ABBEY COUNTRY - THE LA SALS

The sight of the symmetrical white cones of the La Sal Mountains through Delicate Arch in spring is enough to send any desert mountain freak into a peaking passion. This past Memorial Day, weekend, I had the chance to climb in these mountains which float like an Alpine mirage above the heat waves of Moab country. Leaving the Denver area after work Friday, we arrived at a friend's house in Grand Junction well after midnight (can't pass up a TGIF Mexican dinner). Next day the three of us drove across the Uncompahgre Uplift via Unaweep Canyon, a mysteriously abandoned course of the Colorado River, and down into a wondrous and completely atypical corner of Colorado with the look and the soul of the Utah-Arizona desert and place names like Bedrock, Slickrock, Paradox, Sinbad Valley and Gypsum Gap. Turning south at Gateway, we took en "automobile raft trip" through the Dolores River Canyon on Colorado 141. In fact, that was the only way the canyon could have bean "rafted" this spring; the Dolores was shrunk to a sickly yellowish trickle by the drought. A few miles short of Uravan, we took a dirt road cutoff which follows the river a few more miles to join Colorado 90 near Bedrock. At the state line, this road becomes Utah 46. We turned NW off 46 about 7 miles W of the state line, at a small unnamed settlement near a sawmill. A mile north, we took a left turn on a Forest Service road signed "Medicine Lake". We were glad to have a Blazer, because this road would not be recommended for average cars. Smokey's helpers really went to town building gigantic Kelly ditches and water bars, spaced a hundred yards or so apart, and the roller-coaster ride just about made us seasick. We soon climbed out of the oakbrush lifezone, and, at about 9000', entered the most magnificent climax forest of pure aspen I've ever seen. Because of the early season, some groups of aspen were bare, while a light green haze of color was just showing on other stands. Here, the aspen did not have the look of a dainty, ephemeral tree, a passing stage in an evolutionary succession leading to spruce and fir. Many of the aspen here had the look of broad-shouldered forest giants who weren't about to yield to anyone. One monster which we named the General Grant Aspen had a trunk four feat thick and branches bigger than most mature aspen. The La Sals are "desert peaks" only in the sense that the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona are - forested Alpine peaks rising from desert surroundings. However, this draught year the La Sale fit the description of desert peaks almost too well. I have never thought twice about bringing a water supply to high forested mountains, but when we got to a small camping area in an open spruce-fir forest at 10,000' on La Sal P8ss, no decent-looking water was to be found. The wetercourses coming off the high peaks, already mostly stripped of snow, held only rocks and dust. One spring shown on the topo was full of little black worms - which sort of blunted one's thirst. The Forest Service had, incredibly, routed the road right through the other nearby spring shown on the topo, creating a man-eating mudhole on the Moab side of the pass. Medicine. Lake was a stagnant yellowish beaver pond.

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