A Day in the Life of Laurel Hagen

July 25, 2007

By Laurel Hagen

July 26, 2007. Drove into Dinosaur, under thunderclouds throwing fantastic shadows over Split Mountain. I stopped at the Green River takeout to dunk my head in the cool water. A group of boaters were de-rigging at the sandy ramp, folding yellow cataraft tubes and drinking beer. Fiddle music was pouring out of a pickup truck, and the slow notes echoed across the river, bouncing off the sheer wall of Navajo sandstone and interweaving into a repeating symphony, undercut by the percussion of moving water. Water and light and leaves and stone: perfect.

I drove back out to find a place to sleep, to be alone under the stars and let the dogs run around. I found a little dirt road leading up a hillside and up a rocky ridge. I followed it to where it split into multiple tracks spreading over the top of the ridge, and stopped. The view was spectacular: the fantastically eroded cliffs of Split Mountain, the shining curve of the Green River, and a lateral twinkle on one plateau that I thought must be Vernal. The clouds gathered thick overhead, providing blessed shade and the promise of rain. And the price was right: BLM land, open and free. No one else around, no RV generators or people revving motors or yelling at their kids.

I walked around the ridge to find a good spot to spend the evening, and stumbled into a number of plastic cups and bottles, a beer can or two, some broken Styrofoam, and the prize: used toilet paper. Yay. This is the problem with a place that¹s free and remote‹some people are jerks with it.

Here, dirt bike tracks wound a looping slalom between the pinyon trees, and someone on an ATV had crushed two juniper seedlings while driving donuts in the cryptobiotic soil. I heard the faint buzz of a motor and walked to the edge of an outcrop: a lone man on an ATV had appeared from behind a ridge and was kicking up a red dust plume two hundred feet below me. All around that little valley were tire tracks: sets of tracks too narrow for a jeep, indicating ATVs; single tracks too thick for bicycles, meaning dirt bikes.

This was one of the places that had been chosen as a play area for OFF-ROAD VEHICLEs.

There are a lot of them. I find these little pockets of destruction a lot when I travel in Utah: there¹s Factory Butte, Kane Canyon, Providence Creek, Butler Wash, the old CCC highway. This is the thing that bothers me most about my job, I think: constantly finding the visceral evidence of someone¹s disrespect, ignorance, or casual cruelty. If so many people can treat the land this way, just for fun, and not see what¹s wrong with it, then what chance does the human species have of making a good life on our planet?

I pulled my camp chair out of the car and walked over to the rim, irritable. It’s easier to be angry than sad, or afraid. So I threw pebbles off the cliff, and spit sunflower shells aggressively into a cup. The evening progressed, and the light slanted slowly through gaps in the cloud. A long, grey scarf of rain glowed pink in the sunset. The water looked to be hitting right at the takeout ramp. I wished it would come over to me. I rolled myself in a sheet, the moon shining faintly in the east, and tried to sleep.
The smell of rain slapped over the ridge on a hot wind, pelting my mattress pad with sand.

Next morning: the purpose of this leg of my trip. I was meeting with, as far as I knew, the only conservation activist group in this end of Utah. In a wood-paneled living room guarded by a set of watchful dogs, we mulled over maps and talked about the collapse of the local trails committee (the County Commission thought that the results of the coalition process weren¹t motor-sport-oriented enough).

As Wildlands CPR’s new Utah ORV Coordinator, I’ve been holding similar meetings around the state to discuss the Forest Service Travel Planning process. All the FS offices have to put an end to widespread cross-country travel and print new official travel maps showing which routes are open to motorized use. Off-roaders are applying lot of pressure to keep old logging and mining roads open for recreational use, and they are also pushing for large trail systems that spread motor tourism through the mountains. I’m working with local activists around the state, trying to help them introduce a little ecological sanity into local policymaking.

The group I talked with that day has been around for years, working on the Uinta Mountains and their local rivers and canyons. In an area with the highest percentage of off-road vehicle riders in the state, they have to operate carefully, but they’ve been persistent, and they love their trails. One of them took me up his favorite canyon, Dry Fork, just as the rain broke overhead. It was delicious: aspens and firs growing inside castled sandstone walls, dripping thickets and soft dark soil. Their group had worked to make sure that this old wagon track was preserved as a hiking trail. My guide showed me his favorite rock-and-tree combo. “I’ve been meaning to come out here some day and just sit for hours, not do anything, just watch the day go by,” he said.

This is the impulse that it is my job to nurture: this desire to protect the places you love, to hold yourself responsible for something without owning it, to enjoy it without having to leave your mark on it. It¹s the human impulse of selfishness used in the best way. We walked back down the canyon through the rich smell of rain, talking and planning. There is something we can do, and I’m here, doing it. I drove away to find my next campsite, the next day¹s meeting, with a fuller and lighter heart.