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Monticello, Utah

The overlooked town of southeast Utah maneuvers into the big picture

story and photos by Amy Maestas

Found in: | Outside | Our Towns |

" All the freaky people make the beauty of the world. - Michael Franti "

Around Town

The Hideout Golf Club

This 18-hole, city-owned public golf course is Utah's highest in elevation, 7,000 feet. Repeatedly golf professionals and fanatics rate it among the best in the West, relative to its size and location. Besides being a challenging course, it sits at the base of the Abajo Mountains, nestled among cottonwoods and streams.

Abajo Loop Scenic Backway

This scenic drive really does showcase the area's natural beauty. Head west from Monticello and follow the graded-gravel back roads through the mountains for about 35 miles before ending up in Blanding. The road climbs to 10,300 feet and provides a spectacular view of the San Miguel, San Juan, and La Sal mountain ranges, as well as the Sleeping Ute.

Harts Draw Road

Drive it, fish it, hike it, ride it or snowmobile it. The paved road that crosses the flank of the Abajos is one of the main thoroughfares to outdoor recreation. You are likely to see more wild turkeys than you are humans.

Roughlock RV Park and Line Camp Steakhouse

The Line Camp Steakhouse, owned by Bob and Jane Musselman, sits in rim country about 8 miles north of Monticello. It's easy to miss, because it's nestled among the trees and scrub oak off Highway 191. The RV park fills up in the summer. If you drop by for one of Musselman's famous steaks, save your own face and Bob's reputation by not asking for two things he finds offensive: “Don't order it well done, and certainly don't ask for some A1 to put on it,” he warns.

Canyon Rims Recreation Area

About 14 miles north of Monticello is the turnoff to reach the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. As you drive, hike or ride, you can eventually reach the Anticline Overlook - a geological formation - the Colorado River and Kane Springs Canyon.

Newspaper Rock/Indian Creek Scenic Byway

North of Monticello, Indian Creek Canyon begins at the bottom of a series of switchbacks. It takes you past Newspaper Rock, a large petroglyph panel that represents various cultures and times of Native Americans.

Frontier Museum

Duck into Monticello's Visitor Center on Main Street (Highway 191) and visit the Frontier Museum. It houses vestiges of past lives and activities in the area, representing everything from the communities of ranchers, farmers, pioneers, Native American tribes and miners.

Southwest Ed-Ventures/Four Corners School of Outdoor Education

This popular outdoor school has received props from the best in the outdoor recreation and travel industry. Choosing Monticello as home-base because of its proximity to the Colorado Plateau, the school pre-plans outdoor trips or let's you design your own.

Wilderness Quest

Like many other programs in the West, Wilderness Quest, based in Monticello, serves specific clientele: at-risk youth. It combines wilderness with behavior treatment to help youngsters struggling with a range of issues, from alcohol and drug addictions to depression.

Bull Hollow Raceway

This relatively new ATV and motorcycle race way is 5 miles south of Monticello. It is a world-class race track that is part of a touring series, a host of dirt-bike races and the site of the Blue Mountain Festival, which is a celebration of the Old West with entertainment, traders and crafters. The raceway is open for practice and for events.

Move over Moab, and make room for Monticello.

That's right. Southeast Utah has been in the spotlight for decades, with Monticello's popular neighbor to the north often being at center stage. So much so that some people in Monticello prefer not to talk about their town and M..., er rather, the "M" word, at the same time. For them, it can be grating that often outsiders think Moab is the only thing Southwest Utah has to offer. But it isn't.

For all of its appeal, "M" has grown exponentially into an overrun tourist trap that is sometimes chockablock with thrill seekers willing to spend their vacation with scads of others who had the same idea, at the same time. For some, the experience ends up being a sort of Disneyland in the desert trip. Just less than an hour south, though, little-town Monticello sits in the shadows of that place "up north," resplendent with its own kind of beauty and, to a lesser - but not inferior - degree, provides its own unique Canyon Country experience. In Monticello, there are easily reserved hotel rooms, less crowded trails and byways, cooler summer temperatures and perfectly situated coordinates in Utah's Canyon Country.

