Scenic Byway Twelve and the Hogback

The road you are driving, State Route Twelve, is no ordinary highway. It has earned the rare federal designation of All American Road, reserved for routes so scenic and significant that they are destinations in themselves. Its one hundred twenty three miles wind through a journey of stone and time, but the stretch between Escalante and Boulder is the drama's high point.

Here the pavement climbs onto a knife edge of rock called the Hogback, a narrow ridge barely wider than the road, with the land falling away in dizzying thousand foot drops on both sides and no guardrails to soften the view. The story of how this road came to be is itself remarkable. Well into the twentieth century, Boulder was among the very last towns in the United States to receive its mail by mule train, cut off by the surrounding canyons.

In the nineteen thirties, crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression era work program, blasted and graded the first automobile road across this impossible terrain with dynamite and hand tools. The all weather highway you now travel was begun in nineteen thirty five and finished in nineteen forty, so costly and hard won that locals called it the Million Dollar Road. Drive it slowly.

Every mile trades one breathtaking view for another, and the ridge tops offer a perspective on this broken country that early settlers could only cross on foot.