Moab: A Crossroads on the Colorado
Near Moab, Utah
Moab sits in a valley carved by the Colorado River through the red rock plateau of southeastern Utah, a place that has been, in succession, a river ford used by Spanish expeditions and American fur trappers, a failed Mormon mission, a cattle and mining town, the uranium capital of the world, and the outdoor adventure capital of the American West. Each of those identities was total and then abandoned, and the current one shows no signs of going anywhere. Every road into Moab brings travelers with mountain bikes, kayaks, and dust on their windshields, come to ride the slickrock, float the rivers, and drive the canyon roads that encircle the town on every side.
The landscape is the reason. Moab sits in Spanish Valley, a broad opening in the canyon country where the Colorado River briefly widens before resuming its long journey to the sea. To the northwest, the fins and arches of Arches National Park rise above the desert floor.
To the southwest, Canyonlands National Park preserves the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers in a wilderness of mesa and canyon. Dead Horse Point State Park overlooks the Colorado from high above the river. The canyon country visible in every direction is among the most geologically concentrated landscape on earth, and Moab is in the middle of it.
The name Moab comes from the Bible, the name of an ancient kingdom east of the Jordan River. Whoever first applied it to this Utah valley was drawing a comparison to the stark, arid landscapes of the Middle East, and was not wrong. Latter-day Saint settlers who arrived in the late eighteen seventies had complicated feelings about naming their community after a people the scriptures described as adversaries of Israel, but the name stuck, as names tend to do in canyon country, written once into the landscape and very difficult to erase.
Before the Mormon settlers arrived, before the uranium boom and the mountain bikes and the Jeep tours, the Colorado River crossing at Moab was one of the most strategically important geographic facts in the American Southwest. Spanish expeditions passed through. Fur trappers crossed here.
The Old Spanish Trail, the commercial route connecting Santa Fe to Los Angeles, ran through the valley. Moab's history is as long as the canyon walls above it, and almost as layered.
