UTAH IN 125 WORDS

To celebrate Utah’s 125th anniversary, the Utah Department of Heritage & Arts invited writers to capture a telling Utah story in 125 words. I love these Zen exercises in concise writing, so I submitted a fistful of possibilities. The discerning editor, Ellen Weist, chose “Shoreline Trail, Solstice,” for the online collection. Here’s my full submission — celebrating my two home territories, the Wasatch Front and the redrock canyons.

Happy anniversary Utah, this odd and wonderful place!

A CHORUS OF MOUNTAINS

The spine of the Wasatch Range swings from one mountain to the next in graceful curves, a loose aggregation of mountain blocks, each sliced off in facets by faults and isolated as massifs by canyons and rivers. Clusters of peaks stand as small choruses — soloists, trios, sometimes a half dozen peaks rounding behind a valley.

You pass into the mountains with a single exhilarating footstep. Sagebrush to forest, water to rock, basin to range, valley to peak. In this uniquely western geography, public land and designated wilderness lie literally just over the backyard fence.

Once you take that stride, you enter a zone of unpredictability. You leave the familiar, safe cocoons of car, house, office and give yourself to the intimate potency of the mountains.

A SINGLE STEP

With a single step, we leave the city and enter the mountains, exchanging pavement for dirt, bluegrass for oak thickets, tame for wild. Winter ends with glacier lilies. Soon, arrowleaf balsamroot covers the hillsides. Next, blue lupine mixes in, and the yellow balsamroot fade. Two more flashy yellow flowers lead the next waves of bloom, mule’s ears and then, arnica.

The Shoreline Trail brings wildness into our lives. This is the turn where the rattlesnake lay coiled beneath an oak. This is the slope that harbored two moose last winter. This is the south-facing ridge where spiky and elegant horned lizards nest. In this gully, tarantulas methodically cross the ruts of the trail. This is the thicket where our friend ran past a mountain lion.

SHORELINE TRAIL, SOLSTICE

Winter solstice, the end and the beginning. I walk the Shoreline Trail at sunset — to an easily reached knoll with a commanding view. This perch on the trail, where desert and mountains have equal weight, seems perfect to witness the year’s passing.

The sun drops westward, an orange ball over blue distance, closer and closer to the Great Salt Lake and its islands and the Great Basin mountain ranges beyond. At my feet, the valley sweeps away in snow-covered white. Alpenglow flushes the peaks of the Wasatch. The sun touches the horizon — out toward Nevada — then slips away.

I luxuriate in the moment, the place and the passage that mark our lives with beauty and grace and tie us to the rollicking cycles of Earth.

SUNRISE IN TORREY

Sunrise hits the top of the Cockscomb, a brilliant white-gold flare moving across the Navajo Sandstone cliff. I’m partial to these monumental, transcendent stripes: red Moenkopi ledges in the foreground, piñon-green hills and mesas midground, then the sea-monster ridge of the Cockscomb spotlit by shafts of sunlight from the Fresnel lens of moving clouds. The green-black mountain rises beyond as backdrop and finally gives way to blue sky, with strokes of cloud swashed across the firmament.

My predilection for stripes matches the landscape of Capitol Reef — the long, rolling cliff face of the reef, its monoclinal tilt eroded in hogbacks and ridges, color by color, formation by rock formation, running across the horizon in what the Paiutes call a “sleeping rainbow” for a hundred-plus miles.

SPRING CANYON SUNSHOWER

In Spring Canyon, a nine-mile wander through the Waterpocket Fold, slickrock surrounds us as we thread the cliffs. We lose ourselves in the springwater surprise of a pool, reflecting golden stone. Benign clouds sail across the blue stripe of sky, framed by canyon walls.

Seven miles in, thunder rolls downcanyon. Raindrops fall one by one, increasing to a scatter, a sprinkle, each drop diving through the oven of summer air held between the desert-varnished walls.

Though the clouds have turned moody, they haven’t filled the sky. They’re erratic, here and there. And so our rainshower is also a sunshower. Thrilled, we look up between sandstone towers into a brilliantly backlit sky, following each raindrop — sunstruck, gleaming, jewellike — as it falls from sky to canyon floor.

As writer, editor, and photographer, Stephen Trimble has published 25 award-winning books during 45 years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West. His most recent book is The Capitol Reef Reader. Trimble makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. www.stephentrimble.net @stephentrimblephoto