Under the ledge

"Under the Ledge" is what old-time cowboys called the vast grass and slickrock range plunging toward the Colorado and Green rivers below southeastern Utah's Orange Cliffs.

"Crazy country," Edward Abbey wrote in his '70s eco-adventure, "The Monkey Wrench Gang." A desert territory as much vertical as it is flat, so gashed and shoved about by time, tectonics and weather that it's daunting and often inaccessible even to someone on foot.

Under the Ledge encompasses places like Waterhole Flat and the Land of Standing Rocks, the Doll House spires and the labyrinthine Maze.

"Whoever named it knew it," veteran tour guide Kent Frost remarked of the latter in a 1971 memoir. An ideal hideout, in other words, for Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith, the environmental rebels in Abbey's novel. A place more like home to them than home. Just as it was for Old West thieves like Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch.

"It was hard country for people," remembers Ned Chaffin, wild, desolate and as remote as remote can be. But people lived and worked there years ago, ranching mostly and prospecting some.

"It was a rough go for short dough," he says.

Chaffin is 86, retired in Bakersfield, Calif. But as a lad he was a cowboy who chased wild cattle and weaner calves Under the Ledge.

"It isn't so bad now," Chaffin says. "You can go down there in your jeep. But we must realize the isolation of that country at that time," far from both highways and the railroad.

"One hundred and ten miles from the Maze to Green River," Chaffin says. "And you'd ride that horseback or part of the way in a buckboard when I was a kid — three or four days to get out there and three or four days to get back. And while you were there you might just as well have been on Mars. You didn't see anybody, and it was before radio."

Frost, now 83 and based in Monticello, rambled through the country on foot as a teen and later developed his fascination and expertise into a pioneering guide business. "It was quite a challenge to get into places by hiking," he matter-of-factly recalls.

Today the region is the still-remote western Maze District of Canyonlands National Park.

And upon reflection, Chaffin isn't taken aback by the fact that it has gained a rough notoriety as well as park status.