortune and Catholic converts, the resident Crow and Shoshone called the river the “Seeds-ke-dee Agie,” Prairie Hen River. It is worth noting that today the once-abundant prairie hens cannot be found anywhere nearer the Green River than isolated populations far to the east in Kansas. A scant nine of the thirty species of fish in the Green are indigenous; tamarisk and cheatgrass crowd out native horsetail and other riparians faster than they can be checked. Native chokecherry, box elder, and cottonwood are also threatened.

Lost to recorded time, a thousand years earlier, a people archeologists call the Fremont Culture knew the oasis at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers. Watched over by the Steamboat Rock massif, they farmed using irrigation techniques, grew corn, beans, and squash, and feasted on berries and cactus fruits and piñon nuts. They hunted wild game such as mule deer, bighorn sheep, small mammals, and birds.

High on the surrounding canyon walls, they created petroglyphs and pictographs, spiritual language I hoped to hear if I listened carefully.

In our time, Echo Park stands as a monument to the efforts of an aroused citizenry. In the 1950s, urged on by the likes of Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and the Sierra Club, the Federal government’s attempt to dam the Yampa and Green Rivers was stopped in its tracks. The tragedy would have been profound, Echo Park submerged forever. The efforts to save other places that have failed (Glen Canyon, Hetch Hetchy) tear at the heart in places like Dinosaur all the more because of how nearly the battle there might have been lost.

But my presence—yours and everyone’s—presents a paradox: staggering natural beauty and timeless messages, essences of a place, are not reckoned, let alone understood and wondered at, other than by the very humans who encounter them and, even innocently or barely perceptibly, begin their despoliation. As Stegner observed, places are not places except as our senses take them in. Yet it is we who have often destroyed them or allowed them to be compromised. In my imagination, I even summoned up a boat; I’d shove off and live a childhood dream of running the Colorado with Powell—map my "experience onto a waking dream," in the words of Jonathan Franzen.

As it was, needing more than to understand but to actually feel Echo Park, I hiked and hiked, sand tugging at my boots, using both hands to brush aside tall grass, enjoying the feel of sage branches scratching my face as I squeezed past them.

At night, I’d lie in my tent alert to every sound, every snap of a twig, every nighthawk's bzzt, every whisper of a breeze, every rustle of some night creature. At some point, sleep happened, and I’d awaken refreshed and hungry. A lazy breakfast—bacon of course, eggs and hash, firepit-charred toast, and camp coffee—watching the sun paint the top reaches of Steamboat Rock and start to climb the taller pines in the valley.

But back to Stegner’s paradox. Was my presence there purchased at a price I might decide I should no longer be willing to pay? I subsisted in timeless Echo Park by virtue of meals concocted out of foil packets; a plastic bottle made from petroleum polymers; a tent, fly, tarp, ground cover, sleeping bag, and mattress (also jacket, daypack, and boots) made of state-of-the-art nylon, polyester, or Gortex; and, tent poles, canteen, lantern, camera, binoculars and camp stove (with throw-away propane canister), made of aluminum or even more exotic materials at who-knows-what environmental cost in extracting, smelting, and molding. I drove here in a truck that gets lousy mileage.

Without these things, would I even be here? Should humankind simply not invade this space?

I lay down in my shorts and t-shirt on top of the concrete picnic table by my tent, arms and legs akimbo, and stared straight up into an endless sky. I listened to warblers, buntings, swallows, sparrows, towhees and the scree of a hawk. I heard no people. Tiny wisps of campfire smoke teased my nostrils. The languid breeze was warm.

I would stay there forever, I decided. I would not solve good Professor Stegner’s problem in a week. I placed the blame elsewhere: in spite of itself, Echo Park was its own worst enemy.

I stretched. My solitude and the grace bestowed upon me was the result of no little denial, to be sure. But this I banished into the silence and the stories that surrounded me. I closed my eyes, and off I went into the eternity of rivers and rock escarpments and lost languages, and the truth of my transience.

…round apples glowing red in the orchard and the rustle of the leaves make me pause to think how many other than human forces affect us… I respond – how?

Virginia Woolf - “A Sketch of the Past”

*See, however, Canyon County Updates (Summer 2021), “BLM Resurrects Dinosaur Area Drilling Proposal.”

A Sense of Place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument

Return of the River – The Glen Canyon Story – May 25 Webcast at 6:00 p.m.

Birch Hollow