The Abajo (also known as the Blue) Mountains that overshadow Monticello are an under-used outdoor recreation spot. They are part of the Manti-La Sal National Forest, but no matter the season, the mountains often go ignored as weekend warriors make their ways to points north, south and east. For years, Monticello has been the town that everyone breezes through while traveling south to paddle the San Juan River, north to hike Canyonlands or bike in Moab, and east to Mesa Verde or Durango. This author is guilty of the same routine. Monticello has so often been the crossroads, literally and figuratively, to something grander, more popular and more polished.

Yet if Monticello stays on track, that type of fly-by travel will begin, however slowly, to change. Monticello hopes to lure sugar-laced adventure types and vacationing families to slow down and, as schmaltzy as this industry speak is, stay awhile - if not forever.

Where the West honors the East

Even as Monticello is a western town that has the history of outlaws, ancient Native American cultures, cowboys and agriculture, it has a distinctly odd tie to colonial America: its name. Monticello (pronounced with an "s," not a "ch") was named after the Virginia estate of the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson. Mormons originally settled Utah's Monticello, in 1887. They moved up from the southern towns of Bluff and Blanding, where Mormon pioneers had rooted not long before. Reportedly, the Mormons were sent to seek water for potential homesteading sites.

According to written history, the settling wasn't peaceful. The Kansas and New Mexico Cattle and Land Company had already been working in the area, but it didn't stop the Mormons from beginning to plant crops, setting up farms, taking irrigation water and laying out a town. Of course, this led to drama. The two groups shot warnings, sued each other, fought viciously and held steady to claim what each person thought was rightfully his. Add to the mix Native Americans and cowboys, who wanted a piece of the pie.

All of this over water.

Monticello's early beginning tells us, if nothing else, that things don't often change. Today, water is still one of the most fought over and sought after commodity in the West. In Monticello, the Mormon settler eventually won the ground. Eventually, people built their homes and farms on the land, and the town began to take shape, even being bolstered by the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act. Now, much of the town's heritage remains intact - farms and generations of Mormon families exist, even as the population is beginning to diversify. The town still clings tightly to its Mormon roots, though. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - the official name of the Mormon Church - nearly 10 years ago built a mini-temple to serve its member population in the Four Corners.

The almost-stately looking building situated just a few blocks off Main Street is simultaneously beautiful and incongruous with its surroundings. Blocked off by wrought-iron gates, the 11,000-square-foot Turkish off-white marble building is just about the most modern development in Monticello in a long time. The single-spire design, with the revered golden angel Moroni perched atop, seems out of place in a town that has seen very little change in decades.

During World War II and into the 1950s, Monticello and Southeast Utah drastically changed as the region underwent a uranium-mining boom. Monticello became the site for the Vanadium Corporation of America's vanadium processing mill, which later processed uranium. The mill was a welcome, new money generator in Monticello, and continued that way until the Atomic Energy Commission closed it in 1960. (The toxic and hazardous tailings from the milling remained in place until the 1990s.)

The in-between years of the mining boom and today have largely been stagnant ones for Monticello and its residents. The remnants of the mining years are mostly heartbreaking. Mining practices left tons of perilous piles - tailings and contaminated water - behind when the industry folded nearly 60 years ago. Though the federal government has given Monticello a clean bill of health, the former miners, mill workers and ore haulers have been left with a legacy of cancer - a devastating reminder that today compels residents and advocates fighting for health care and monetary compensation for victims.

Building Momentum

As fruitful but hazardous as the uranium mining was, its success in Monticello helped native Bob Musselman also succeed.

