Hole in the Rock: The Wagon Road That Should Not Exist
Near Bluff, Utah
In the autumn of eighteen seventy-nine, more than two hundred Mormon men, women, and children set out from Escalante in southern Utah on a journey they expected to take six weeks. It took six months and nearly killed them, and the place they finally reached was Bluff. The journey was called the San Juan Mission, and also the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition for the most dangerous passage it required.
LDS Church President John Taylor had called upon families from sixteen southwestern Utah communities to colonize the remote canyon country of the San Juan River, partly to establish a church presence in territory frequented by outlaws, and partly to improve relations with the Native peoples of southeastern Utah. The roughly two hundred thirty people who answered the call gathered their wagons and livestock and headed southeast from Escalante in November of eighteen seventy-nine. The route they had planned ran into an obstacle they had not fully anticipated: the Colorado River, carved into cliffs so sheer that no wagon road existed anywhere near their intended crossing.
The missionaries scouted the canyon rim for weeks before finding a solution, a natural crack in the sandstone called the Hole-in-the-Rock where a fissure plunged roughly twelve hundred feet to the river below. The men spent six weeks blasting and chiseling the slot into something a wagon could be lowered through, packing the crevice with brush and rocks to form a ramp. On January twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty, they began lowering wagons through the passage, one by one, with men on ropes acting as brakes on the rear wheels while teams of horses pulled from below on the river bank.
Eighty-three wagons made it through in a single exhausting day. After crossing the Colorado, the expedition still had to cover more than a hundred miles of canyon country with no road. They improvised a route across slickrock and sand, cutting new trail each day, wearing out their animals and wearing down themselves.
When the first wagons rolled into the San Juan River valley on April sixth, eighteen eighty, the six-week journey had lasted nearly six months. The people who climbed down from those wagons had crossed country that should not have been crossable. The town they built on the banks of the San Juan River, which they named Bluff for the sandstone cliffs rising on both sides of the valley, would test them for the rest of their lives.
