OCR Text |
Show June 1969 rock country affected by the expansion of the Capitol Reef National Monument. community of Boulder nestles in a small valley, green in summer against the rugged red The Tito Sunn by Ken Rice It was a cold, stormy day in February when we first saw Boulder. We left the end of the pavement and started down the muddy four-mildescent' into the little community, knowing as soon as we started down that We'd. never get back out without help. The small community of Boulder lay under a blanket of some of the heaviest snow the 108 residents have seen in many years. We gunned the car through more than 6 inches of mud on the road until we reached a crossroads marked by a store that was apparently closed for the winter. Boulder looked peaceful enough. The houses were widely separated and there wasn't anything about the place that would make you look twice. Two gas stations, one small motel that housed a few tourists during the summer, and a rooming house that sheltered people when they needed it ' But there was more there than met the eye. For this was the town that raised nearly $60,000 as their share of a modern church building, $68,000 for a community water system and another $65,000 for a community pasture sprinkling system. It was also the town that voted to change its name to "Johnson's Folly". It was a brief news item about the name change that brought us to Boulder in quest of a story. We knocked at the door of the small white house at the crossroads. We were welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Joe Covington, who gladly told us the story of how much of the grazing land used by the cattlemen of Boulder, had been included in the expansion of Capitol Reef National Monument The change in status from Bureau of Land Management ground to National Monument status would mean no more grazing, al"None of us have 'heard. a word from the federal officials," though j , Mrs. Covington added. e, - - . . . - - . - ; : Boulder's entire economy rested on cattle. Since 1889, when the first settlers arrived in this rugged part of Utah, the Boulder residents have been cattlemen with no other industry. With the exception of the small amount of feed that can be raised in the tiny valley, the cattle are grazed on the rocky hills and trucked nearly 200 miles to market during the winter and more than 100 miles when the mountain road is open during the summer. With the grazing rights taken away, Boulder will dry up. When the gloomy news arrived, the residents declared that if their community became a ghost town, it wouldn't be known as Boulder. Boulder meant too much to them. Boulder was what they and their parents had worked and sacrificed to build. If it had to die, they said; it would die with the name of the man they held responsible. And so, they vowed if the grazing was taken away, the town would be known as "Johnson's Folly". Because of the weather we decided to try and get back to Escalante, 23 miles to the South, before nightfall The rest of Boulder's drive story would have to wait But try as we might our car couldn't negotiate more than a half mile of that passenger steep muddy road. Joe Covington in a drive Bronco with oversized knobby tires pushed us up 3 miles of muddy hairpin turns. We promised to be back to meet with some of the, other ranchers and get the res't of the story. It was nearly three months before we got back to Boulder but in the meanwhile we learned a little about the people who created this small community. Beginning in 1880, eight stockmen drove more than five thousand cattle to graze on the Boulder mountain. They rounded up the cattle, each Fall and corraled them at Pipe Springs located in the foothills north of Boulder. The .cowboys two-whe- four-whe- el , el |