Hell's Backbone

On Saturday the 14th, we drove a "Utah Scenic Backway".

In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps. (the CCC) built a 38 mile road from Boulder south to Escalante. It was the only road between the two towns but was not passable in winter.  In 1940,  highway 12 opened as a year around road.  The old CCC road is still able to be driven, and is actually in pretty good shape.  We decided to take the road today, starting just below Boulder off of Hwy 12.  We then drove it all the way back south to Escalante.  The road is called "Hell's Backbone" for the tight ridge it is built upon with sheer drop offs on each side, as much as 1,800 ft in places.  The road carries a warning, "Not for the faint of heart".

The road climbs to over 9,200 ft, and travels through pinyon/juniper and ponderosa pine forests for the most part, with a few aspens here and there thrown in for good measure.  We cached along the way and found some interesting and challenging cache locations.  If you zoom in on this picture, you can see me pulling out a cache container at a rather precarious spot.

Along the drive you come upon a gorge where the Escalante river flows beneath.  This required the CCC to build a bridge.  The drop off is 1,500 ft at this point.  The story goes that they were using bulldozers, and they got to a point in the bridge construction that they had to get a big compressor from one side of the gorge to the other, but at that point, there was no bridge.  They topped two pine trees and felled them over the gorge.  One fellow agreed to pull the compressor over the two logs using a bulldozer.  They tied a rope around the fellow as a precaution should the vehicles fall to the depths.  The fellow started over, and everyone on each side of the gorge held their breath and prayed.  The fellow made it.

The old wooden CCC bridge served until cars traveling over it began producing creaking noises within the bridge.  It was then replaced with a more modern bridge, but only recently.  Regardless, the drop offs are the same.  From the bridge you can look down into Box Death Hollow Wilderness area.  That name alone gives me a chill.  We took some pictures here, but it is really difficult to capture the area in a photo.

When we made it back to Escalante, we enjoyed a great BLT sandwich at a local outfitters/restaurant, and then Kathy took a historic walking tour of Escalante, while I hunkered down behind the PC to log caches and work on the blog.

It was windy on the ridge today

:-)