Some 8 miles north of town limits, Musselman sits on his empire of land that is a combination of RV/tent park, steak house and lodge. The Roughlock is easy to miss. Its shambles of a sign does not portend what is just hundred of feet behind dense scrub oak. There sits Musselman's years of hard labor born of his work as a uranium miner and trapper. He built this land up starting 45 years ago. At that time, Musselman bought 69 acres of land and paid cash with the money he made trapping bobcat, beaver and coyote.

"This place is everything I sweat for," he says.

Indeed, the antiquities adorning the wooden porches and the stuffed wildlife inside the restaurant give way to decades of stories about Musselman's sweat equity. He was born and raised in Monticello, the son of the town sheriff "for a couple hundred years," Musselman jokes. Though his family roots remained in this small town, Musselman came and went as the economy dictated. His years as a miner may have compromised his health. Musselman was preparing to drive to Grand Junction to see a doctor about his health - affected by working among uranium and vanadium and hundreds of feet underground during a time when the government paid scant attention to the affects of such work on its employees, let alone the general population.

But Musselman isn't bitter about being affected, because Roughlock was the result of that employment. He first built a log home for his ailing parents, about 35 years ago. They lived there until they were too old to do so. Musselman's mother agreed to make that her home as long as her son promised her that he wouldn't turn it into a museum after her death.

He didn't. Today it's a lodge that tourists can rent year-round. The lodge is especially popular with hunters - specifically mountain-lion hunters - who enjoy Roughlock's famous steak dinners and proximity to the rim country that lions roam.

Musselman says high-charging hunting outfitters use his place often. It is serenely situated below rock cliffs dotted with scrub oak, pi�ion and juniper. The restaurant and lodge back up to a cliff that rises several hundred feet and is often a thoroughfare for the oft-hunted lion. The surrounding geology is like the rest of Monticello and the area: a result of molten layers of rock below the Colorado Plateau rising up slowly, pushing layers of rock above them upward, and creating solitary peaks known geologically as laccoliths. The Abajos are part of the laccoliths, and the tan and brown sandstone rims like the ones that surround Roughlock are part of the outlying geology.

For many years, Monticello and its surrounding land weren't sought after. But only a few years ago, Musselman and his wife, Jane, heard rumor about a spa being developed on the rim overlooking their business. Quick to preserve their privacy and rustic nature, the Musselmans bought a 100-foot strip along the rim in an effort to protect encroaching development and a foreboding structure looking down on the park and lodge. Musselman says he's not certain of whether the rumors were true, but he didn't want to take the risk of not acting.

In the last year, just south of Roughlock, less than a mile off Highway 191, a large-scale development began sprouting up. Two pockets of land - one 600 acres and another 640 acres - are slated to be built up with large homes. Because Monticello's existing population isn't sprawling, the new development is the first sign of outsiders moving in. With those plans in place, Musselman knew Monticello was beginning to come out of its stagnant state, and the result might just increase land prices.

Then a few weeks ago, the inevitable came. A developer dropped by Roughlock to chat up Musselman. By the time he left, he had in so many words offered to buy Musselman's property.

"He essentially offered me an unbelievable, horrible amount of money," says Musselman.

Now, he says, he knows that his property is the most valued in the Four Corners for development.

"I mean, he named an amount that was really a lot of money," Musselman says again, simultaneously shocked and perturbed.

While many would be enticed by the amount, and the possibility of a day spa marring the beauty of the rim above him and invasion of a species habitat, Musselman steadfastly scoffs at selling his land and businesses.

"I built this place with my own hands. And I'm just not giving it up. Million dollars or not."

Shifting Out of Neutral

Musselman's alluring offer is what he sees as the first monumental shift in decades for Monticello, whose population hovers around 1,958, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Compared with the 1990 U.S. Census, the town's population has grown by only about 150 people.

"For years we sat neutral and idled," says Musselman.

That's true, says Monticello City Manager Trent Schafer, also a town native.

"We are standing on the threshold of growth," says Schafer. "We hadn't annexed any land into Monticello since 1981. But last year we had two requests for annexation, and this year we have had one so far. We are being found."

