After my family moved to Utah from the Northeast, Nine Mile Canyon was among the first places my brother took my parents and me to introduce us to Utah's desert environs.
He had come to Utah before us to attend school and had taken a summer job with the Bureau of Land Management providing him the opportunity to experience first-hand the beauties of the San Rafael Swell, Nine Mile Canyon and many other places I probably will never get to know as intimately in a lifetime of weekend camping trips.
While mother, hardly the outdoor type, sat in the car off the dirt road leading up the canyon, we hiked up the canyon wall to a ruin my brother was familiar with. I will never forget the excitement of exploring the remnants of one of the Fremont's stone dwellings, examining shards of pottery and looking for arrowheads. I don't remember if we found any, but the joy of the search is something that has stayed with me all my life.
The novelty of rock art to a young child who spent his first years in the green and well-developed world of southern New England is also something I still haven't gotten over. But even on our first trip down Buckhorn Wash in the San Rafael Swell more than 20 years ago, vandals had significantly damaged sites unfortunate enough to be located close to the road.
Names, love notes and even bullets had taken their toll on the panels. It's as though rock art is just ancient graffiti and now it is our turn to replace depictions of bighorn sheep, snakes and figures whose identity remains a mystery with our own much more narcissistic and less imaginative version.
With the addition of more than 700 wells to Nine Mile Canyon and the surrounding area, the old dirt road already straining under heavy truck traffic will have to be improved. Unless it is paved, the dust kicked up by heavy trucks and other visitors taking advantage of road improvements can only accelerate the loss of cultural treasures both known and still hidden within the canyon.
Significant road improvements will also bring vandals whose handiwork is on display elsewhere. While most people would never dream of carving their name or taking a shot at a petroglyph, some small percentage of new visitors will, and more cultural treasures will be permanently damaged.
Time and the forces of nature will eventually erase any indication the Fremont culture ever existed, just as they will inevitably do with our culture. The Fremont and Anasazi should serve as a reminder of just how fragile our existence is.
Instead, we seem determined to erase these reminders in the name of sustaining a way of life with consequences that should be obvious by now even to the most hardened global warming denier or industrialist committed to the notion that he who dies with the most wins.
For me, the dream of eventually taking a grandchild to Nine Mile Canyon and passing on what I experienced is worth far more than 17 days of natural gas for a society already living beyond its means.
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* CRAIG AXFORD has worked as an environmental activist, ran for Congress in 2002 and currently works for the Democratic National Committee as party organization director for Utah.
