The Colorado Plateau

It is the natural sculptures of Arches National Park that gave Delicate Arch which has become the emblem of Utah, the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon that tell the extraordinary transformations of the landscape and the miracle of Zion saved from the desert by its river, discovered and inhabited by the Mormons.

It is the living land of the Native Americans and ancient pueblo from whom the Indian tribes descend, with sites as ingenious as they are mysterious, petroglyphs, pictographs, and Newspaper Rock, a stone of inscription from the ancient basket makers to the new European arrivals.

It is the immensity of the Great West that stretches across a 100 miles horizon in Canyonlands National Park, with trails blazed by pioneers and settlers, widened by the powerful trucks needed for the uranium mining demanded by the Cold War, and where today recreational SUVs venture up steep slopes toward the history. A immensity that finds a different tone in the Grand Canyon, 450 km long with a maximum width of 30 km and a depth of up to 1,600 meters, at the bottom of which the Colorado River carves its course. Visited by more than 4 million people a year, still inhabited by Native Americans, its geological strata tell the story of the North American continent in plain sight.

It’s a ballad to gold prospectors and banks, money transporters and robberies, settling of scores and towns perched at over 2,500 meters altitude, with

scenery made familiar by Westerns movies : a main street lined with shops, saloons, and Victorian buildings, in front of which SUVs have replaced horses.

It’s also the birthplace of the atomic bomb and undoubtedly the site of other experiments that would delight the devil.

And at the edge of the plateau the 66 Road heading west, the Mother Road which, retracing the path of the 1857 Fitzgerald Beale expedition to California in 1926, led the farmers of The Grapes of Wrath to the orange fields in search of labor. This same route after World War II and the automobile boom, spurred a whole roadside economy with gas stations, auto repair shops, tire stores, motels, restaurants, and fast-food in the fifties and sixties style. It modernized the “go west” experience. It crystallized the road trip, whose roots lie in the conquest of the West and which was popularized by the movie Easy Rider.