Despite mythic fame as a hobo Eden - one said to be blessed with lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings and handouts grow on bushes - central Utah's fabled Big Rock Candy Mountain has witnessed times both sweet and rocky.
Mostly the latter in recent years.Glen Overton believes, however, that the future for the real-life geologic curiosity and its namesake resort is, as "Haywire Mac" suggested in a hundred-year-old folk tune, "fair and bright."
A few summers ago the newspaper headline read: "Big Rock Candy Mountain on sale for a song." Well, certainly not a song on the cheap: just under a half-million dollars.
In mid-1995 the Marysvale Canyon property - a portion of the banana-split-and-fudge-sundae mountain, a small roadside motel and rental cabins beside the Sevier River, a cafe, a gift shop and a rock shop - was tied up by liens and property-line squabbles and eventually put up for bid in federal bankruptcy court.
Overton, president and managing partner of the Provo-based Zion Management and Development Corp., which operates motels and hotels in St. George, Utah Valley and Salt Lake City, says he and his partners decided to dive into the lemonade-spring resort business "for the sheer love of restoring it and getting it back on its feet." And to add to the mix of their company's Utah lodging business, of course.
Overton himself grew up in Fillmore, relatively nearby but on the sunset side of the mountain range, "so I've always been familiar with it." And he admires Marysvale Canyon, through which twine the Sevier River and U.S. 89. Once upon a time, a rail spur passed this way as well, linking northern and southern Utah, and bringing Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock through.
"Haywire Mac," then a young brakeman on the short-line railroad through colorful Marysvale Canyon, wrote his "In the Big Rock-Candy Mountains" (there are apparently several versions, with varying lyrics) in 1897. Tex Ritter, Burl Ives and the Brothers Four performed on the best-known recordings of it.
Most traffic today swings to the interstates to the north and west, so this many-hued corridor "is one of the forgotten canyons of Utah," Overton says. For one thing, "it has that beautiful stream - one of our carpenters caught a German brown (trout) right behind the cabins. You come up that little stretch of road there and find eagles, and we've seen cougar and bear there. It's just a little chunk that people don't see any more because of I-15."
The canyon resort beside the fabled mountain was developed in the 1930s by Pratt and Ethel Seegmiller and Ben and LaRue Seegmiller Dieringer, and later by John and Gloria Gledhill and their family.
Today, a friendly plywood character set up beside the main entrance exclaims, "Howdy pardner, a Big Rock Candy Mountain welcome!" A mileage post, a la "M*A*S*H" or your childhood summer camp, advertises the resort's strategic placement midway between the metropolitan Wasatch Front and southern Utah's national parks and playgrounds. "190 Miles," it says, between two arrows, the one on top pointing to "Lake Powell," the one below to "Salt Lake City." Another says "Butch Cassidy's boyhood home, 20 miles," directing the curious southward.
The whole setting, says Overton, "is really Old Utah - there are few other places like it, maybe five resorts." And the locale is rich in history. Cassidy lived just down the road and was naturally and criminally inclined toward the railroad. Zane Grey, best known for "Riders of the Purple Sage," did some writing in Marysvale and Kanab, he says. Some 2,500 people lived near and worked for the Kimberly gold mine in the mountains above the resort from about 1915 to 1925.
"So Marysvale, which is just up the street, was both a mining town and a railroad town," Overton notes. "It was probably a lot like Park City was a hundred years ago, just not by a major metropolitan area."
After purchasing the resort, the partnership pumped another million dollars into it, Overton says, putting in new water, sewer and electric systems, and gutting and renovating the half-century-old cabins and the family motel and shops.
It reopened for Memorial Day weekend and business remained good through the summer, says manager Marty Sundgren. Then "we did pretty well with the deer hunters. Now it looks like it's going to slow down for the season."
The revitalized roadside stop includes a small restaurant and a candy shop stocked with, appropriately enough, rock candy as well as tempting taffy and giant speckled jawbreakers. One table displays mouthwatering locally made fudge, at $1 a portion, in such varieties as cherry-chocolate chip, chocolate English toffee and cream cheese without nuts.
The resort rents ATVs to those interested in scooting across the river and heading into the eastern hills. Hourlong raft trips on the Sevier are available, with reservations, from Memorial Day into September. Next year there'll be horseback riding, as well as a fishing pond and petting zoo for the kids, with raccoons, birds, pygmy pigs and fainting goats ("You clap your hands and they drop over," Overton says).
For years the mineral-laced "lemon bitters" from the springs were bottled and sold all over the world as a medicinal cure for various ailments. Big Rock Candy Mountain is not presently selling the natural brew, but a Phoenix herbal company has shown an interest. And, Overton says, another idea is to create a heated pool so folks can bathe in the mineral waters.
Big Rock Candy Mountain's accommodations have been nicely updated. In addition to numbers, the motel rooms sport names, including Peppermint, Chocolate Fudge and Cotton Candy. The cabins, in a grassy area beside the Sevier River (and "Huck's Fishin' Hole" - Huckleberry Finn seems to have wandered far from the Mississippi), also have names, tied either to Mac's ditty or to the region's legend and lore. There's the Bluebird and the D&RGW, the Kimberly and Butch Cassidy, the Sundancer and Hole in the Wall.
Overton envisions the spot as a haven for vacationing families and reunions; a stopover for tour buses, and, with the addition of a meeting area and 30 more rooms, a conference center for businesses. People could meet in the morning "and do some bonding in the afternoon," he says - ride horses, go hiking, get in a golf game in Richfield or go fishing at Fish Lake, which he describes as "a miniature Lake Tahoe" an hour away.
"They've really done a lot of renovating and rebuilding," Sundgren says. "We're still working to get it where we want it, but it's comfortable."
Besides candy, the gift shop displays all manner of postcards, Western mementos - and a bucket stocked with reproductions of the sheet music, with ukelele accompaniment, for Harry McClintock's folk song.
Although today's FDA and USDA might not approve, the railroad man surely did make Big Rock Candy Mountain sound like an appealing respite, for hobos and other dreamers:
There's the lake of stew
And of whiskey too,
You can paddle all around them
In a big canoe,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.