Out here, no one thinks twice about ghost towns, those bleached specters that rise in the desert, screen doors slapping in the wind. Boom-bust cycles, after all, have defined the American West. Folks in these parts regard such fluctuations with a near-Zen acceptance.
So when the uranium processing plant in Moab folded in the early ’80s, many assumed the town would become another Cisco, the community an hour’s drive up the Colorado River that faded like a daguerreotype after Interstate Highway 70 bypassed it. Today, Cisco is best known as the set location where Geena Davis blew up a sexist truck driver’s rig in the movie “Thelma and Louise.”
But Moab refused the death rattle. Instead, it performed the classic American act of reinvention. For starters, the Colorado courses through it. Arches National Park, whose iconic Delicate Arch graces everything from postage stamps to license plates, is a five-minute drive. And the canyonlands of southern Utah, arguably the most spectacular landscape in the United States, surround it.
So Moab transformed itself into a mecca for river rafters and, later, mountain bikers from all over the world who came to herniate themselves on the endless expanse of “slick rock,” the smooth canyon stone of the area. They also introduced dreadlocks, lip rings and contraband to the conservative Mormon community. This invasion produced a wonderful melange of young hard-bodies in North Face gear and rawboned farmers in straw Stetsons.
Increasingly, Moab became a magnet for thousands of lunatics prone to physical torture. First there was the legendary Slick Rock Trail, 12 brutal miles of stone and sand laid out 30 years ago for motorbikes. Then came the Canyonlands Fat Tire Festival, an annual bash for biking addicts that was 15 years old in 1998. And who can forget the 24 Hours of Moab race, a Le Mans-style exercise in exhaustion held around the clock in spectacular desert surroundings?
For terror on water, there is always Cataract Canyon leading to Lake Powell. This offers Class 5 whitewater (Class 6 is navigable only by fish). Slightly less scary is Westwater Canyon above Cisco with Class 4 rapids. Both are on the mighty Colorado.
“Moab isn’t a town,” wrote Lee Benson of the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. “It’s an aerobic sport.”
Hollywood, meanwhile, has been shooting movies in the area since John Ford discovered Monument Valley to the south half a century ago. Parts of 100 films have been made in the canyonlands. More recently, television sponsors grew enamored with Moab as mountain biking morphed into a religion. Schwinn even named one of its fat tire models after the place.
Moab, in short, became seriously hot.
Today, the place teems with tawny young outdoor types who don’t yet know just how complicated life can get. They ride the seasonal thermals at winter ski areas and summer river and bike towns, their Cannondale bikes permanent fixtures on the roofs of their SUVs. The planets in their galaxy have names like Durango, Alta, Crested Butte and Taos.
Some follow this circuit for a few years after college and return to the fold through law school or environmental biology. Others find themselves approaching 40 still guiding young portfolio managers through slick rock or white water. They profess no love of the mainstream and remain refugees from reality, eschewing 9-to-5 jobs and health insurance.
More recently, Moab has been pushing culture as well. For the past five years, it has had its own film festival. Sundance it is not, but the program is growing. “We got a call last week from Berlin,” one of the organizers crowed recently. And for the last seven years, the town of 4,300 has mounted a classical music festival. Moab even has a decent book store, Back of Beyond, named from the writing of Edward Abbey, the environmental icon who took no prisoners in his fight to protect the back country of Utah and Arizona.
So what’s going on here? Are we looking at another Telluride, Colo., in the making?
Not a chance. Moab is too tacky. Its main street is littered with fast-food outlets, cheap Indian jewelry and T-shirt shops, and cinderblock motels. The inevitable “slick rock” name inflation now includes the Slick Rock Cafe, the Slick Rock Building and the Slick Rock Cinemas.
Hollywood wouldn’t go near the place except to shoot movies. Moab offers nothing like Robert Redford’s chic eatery, Zoom, in Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival and the upcoming Olympic games. There are no upscale hotels for agents dressed for funerals and no Gulfstreams gleaming in its Waldo Pepper-sized airport.
Moab’s summer temperature, which routinely tops 100 degrees, is suitable for mad dogs and Englishmen, not emigres from Santa Monica, Calif., or the Hamptons. There exists no ski area to transform the place into a year-round affair like Sun Valley or Aspen, Colo. And it is a monumental schlep to reach by car. So whatever else happens, Moab will never be precious. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, like countless other Western towns, it is growing ugly fast. Telluride, like Santa Fe and Aspen, is too expensive to get ugly. But absent large money, the West succumbs to its pathological obeisance to individual rights at the expense of everything else. Along with its raw muscle and breathtaking beauty comes a relentless rejection of coherent growth. The mere thought of zoning is considered as heinous as horse thievery.
So towns out here get bigger in one of two ways. Places like Moab grow inexorably toward mayhem. Others, like Redford’s Sundance ski resort and film institute near Provo, are tightly controlled by a few people with power and money. There appears to be no middle ground. Redford has been criticized for his iron-fisted control over Sundance, and indeed nothing happens there without his approval. But his absolute monarchy remains a far better option than the development-devouring Park City and its environs, and the awful sprawl south of Salt Lake.
Sprawl is shocking out here because of the breathtaking beauty it ruins.
Many Moab lefties read much into the disappearance in 1999 of the Star Diner, a kitschy place that epitomized the local counterculture. It attracted a loopy clientele who came for the vegetarian confections made by the owner, who sang scat in the kitchen as he cooked. The Star was pure Moab. No longer. The owner sold out this spring. To Burger King.
“What happened to the Star Diner is a real metaphor for what’s happening to Moab, and that story is being repeated all over the West,” says Jim Stiles, owner of The Zephyr, the town’s spirited alternative paper whose credo reads, “All the news that causes fits.” “Moab is no longer a community. It has lost its soul.”
Also troubling is a new chairlift that opened this spring west of town whisking flaccid rubberneckers up to the canyon rim for the view. A second is on the drawing boards, complete with a restaurant slated for the top. Such sedentary tourism is anathema to the hard-body culture here.
Critics of Stiles’ uncompromising stands deny that Moab has gone to the dogs. What’s more, they say, the aesthetics of its main drag pale in importance next to the beauty of its surroundings. The town has always been a staging area from which outdoor people depart on foot, by Jeep, bike or raft for adventure. It is in the back country that the Moab experience is gauged, they argue, not in the Star Diner.
Perhaps. But the back country is beginning to resemble an expressway. Moab had a million visitors in 1998. More than 850,000 people visited Arches National Park alone, effectively double the 468,000 in 1987. Europeans come in droves. The Germans and French in particular have a weird affinity with the American West, perhaps because they have never seen anything like it.
So Moab sheds more of its charm each year as it swells with outlanders. Purists fear for its future, and for good reason. All is not lost yet — it’s too damned beautiful for total ruination — but the signs aren’t encouraging.
One would do well, then, to remember the seditious quote from Edward Abbey that Jim Stiles runs on his editorial page to reaffirm the soul of the canyonlands. It reads: “Throw a rock at something big and glassy. What have you got to lose?”
