Pipe Spring National Monument

On our first days off in June we decided to combine a lite shopping trip with some sight seeing.  Kanab, UT is the closest place, at 85 miles that has full service grocery stores (2 of them) and enough places with diesel fuel to spur a little competition and get the price of a gallon below $4.  A few miles west of Kanab is a National Monument called Pipe Spring.  We never made it to this attraction last year so we thought we would give it a try this time.

Pipe Spring National Monument started out as ranching operation, pioneered by the Mormons.  Of course the spring was the life blood of Native Americans for hundreds of years before the Mormons arrived.  But it took the Mormons and their construction of a fortress over the top of the spring to forever change the surrounding desert from being a sustainable provider to a near wasteland.  The Mormons ran the operation as a tithing ranch, receiving thousands upon thousands of sheep and cattle they received from their parishioners and grazed on the then plentiful prairie grasses.  But the high desert could not keep up with the demand of the domestic herds and soon the grass was gone and unpalatable sage took over.

Like many of our National Monuments, Pipe Spring nearly dissolved into the sands of time before the Park Service took possession (in 1923).  Even then, many of the structures continued to decline for another seventy years until money finally found its way to this tiny, remote outpost in the '90s.

The visitor center has an impressive museum that does an excellent job of portraying the history of Pipe Spring and surrounding area.  And there is a guided tour every half-hour of Winsor Castle (the tiny fortress built over the spring), which is what made the trip worth it to us.  It is about the only structure left that has original construction in it and although it has been refurnished to period, none of it is original with the exception of one piece, the cast iron stove.

I'm not sure why, but I was really taken with this stove.  It had so many features - a hot water tank, bread box, kettle warmer, flue controls and drawers and compartments that I don't know what they are.  The place that built this thing must have been really something and it must have been one heck of a wagon that got it to where it is.

Back in the mid-1800's people were not really clear on where the border between Arizona and Utah fell exactly.  When the Mormons built Pipe Spring it was generally accepted that they were in Arizona.  They also became part of a project for connecting the country by telegraph and soon they were one of many stations that would receive and then relay messages.  The telegraph operator was almost always a late-teen, early-twenties, single female.  The room for the telegraph office and her bedroom were one and the same.  And at that time that was a perk.  The telegraph operator was the only person in the whole complex that had a private living quarter.

The Mormons operated Desert Telegraph, later discovered to be the first telegraph in Utah.

The telegraph wire came right off a glass insulator nailed to the outside wall and through the window to the operator's private living quarters.  Check out how thick the window sill is.  These walls were built to keep out the blistering summers and deep freeze winters.

At some point surveyors got around to clarifying where borders were and much to everyone's surprise at Pipe Spring they found that they had never left Utah.  Their entire operation was within the state of Utah and now they had also become known as the first telegraph operation in the state.

The "fort" courtyard was just big enough to hold a single wagon.  Large, heavy, wood gates were at each end that allowed them to load/unload wagons fully protected.  The irony is that the fear of attacks from marauding bands of Indians never materialized because by the time they completed the construction of the fort there were no Indians left.  They had all been defeated and moved to reservations.  But they did sustain a certain level of paranoia about government interference because of their views on bigamy.  The fortress mentality remained.

In our touring of the grounds and facilities we found we had constant companions; lizards.  They were everywhere, you had to watch where you stepped for fear of squishing one of them.  They were inside, they were outside, they were everywhere.

It has been a few hours since we arrived and the sun is high and hot now.  The lizard in the photo above is alternating lifting feet off the hot surface.  We are going to make the 14 mile drive to Kanab and get our groceries and head back to the cool climes of the North Rim.