Tavaputs Ranch » I know where God lives. I'll tell you but you have to promise not to bug him. My wife and I visited last week and we're still not over it.

With friends Alan and Karen Green of Price, we spent two days at Tavaputs Ranch in eastern Utah.

Things did not begin well. We set off from Price in a truck and a rainstorm. Because he knew how to get from one axle-cracking mud hole to the next, Alan drove. It took nearly three hours to cover 30 miles.

Tavaputs Ranch sits on the lip of Rock Creek Canyon, which feeds into a dizzying set of geological turns ending in Desolation Canyon about half a mile away as the crow flies and two miles straight down as a fool falls. I stayed away from the edge.

In addition to cows, Tavaputs Ranch also dabbles in tourists. This early in the season, the Greens and Kirbys were the only ones. We met Jeanie Jensen, owner, operator and cook.

Later, the sky cleared and Jeanie's husband Butch arrived. He took us on a drive around the plateau. We drove through sage, pinion and aspen, coming upon wildlife around every bend -- bucks in velvet, and elk.

When one doe refused to shoot away, we stopped and waited. After a minute, a newborn fawn wobbled to its feet and followed its mother.

For all their niceness, Jeanie and assistant cook Mandy Jessen kept trying to kill us. Lunch was a hamburger that, no lie, weighed 8 pounds. Dinner was a steak the

Advertisement
size of a mattress. I felt like a tick.

All good things end unless you're at Tavaputs. When it was time to turn in, I was exhausted. I figured sleep would come with the subtlety of being knocked unconscious, but the ranch wasn't finished with me.

The head of my bed was a window overlooking the canyon. At first, there was nothing to see except dark trees. Then Butch shut down the generator. In the sudden blackness, the sky over the ranch burned.

I couldn't sleep. In the crystalline atmosphere of 10,000 feet, the universe was a freeway of shooting stars, comets and satellites. Vertigo set in.

Over on the next ridge, lights glittered from another ranch. Apparently, we weren't that far from civilization after all. I was disappointed until learning that the "ranch on the next ridge" was Vernal, nearly 80 miles away.

Before dawn, a fingernail moon lifted along with the love affair of Venus and Mars. I surrendered and went out to watch the sun come up over Desolation Canyon: a peek from a dragon's eye that bled the canyon red and gold.

After breakfast, it was time to leave. Butch suggested Alan take us down through Sheep Canyon. Butch had spent the previous day working on the road and said it was greatly improved.

Apparently, it's a relative concept. To ranch people, the road probably resembles a pleasant country lane wending its way to the bottom of a canyon. Butch's "improved" road looked more to me as if Shrek got drunk and tried to find his way home after dark.

Back home in Salt Lake, Tavaputs stayed with me. It's a good thing, too. The steaks here aren't as big, and I can only see half a dozen stars from my porch.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com.