Day One - Utah

From my front door I drove to Interstate 15 and headed south to U.S. Highway 6 at Spanish Fork, Utah, where, turning east I began my journey to the Santa Fe Trail. My traveling of an old trail begins in Spanish Fork Canyon where Route 6 parallels the Union Pacific rail line. This is currently the route of Amtrak's California Zephyr and is heavily used to haul freight and coal as well. The miles from Spanish Fork to Helper are steep and difficult but this line was developed to bring coal from Carbon County to the west side of the Wasatch Range to provide fuel for industry, especially copper smelting.

This map shows my route to The Old Spanish Trail in green and the Utah section of the Trail itself in purple. Map courtesy of d-maps.com.

At the top of Spanish Fork Canyon is Soldier Summit an area of windswept open range. The streams that originate here drain westward into Utah Lake or eastward into the Colorado system. Continuing past the summit, the serpentine highway becomes separated from the rails by the headwaters of the Price River which has carved a narrow canyon whose walls seem to be constantly crumbling. This stretch of Route 6 is well known in Utah because of the high number of fatal accidents that occur here, usually as the result of drivers being unable to stay in their own lane. The skeletons of a few derelict buildings that formerly housed filling stations and restaurants now haunt the high country here but most of the human activity along this road is hunting and fishing. There is also a lot of SUV and RV traffic since it is the most direct route from Salt Lake and Provo to Arches and Canyon Lands National Parks and the popular mountain bike trails in Moab.

The descent of Price Canyon into Helper can be a white knuckle experience but at least I'm not coping with snow and ice and once I get off the highway and into the town itself there is almost no traffic. Helper got its name from the additional engines that had to be added to the westbound trains in order to haul them up the tortuous canyon I had just descended. Rail yards and maintenance facilities were built there and it grew into a major rail hub serving the coal mines of Carbon and Emory Counties as well as freight and passenger traffic.

The "Helper" engines can still be seen waiting for the next train from the east and the small Amtrak station still serves passengers but the days when Helper was a brawling railroad town are long over.

Like a lot of other transportation hubs in the U.S., Helper's heyday was Prohibition. Main Street was lined with hotels, restaurants, and a theater, most of which remain, though in varying conditions ranging from restoration to decay. People in the local community have been trying to attract artists as a means of keeping the town going but their results have been mixed. While there are a few galleries and an annual art festival, Helper looks anything but prosperous.

Like other small cities in coal country, Helper suffered greatly during The Depression, but the community received some benefits from the New Deal that are rarely seen in other parts of Utah.
The Community Center (which now houses the library) and the post office were both built as WPA PWA projects.

The miner statue in front of the Community Center claims to be the biggest in the state. The post office also contains a famous mural which was commissioned by the Smithsonian.

Helper has declined in importance and population over the years to be eclipsed by neighboring Price which today contains a new medical center and a college which has grown from two to four year status and is now called Utah State University South. Price started out small but became the metropolitan center for the local coal industry as the small company towns called camps declined. Like in the rest of coal country the jobs have steadily become more scarce as demand for coal has declined and mechanization has increased.

Moving past Price, the highway and rail line turn southeast to join up with Highway 50 and Interstate 70. There's a lot of nothing here and it prompts sympathy for the people who had to do it on horseback or by wagon.

Through this area Route 50 follows part of the Old Spanish Trail system and anyone who used it faced severe heat and scarce water. A little further east, though, is the man-made oasis of Green River where some enterprising pioneers developed a watermelon industry along the broad flood plane. These had to be tough people because they marketed their fruit to the mining towns some seventy miles to the west and typically carted their freight in wagons. 

Today, downtown Green River is largely boarded up with a few remaining local businesses hanging on. The town does have a fish hatchery a golf course and a state park so there is some employment beyond watermelon growing for which they are now famous.

It's sad but typical, that even though the town is struggling, there are new motels and a travel center near the I 70 exits built by national chains. Of course this is what happens when the road no longer goes through a town. 

From Green River the highway passes the remnants of two small towns that died when faster travel and convenience made them obsolete and onward to the Colorado border. I'll pick up the trail there tomorrow.