Far to our south, mountains rise from the scorched, cactus-specked Sonoran Desert to heights of 8,000 and even 9,000 feet. With moderate temperatures, additional moisture and very different flora and fauna from what's below, these spots seem downright alien amid their surroundings, as if they had drifted from somewhere hundreds of miles farther north.
Naturalists and locals in Arizona have coined a poetic term for peaks like these. They call them "sky islands."For Utahns, few places can evoke that concept better than Tooele County's Stansbury Mountains - and they fit the description quite naturally.
"Of course, at one time the Stansburys were an island - during the Lake Bonneville period," 15,000-plus years ago, notes Keith Clapier, a U.S. Forest Service botanist.
Scientists describing the range's semi-isolated biologic zone, surrounded by a near-barren "sea" of dried salt, mud and stingy gravels, have even compared the Stans-burys and other Great Basin ranges to oceanic islands.
Clapier points to a 1983 paper by researcher Alan C. Taye in the journal Great Basin Naturalist. Taye observed that though the Stansbury range occupies only 0.43 percent of Utah's land area, the mountains harbor representatives of 19.2 percent of the state's 2,575 native species. These range, Clapier adds, from big-tooth maple and serviceberry to cliffrose and currants. "None of the species are endemic" to the Stansbury area, Taye writes, "though several are restricted to somewhat larger areas," including low shrubs and plants from the adjacent Rush and Skull valleys, as well as central Utah and eastern Nevada.
Otherwise, these mountains and the benches at their feet serve as a botanical port of call for species from virtually every point on the compass: the Mojave Desert to the south, the Great Basin to the west, the Snake River basin to the north and, in particular, the Wasatch Mountains to the east. In a great many cases these sky islands are on the edge of a particular plant's range.
Stand on the highest of the Stansburys - 11,031-foot Deseret Peak, centerpiece of a wilderness area sharing that name - on a clear summer day, and the island-like aloofness of the range is amplified. On a clear day, the vistas are dramatic in all directions.
Some 6,000 feet below and to the north, the Great Salt Lake is a beautiful aquamarine blue; Antelope Island and, nearer still, Stansbury Island (a peninsula, for now, attached to the exposed south shore) are summer brown. From a distance, the tan mud flats, moon-white salt flats and sloping alluvial fans - together a patchwork covering hundreds of square miles - appear incredibly stark, deserving of the name "desert." Still, rectangular green patches identify small farmsteads and Dugway's English Village in dry Skull Valley to the west and southwest. Grants-ville and Tooele stand out in the more habitable Tooele Valley to the east. Tooele Army Depot's chemical storage areas and service roads outline geometric patterns on the valley floor.
Other mountains, a hundred or more miles away, delineate the horizon. The Wasatch peaks are visible from the northeast (Ben Lomond) to the southeast (Mount Nebo); the Oquirrhs on the other side of Tooele block out many of the mountains beyond the Salt Lake and Utah valleys, but the still snow-striped summits of Twin Peaks, Lone Peak and elongated Timpanogos can be glimpsed from Deseret. To the west, beyond the low, earth-toned Cedar Mountains, the Deep Creek Mountains float at the Utah-Nevada border.
The Stansburys are named for Capt. Howard Stansbury, who led a U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers expedition in 1849-50 to survey the Great Salt Lake and its environs. Stansbury skirted the northern edge of the range as he circled, counterclockwise, the Great Salt Lake (the first explorer to do so) and used the mountains as a frame of reference in his work. In his fascinating 1852 report to the U.S. Senate, "Exploration of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake," he described the range and its ridges, composed of stratified limestone and shales, sometimes overlaid with conglomerate rock.
"On the eastern side of the mountain, which divides it from Spring Valley" (apparently what we today call Skull Valley), "the same geological appearances occur as were seen yesterday at the point of the range on its western side," he wrote on Nov. 6, 1849. "The limestones were thrown up at a very great angle, and in some places the strata were perpendicular."
In pre-pioneer times, American Indians traveled through the Stansburys. Historian Dale Morgan, in his book "The Great Salt Lake," indicates the small mountains south of the Stansburys - the Onaqui range - may now possess the original name for all mountains in the area south of the Great Salt Lake. "Onaqui" is a Goshute Indian word that refers to salt, so prevalent in the vicinity.
During his expedition to Utah in 1843, Capt. John C. Fremont traveled around the north end of the Stansburys. But the first white person believed to actually visit the higher Deseret Peak area may have been a man known as Hudspeth, a member of the Hastings party headed for California.
The date was July 31, 1846, and Hudspeth, acting as an advance scout, didn't want to skirt the Stansbury Mountains, so after camping at the future site of Grantsville, he followed an American Indian trail up one of the Willow Creeks and ended up in Skull Valley on the west side. He apparently crossed the mountains in the area of Deseret Peak.
Since pioneer times the Stansburys have had their share of human visits and invasions, though certainly not to the degree of ranges to the east.
Traces of mining remain, and there's a canyon called Mining Fork, notes Jerry Medina, Grants-ville's city administrator. "There's an old four-wheel-drive road that goes through there," he says, though no operations are under way now. The Stansburys remain relatively untouched in this regard, especially when compared to the intense excavations in search of copper, silver and gold still in progress in the Oquirrhs just across the way.
Ranching, though still to be found in some parts of the range and below, has been scaled back in many places. Some of the upper valleys still show evidence of this use from the past, including the seeding of alien species of plants palatable to cattle and sheep, the Forest Service's Clapier notes. Water flowing from the Stansbury slopes irrigates farm fields and residential lawns, Medina points out. (Grantsville's drinking water comes from artesian wells.)
But the real value of the Stansburys today seems to be as a place to get away from it all.
Camping, deer hunting, hiking, horse riding - the canyons and high peaks are a magnet. The people of Grantsville below the range are especially blessed in this regard, Medina says. "It's a great recreation source. We have quick access to the mountains."
Historian Eugene E. Campbell, writing about the Tooele area in the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1983, listed a collection of "M-factors" important to the valley's development, from Mormons and miners to migrants and the military. Among the most important to him personally were "the mountains."
"Some of my happiest memories of growing up in Tooele have to do with recreational activities in these mountains," he wrote. "Boy Scout camps, father and son's outings, community celebrations, school picnics, as well as pine nut gatherings and choke-cherry-picking expeditions all centered on the canyons of the Oquirrh and Stans-bury mountains."
With their proximity to Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, the Stansburys - Tooele County's sky islands - offer many more people the same opportunity to escape and to explore.