On the far eastern edge of the great Colorado Plateau sits a lovely little piece of public desert: the Colorado National Monument. It's 32 square miles of cliffs and spires — big enough to amble about in but small enough that it often gets overlooked.
Utahns especially tend to overlook this monument. After all, we have our own more dramatic sections of plateau. There are more arches in Arches, for example, than there are in the Colorado National Monument. There are more canyons in Canyonlands.
And when Utahns go in search of wilderness, well . . . there are, within a day's drive, many places more remote. Colorado National Monument is bordered by the towns of Fruita and Grand Junction. It's bordered by suburbs and bisected by a highway.
Still, this is a pretty place. And its size and its roads make it accessible. Here is nature designed on a family-friendly scale. In addition to some challenging trails, there are short hikes for short legs. There are also long, easy hikes perfect for those with elderly knees. As for people who don't want to walk at all, the Rim Rock highway offers them many views and vantage points.
Autumn is a good time to visit.
On a warm night in early fall there's no better place to see the stars than Saddlehorn campground. On a sunny day in September or October, a hike in the desert is much more pleasant than it is in July.
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For the most part, when you hike in this monument you will walk through juniper and pinyon. The air is clean in this corner of Colorado. You'll smell the tang of the trees. You'll smell the dry red dirt.
And wherever you look, you'll see cliffs of sedimentary rock — red, white and yellow — the ribboned layers of Chinle, Wingate, Kayenta, Entrada. Their very names sound Southwestern. You'll see lizards and cactus, too, and maybe a cottontail rabbit. If you are lucky you'll also see a hawk and hear the canyon wren.
There is water here, as well. The Colorado River runs through the valley below this mesa. (In fact, Utahns probably come here to run the river more often than they do to hike the mesa.) If you venture deep into the canyons, you'll find pools and cottonwood trees.
The monument was established in 1911, at the urging of an offbeat fellow named John Otto. The park brochures quote from his letters. In May 1907 he wrote:
"I came here last year and found these canyons and they feel like the heart of the world to me. I'm going to stay and build trails and promote this place, because it should be a national park. Some folks think I'm crazy but I want to see this scenery opened up to all people. I'm a straight American. Do your best for the West. The best for the world. The new day, get it going."
Boostingly yours, John Otto.
And Otto did labor. After the monument became official, he was paid $1 a month to be the custodian. His promotions continued. He brought in bison. He built a road, which he called the Serpentine. His letters sound relentlessly joyful ("Do your best for the West!"), yet at the same time he sought to bring more tourists to the mesa, Otto seemed to have an increasingly difficult time getting along with people.
He married one spring, but by fall his wife had left him. She wrote to her family in the East, "I could not live with a man to whom even a cabin was an encumbrance. He wanted to live in tents, or without tents, outdoors."
In February 1927, Otto wrote, "The National Park Service doesn't want me as custodian any more since I decided to go into politics. Seems I can't do both at the same time. I have no more tact than a bull going through a fence, I admit all that. But I'm living with my bulls in the monument still, taking care of the highest class Park Project in all Creation."
He vowed to make the best of the situation — but within a few years, he was gone. Otto moved to California and never came back.
In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a new highway. In 1983, Park Service managers decided the bison were not really canyon creatures and took them back to the Plains. John Otto's most lasting contribution to the monument are his words, "These canyons feel like the heart of the world to me."
Otto's words will come back to you if you hike Ute Canyon. And fall, when the cottonwoods are yellow against the steep red walls, is probably the best time to make that hike.
You approach Ute Canyon by a steep descent from Rim Rock Drive. Then it's a seven-mile trail along a streambed. The trail ends at a funky formation called Liberty Cap. To leave Ute Canyon, you have a choice of three routes. You may hike back up to the road — via the Ute Canyon or Liberty Cap trails — or you can walk a few miles downhill and end up outside the park, in a subdivision, where you could have left a car or a bicycle — thus making your hike a whole lot shorter.
Otto never would have envisioned a community so close to his beloved wilderness. He didn't stick around long enough to see the access get easy.
These days if you ask a ranger to recommend an easy hike, he or she might suggest starting from the subdivisions and hiking into the canyons from below. If you want to hike to Independence Rock, for example, you can avoid the steepest part if you start from the downhill side of the Monument Canyon Trail.
To find the lower trailhead, drive east on Highway 340 (also called the Broadway/Redlands Road) past the park's west entrance to the point where you see mile marker number 5. Look to your right and you'll spot a small gravel parking lot. The Monument Canyon Trail borders the fence, which borders the subdivision, but eventually you'll make your way out of the neighborhood and into the park and up a trail to Independence Monument. This hike is less than six miles round trip and can easily be done in a morning or an afternoon, leaving half the day for other explorations.
If you spend half a day there, in the northwest end of the monument, you may wish to spend the other half of the day doing short hikes in the southeast section. Devil's Kitchen and the Serpent's Trail are two good possibilities.
In the space of about a mile, the Devil's Kitchen trail descends then climbs steeply. Elementary age children would enjoy the scramble and the search for concrete cones that mark the trail.
The Serpent's Trail, which begins just across the road from Devil's Kitchen, is impossible to miss. It was, 70 years ago, John Otto's Serpentine Road.
Now his road has been allowed to crumble. The cactus are slowly coming back along its edges. Still, it's a smooth hike.
About halfway up the two-mile route, as you approach an overlook, you can't help but think of the man who piled the rock walls and smoothed the dirt and who wanted so desperately to bring people to this place.
You look over the edge of Otto's road, and below, in his beloved canyons, you see the Rim Rock highway. Even on a fall afternoon in the middle of the week, there is traffic on that road. Behind you, of course, is the town of Fruita. Beyond lies Grand Junction, with its one tall building shining white in the sun.
You can't help but wonder if the boosterish side of Otto's soul would have celebrated all this. Was there a limit to how many people he hoped to bring in? Would he be glad the monument is, relatively speaking, still a little bit overlooked?
E-mail: susan@desnews.com