New oil boom filling rooms in Uinta Basin

Editor's note: Columnist Lee Benson is spending the week bicycling west to east across Utah, from the Nevada line to the Colorado line. His columns will reflect what he sees, hears and experiences along the way.

DUCHESNE — Want to get rejected over and over again?

Try this: Ask a motel clerk in the Uinta Basin if they have a room for the night.

I got an upclose and personal introduction to the eastern Utah oil boom when I rolled into the Uinta Basin earlier in the day than planned. It wasn't that I'd set any speed records on the 15-mile climb from Helper to the top of Indian Canyon, but that gravity took over on the 29-mile descent and before I knew it, I was in Duchesne before lunch time.

I thought I might as well go ahead and throw down another 30 miles or so along U.S. 40 before the thunderstorms started — and stay in Roosevelt for the night. But before cancelling the room I'd reserved weeks ago at Duchesne's lone motel, the River Inn, I called all three Roosevelt motels and received the same answer three times: no vacancy, no vacancy, no vacancy ...

So it was back to Plan A.

And it turned out the River Inn was having a special on its $45 rooms. They're going for $80.

"We fill up pretty much every night," said the desk clerk with the take-it-or-leave-it air of someone who was not bluffing.

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The Uinta Basin, from Duchesne to the Colorado border and beyond, is one place that is not wigging out about the high price of gas, or the high price of anything else, for that matter — unless you want to use "wigging out" in a positive way.

About four years ago, when a gallon of gas started exceeding $2, the vast oil and natural gas reserves buried below the basin started looking very profitable. The drilling has been going pretty much nonstop ever since, to the point that there are now thousands of wells operating around the clock, producing both crude oil and liquid gas in unprecedented volume.

It's little Saudi Arabia out here, but with greener surroundings.

The "No Vacancy" signs at the motels in Duchesne, Roosevelt and Vernal — they're especially prevalent Monday through Thursday when the various companies that service the oil fields gobble up most of the rooms — are just one indication of the boom. Another is the traffic along Highway 40. I can personally attest that large trucks carrying not just oil, but everything from trackhoes to outdoor toilets to double-wide trailers, constantly whiz by.

Luckily, the highway's shoulders are wide.