Echoes from the Road: Mokee Dugway
Scott August's
journal from the road
while on tour through the Southwest.
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Mokee Dugway. The name echoed inside my head. Every time I mentioned this part of my trip to anyone that had been to the area, it seemed that all they could talk about was the Mokee Dugway, a dirt part of Utah Hwy. 261. Comments varied. To some the road was the most scary, rough, wash-boarded, perilous dirt road they'd ever been on. To others the view was breathtaking while the road was an after thought. "Like being on the edge of the world" or "You can see forever" they would say. Either way I was getting a picture in my head of a one-lane dirt road that clings 1,000 feet up as it winds down the cliffs at the southern end of Cedar Mesa. A Dugway is a road or trail that is cut out of a high land form or a path scraped out of a hillside. Mokee is most likely a alternate spelling of Moki, which was a local name for the Ancestral Puebloean or Anasazi. I left Natural Bridges and head south across the Mesa top. The road stretched out like a ribbon across a gently rolling landscape. Piñon and Juniper trees lined the Hwy. along with Rabbit bush and Sage. Beyond the trees one could see miles into the distance. I kept going south soon there were signs to slow down and steep grade ahead. Suddenly the mesa top ended, and the road began to twist down. At the first switch back around a point that seemed to hang in the sky, there stood a sign. And behind it the horizon seemed to be the ends of the earth. The eye could not take it in, the view surrounds you more than 180°. My new camera no longer seemed so fancy as each shot took in just a small portion. The view to the east were the pinnacles of Valley of the Gods and far in the distance was Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado. To the south, hard to see snaked the Goosenecks of the San Juan river, while in the southwest the buttes of Monument Valley could be seen against the horizon. I took multiple shots and then, once home, quickly stitched them together to make a panorama. From this vantage point the road could be seen as it twisted and turned down the cliff. As I looked back toward where the highway first descended and turned from the mesa top, the rusting hulk of a truck, over turned and baking in the sun, could be seen littering the cliffs below. As I started the drive down more of the roads curves and switch back came into view. The Highway clung to the cliff side. Coming to the points that seemed to pierced the sky it felt like you were about drive off the edge of the earth. Finally the road, as it got closer to the bottom of the cliffs, leveled out a little. From a distance, the cliffs of Cedar Mesa stretched east and west for miles, dominating the northern horizon as the road headed south passing the west entrance to The Valley of the Gods where I went next. |
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