Utah park's remoteness is its lure

Editor's Note: Columnist Lee Benson is bicycling through Utah's five national parks, beginning at Arches and ending at Zion. His columns will chronicle what he sees, hears and avoids along the way.

CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK — It was in the summer of 1961, as the story goes, that an airplane ride created Utah's largest national park and saved the town of Moab in the bargain.

Floyd Dominy, then head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and Stewart Udall, secretary of the Interior, were in the plane. It was Dominy's charter, the purpose of which was to give Udall an aerial view of exactly where Dominy wanted to place the next big dam on the Colorado River — at a point just below where the Colorado and Green rivers merge.

As author Charles F. Wilkinson recounts in his book "Fire on the Plateau," "Dominy's pet idea, 'Junction Dam,' would have created a reservoir larger than Lake Powell and flooded Moab."

But, Wilkinson's book continues, "when Udall looked down to survey the scene, his eyes failed to see a dam site: 'I saw the Needles and all those monuments and formations and all the rest. I had no idea anything like that existed there. I didn't say anything to Dominy, but to myself I thought, "My God, that's a national park."'"

Three years later, in 1964, it was.

Christened "Canyonlands" because it encompasses the many canyons that feed the Colorado and the Green, it is Utah's largest national park. It is also the most remote and least visited.

If it had a motto, it would be "Want to get away?" A patron saint? Marlon Brando.

This isn't to say no one comes to Canyonlands. Last year, there were 392,537 visits, and in 1995, when gas was cheaper, a record 448,769 people signed in at one of three entrances to the 338,000-acre preserve. It's just to say that it takes a lot more work to get here than, say, Zion, which averages nearly 3 million visitors, or neighboring Arches, with close to a million visits a year.

It's still the same place Stewart Udall saw from the sky. You still can't see it from the road.

Canyonlands has two visitor centers. The one in the north, in the Island in the Sky district, is 23 lonely miles off U.S. 191. The one in the south, in the Needles district, is 34 lonelier miles off U.S. 191. The two visitor centers are about 100 highway miles apart. There's also a third district, called the Maze, where there is no visitor center at all, nor any paved roads.