The town measures its growth largely in the amount of residential and commercial building that is taking place. Schafer points out that Monticello often would go a few years at a time without having one new house built. Schafer doesn't know exactly who the intended newcomers will be, but he speculates that a large part of the new home developments will be second homes for an older population.

"Now don't laugh," Schafer says half-seriously, "but last year we gave out 10 new residential building permits. That's huge."

Schafer, who has served as city manager for the last 14 years, says there is little, if any, grumbling about the recent growth. Though most residents realize that real-estate prices and taxes are bound to increase as a result, they welcome the potential. He says perhaps the most dramatic shift for residents will be to learn how to adapt their lifestyles to accommodate growth. For example, because the city hasn't grown, residents, except in severe drought years, have had water at their disposal. The one commodity in the West had little value in Monticello. Where residents in a town five hours away would spar legally and physically over a precious drop of the liquid, Monticello's people had enough - and then some. Schafer says it wasn typical for someone to landscape his or her yard from corner to corner with grass and plants that took hundreds of gallons of water to keep alive.

"We are now going to have to realize that it's not the nationally recognized thing to do," he says. "We'll have to change our habits and we'll have to continue working on the water projects. That's not a bad thing."

Jefferson's Influence

Besides second-home ownership and tourism, Monticello is hopeful that the town's namesake will spur its economy. The city is the seat of Utah's San Juan County - a name that not accidentally is shared with a county in Colorado and a county in New Mexico. All three San Juan counties don't share borders, but they are awfully close. The name is taken from the San Juan River, itself named by Spanish explorers in honor of St. John.

But because Monticello has found its identity in colonial America, it may soon reap benefits from that if a liberal arts college ends up choosing the city as its new home. Schafer says that the George Wythe College, now based in Cedar City, Utah, will soon decide on moving its home campus to Monticello. The non-accredited college's namesake comes from Thomas Jefferson's mentor. Besides Jefferson, Wythe was mentor to other notable statesmen such as John Marshall and James Monroe. He also was a lawyer and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Seeking to turn its students into statesmen, Schafer says the college wants to potentially relocate to a place that has the Jefferson connection.

"We are looking at it very favorably," says Schafer. "We look at the positive results of having college kids here who are dedicated to seeking an education. It's not a party school."

If successful, Schafer says the college will build its campus outside city limits, but Monticello will annex the land and provide support for infrastructure. The city is not, however, investing money in the college. He explains that it could be the shot in the arm that Monticello needs and wants to balance its economy with the transient tourism sector and permanent residential and commercial sectors. The college would contribute students, educators and staff - all of whom would drive up demand for services.

"It's bound to stimulate some business," Schafer says.

Elevation Gain

Government agencies have long been the major employers in Monticello - the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, San Juan County, Park Service and the state of Utah. The agriculture community has remained relatively steady, with some farms and ranches lost to economics.

But now change has momentum. Numbers at the Monticello Visitor Center increase "a little bit at a time," says Susan Taylor, project manager for the San Juan County Economic Development and Visitor Services. For about 12 years, Monticello's visitor center was housed only in the government offices. About 1� years ago, a new visitor center and museum was built on Main Street. Taylor, a 27-year resident of Monticello, says the new center helps immensely in attracting potential tourists. She touts Monticello's 7,000-foot elevation as a prime spring and summer recreation haven.

"Tourism is growing. It will grow even more when people realize how much they can access if they stay in Monticello. We have recognized it, the city has recognized it as a viable economic force, and we know soon more people will too," she says.

Yet it can't rely on being a one-trick pony for it to emerge from being the overlooked town of southeast Utah. Its place at the tourism table is banked on what Musselman says is "a new ambition in town to create a better tourist industry. We have new blood and new ideas.

"Our tourism is picking up. But right now I'd say we're still just a wannabe," he says.

Amy Maestas is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine.