Bluff, Utah

Bluff is one of the most improbably founded towns in the American West. In the fall of eighteen seventy-nine, two hundred and thirty Mormon pioneers left Escalante, Utah with roughly eighty wagons and about a thousand head of livestock, expecting a six-week journey to the San Juan River. They spent six months.

At a sheer sandstone cliff above Lake Powell, they blasted and chiseled a slot barely wide enough for a wagon, lowered everything through it by rope and muscle, and continued into the canyon country beyond. They arrived at the San Juan River on April sixth, eighteen eighty, exhausted and short of food, and built a fort of log cabins on the bluff above the river. The Hole-in-the-Rock Trail they cut became a legend of Mormon pioneer endurance. Bluff today is a tiny community surrounded by red-rock canyon walls, with the original cemetery and several pioneer-era stone buildings still standing along the highway.