Manti-La Sal: The Mountains That Stand Above Moab
Near Moab, Utah
The La Sal Mountains rise from the Colorado Plateau southeast of Moab in isolated peaks that top twelve thousand feet, visible from Arches and Canyonlands as a snow-capped backdrop to the red rock foreground. The contrast is not incidental. The La Sals are a laccolith range, formed not by tectonic uplift but by magma that intruded horizontally into layers of sedimentary rock and then domed them up from below, like a blister, without breaking the surface. The rock on top eroded away. What remains are the resistant crystalline cores, rising abruptly from the surrounding plateau.
Manti-La Sal National Forest administers the La Sal Mountains as its southern unit, and a separate unit around the Manti area in central Utah. The La Sal unit alone climbs from roughly six thousand feet on the forest boundary to Mount Peale at twelve thousand seven hundred and twenty-one feet, the highest point in the range.
Ute people, specifically bands of the Ute Mountain Ute and the Uncompahgre Ute, used the La Sal Mountains seasonally for hunting and the cooler high-country summers. Spanish explorers named the range, and the name in Spanish describes exactly what a traveler approaching from the desert floor sees in late winter: salt. The snow on the peaks reads white against the red canyon country below, and from a distance, the word salt is not a bad approximation.
Moab today sends its mountain bikers, its hikers, and its technical climbers into the La Sals for the relief of altitude and cold water after the desert heat below. The forest has been absorbing that traffic without changing much. It was here before the adventure economy arrived. It will be here after.
