Pipe Spring

Posted on October 16, 2007 in Photos Vacation Fall 2007

The wind made us change all kinds of plans: on our last day on the Arizona Strip, we avoided visiting Coral Pink Sand Dunes because I did not want the lens of my camera sandblasted. Instead, we sneaked a peek at Pliggytown* USA (aka Colorado City, Arizona) and visited a national monument meant to interpret the region’s Mormon and Paiute history.

Pipe Spring National Monument exists mostly to fill the space between Grand Canyon National Park and Zion National Park — a place where tourists could pull out for a bit of history on a plot of land big enough for forty acres and a mule. The main feature is an old Mormon “fort” — more of a ranch house with gunslits carved into the sandstone walls.

We came here for the history, but up on the Ridge Trail I found views that fascinated me. Miles of unbroken sage prairie with hints of old trails and roads. A wedge of my heritage came out of districts such as this — around Richfield, Utah — where my polygamist ancestor Jorgen Smith lived with his three wives. Pipe Spring was a place where polygamists scattered their wives: no one big happy family lived here, but isolated sister-wives hid here and helped with the raising of church cattle and passing on telegraph messages.

Everywhere there were signs of hard work: butter and cheese were churned out daily. Men minded the herds. One sister-wife kept her ear to the telegraph wire and, for her pains, was rewarded with her own bedroom. There were fields of crops and grapes. And, in the evening, when all other chores were finished, the women worked at needlepoint and the men whittled.

We went back twice in a day, the first time to take the tour of the fort (which was blessedly free of any effort by the Mormon Church to evangelize) and then, GPS in hand, to map the Ridge Trail. I spoke at length with a park ranger who gleaned what she could from my tales of my polygamist ancestors and told me about the problems the park had in keeping its livestock.

It was a day when no rain fell, only the shadows of clouds.

We wrapped up our day with a meal at Houston’s Trail’s End in Kanab, Utah, a suitable inn for our last day at the foot of the [[Grand Staircase]].

*Polygamist Town

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