Days and Nights in the Great Basin

Into the Wasatch. For my purpose, when I leave western Wyoming and cross into Utah, the Wasatch Range marks the beginning of the Great Basin, the broad swale of mostly arid land that extends to the Sierra Nevada. And is, in fact, full of life.

It is now early August and the Wasatch Mountains are a soft shade of green, broken by dark rock.

At the eastern edge of the Weber River is a narrow fresh stream, roiling between its sharp banks and bordered by phlox. The banks of the Weber are picketed with many quaking aspen and box elder. Maples shimmer in the breezes that wind along the canyon bottom where you find boulders embedded.

A historical marker appears in Hennefer. The site is quiet at twilight, except for some truck traffic that presses along the street where I stop for coffee.

When I step outside, daylight has left the street so suddenly that only the mass of things can be seen. Not their depth or outline but only the dark substance that requires light to reveal its form. And when night falls the noise of the traffic is astonishing. All sounds seem louder. Probably because hearing becomes more acute, essential in the dark. Trucks thunder along while a motorcycle, forced to slow down, growls with impatience. An owl shrieks. Far off a siren wails. Night hones the edge of every sound.

It was in August 1846 that the Donner Party camped near here for a week after finding not Lansford Hastings, who had promised to guide them across the Wasatch, but the note he left when he had gone on without them. Then they headed southwest and did not “blaze a trail,” but for two weeks had to hack out a useful one—a pathway over which they could lift, haul, shove, and draw their rattling wagons and their limping weary stock—removing boulders and brush, forming, in desperate haste, that rugged but just-passable road. In future years, with improvements from many hands, their route proved helpful to Mormons, forty-niners, the Pony Express, and the Overland Stage.

At the outset they turned toward what looked like one of the two most accessible ravines.

Today, once you enter the Wasatch, hiking toward Big Mountain, this route looks impossible to travel as a wagon party, with many trees needing to be cut. And the canyon bottoms are sharp and narrow, but for a few broad grassy meadows. Each is a rare opening here. Red stone and red soil border a canyon. Elsewhere in the Wasatch, whenever I come upon an outcrop of dark rock, it’s likely to be basalt. And very old—the same ocean-bed rock that lines much of our Pacific Coast.

Cold air settles on Big Mountain in the daytime. But down in the canyons the temperature is moderate.

The sky is often cloudy at this time of year. Sprinkling just now.

These slopes receive frequent drizzles, this one lasts more than five hours. Clearing at twilight. Brief birdsong and a rare clear sky. I’ll sleep in the car tonight.

Climbing hurts my back. It’s easier to keep advancing with short steps around the side of the slope than to stop; stopping allows the dull ache to recede. But then it returns, pulsing. After I relax, a spasm follows. A sudden blow that strikes low on my backbone, and each time the pain feels stronger than before. I’d like to stop for a long while but unexpectedly I find goldenrod here. Then thick bushes. What else? Stickers in the grass showing, in midsummer, white seeds that still hold a little light. And, farther up, the dark towering fir trees. After yesterday’s drizzle they appear much darker today.

For the first emigrants hacking their way through the Wasatch, the route after Echo Canyon and the Weber River Valley was as follows: Little East Canyon Creek to Bossman Creek (in East Canyon) to Big Mountain (offering the first view of the level Salt Lake area that lies ahead) to Farley’s Canyon (fewer trees to be trimmed for passage...