Escalante » Even today it's a rugged road from here southeast to where 19th-century Mormon pioneers spent a winter blasting into the canyon to descend to the Colorado River.
Visitors without four-wheel drive are advised to forget about visiting the historic Hole in the Rock, 70 miles across a bumpy plain, and even those with such vehicles are cautioned when rain or snow is in the forecast.
Yet the place where church-directed settlers proved their mettle en route from Parowan to the southeastern Utah wilderness is one of this community's proudest trophies, and dedicated natives have spent nearly two decades trying to build a museum in town.
The state has helped, first with $625,000 for a parking lot, pavilion and information kiosks and now with a Senate resolution that lends moral support as the locals seek foundation and government grants for a building. The LDS Church donated land on a rise by Highway 12 on the east end of town.
"It is the top story of settling the West," said Sherree Roundy, a board member with the Escalante Heritage/Hole in the Rock Center, "the most difficult" wagon train.
Roundy and her husband, unofficial town historian Jerry, live on a bluff overlooking the valley where nearly 250 men, women and children passed in 1879 on their way to the canyon and, eventually, San Juan County on the other side. Church scouting groups had determined it was a quicker route than across the mountains through Carbon County, and a safer one than looping south through Arizona Navajo country.
But the notch they had found in the canyon rim wasn't wide enough for horses and wagons, and a planned six-week autumn migration became six months as the pioneers blasted rock with dynamite. They steadied the wagons with ropes down the steep grades, said Jerry Roundy, author of the local history Advised Them to Call the Place Escalante , and finally reached the river at the modern-day site of Lake Powell.
"What they didn't realize was the terrain on the other side was much worse than on this side," he said. They had to cut a path through pinyon junipers, and much of the area is undulating rock.
Eventually the pioneers made it to the area that the church wanted them to colonize, and for a time they used the trail back to Escalante to resupply there. Jerry Roundy figures it's one of the Old West's best-preserved wagon trails, both because of the blasted notch itself and the wagon ruts that still are visible on the rock.
Sen. Dennis Stowell, R-Parowan, sponsored SJR1 in support of the group's museum efforts, and last week the Senate passed it 26-0. Among the reasons listed in the legislation: During "their six-month journey, the San Juan colonizers were tempered like fine steel for the formidable task of nurturing relations with the Native Americans, tilling the land, and establishing law and order."
Stowell also noted that the trail was Utah's first publicly funded east-west road, having received money from the Legislature for the blasting.
The resolution offers no money; just a blessing. But the museum organizers -- several of them from a group of friends who went to high school here in the late 1940s -- think it's just what they need to attract serious donations. Even before this, they got a $125,000 planning grant and $500,000 for construction from UDOT, using the same kind of federal road-enhancement funds that pay for other historic turnouts and for bike routes.
The group is about to put the museum's first phase, minus a hoped-for building with theater, out to bid.
Sen. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem, was one of the legislation's most enthusiastic backers. She said her grandfather, Albert Lyman, was the wagon train's last survivor until he died during her college years. His mother had carried him down through Hole in the Rock as a baby.
"Think if you were a woman in a long skirt and bad shoes carrying a baby," Dayton marveled. She has hiked the trail herself, she said, and had difficulty even without a baby in hand. "I was impressed that I kept myself upright."
