Route 50 covers roughly 330 miles in Utah, from Colorado in the east to Nevada in the west. For much of the distance, it is marked as part of I-70.
Interstate highways tend to make a driver feel separated from the surrounding countryside, but in this case that doesn’t happen, because the scenery is at such a grand scale.
If you are impatient with long road trips, you’ll be happy to learn that the speed limit on Utah Interstate highways is 80 miles per hour.
The San Rafael Reef is the eastern edge of a 2000 square mile area called the San Rafael Swell, an anticline, or dome, formed when the surface of the earth was pushed up some 50 million years ago.
The reef is formed of sandstone and stretches for roughly 75 miles. For years, it was an effective barrier to the wild and unclaimed lands of the swell to its west, because only deep, narrow, and winding slot canyons penetrated it.
In 1970, two lanes of highway were opened through the reef as part of the Interstate highway system. It took until the mid-1980s for the road to be expanded to four lanes.
The canyon chosen as the basis for the route was so narrow a person could touch both sides at once. To mark the route, surveyors wore body harnesses and hung suspended 400 feet above the canyon floor.
To give you an idea of the scale, those aren’t dirt specks on the highway in the photo above, they’re cars and trucks.
The photo below shows Route 50 climbing through the reef.
At the top.
← Route 50 — Scenery in UtahSan Rafael Reef, Utah →
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There’s a lot of great scenery on Route 50, but Utah leads the pack, I think. Here are some examples. The road you see in some of these photos is Route 50. The others were taken from Route 50.
You might choose to loop south from Route 50 in Utah to visit Capitol Reef National Park, which is spectacular yet not overwhelmed with tourists.
The park’s name comes from a huge, largely impassable ridge which was called a “reef” by early settlers, along with white sandstone domes that resemble the tops of capitol buildings.
It was established in 1971 to protect the Waterpocket Fold, a 100-mile long warp in the earth’s crust. The fold is a geologic feature called a monocline, formed 50 to 70 million years ago. Today it exposes rock strata that are more than 200 million years old. The exposed rock looms high over the main road through the park, imposing and rugged.
In the early 1900′s, fruit orchards were planted in the flood plain of the Fremont River, which runs through the park. Some orchards still survive, and you can pick fruit yourself. One has been converted to the park’s campground, an oasis of green in a dry, rocky landscape.
It’s about 80 miles from Route 50 to the park from either the east or west on Utah Highway 24. The approach to the park from the east is itself worth seeing, alternating scenes of spectacle and desolation.
Salina is a small town at the intersection of Route 50 and Interstate 70. It generally rains less than eight inches a year here, which classifies the surrounding territory as desert.
If you look at the picture closely, you’ll see that Mom’s Cafe serves scones. I’ve eaten there, and I’ve had one. Although quite different than a scone from a big-city bakery, it was pretty good.
Self portrait.
Delta, Utah is roughly 40 miles upstream from Sevier Lake. Sevier Lake is dry. The picture above shows one of the reasons.
Delta is an agricultural town on the Sevier River, which would drain into Sevier Lake if Delta didn’t use most of the river’s water for irrigation. Delta is surrounded by lush farm fields, to the substantial benefit of the town.
When Sevier Lake was first observed by settlers in 1872, there was water in it, but it turns out that has rarely occurred since. What you see in the picture below is called Sevier Lake, but it is actually the dry surface of an ancient lake in the Sevier Desert.
The lake did have water in it In 2011. It was a year with a lot of rain, and upstream reservoirs dumped excess water into the river. As a result the lake reached a depth of … three feet.
Lately, the dry lake has been found to contain potassium sulfate, which is used in fertilizer, so there may be mining here in the future.
This building is on Route 50 at the western edge of Delta, Utah. It may not look like it, but it’s an important building.
It is the headquarters of the Telescope Array project, a collaboration of researchers from the U.S., Japan, Korea, Russia, and Belgium, formed to study the impact of cosmic rays on the earth’s atmosphere.
“Cosmic rays” are not rays at all, but particles that were once part of an atom. The Millard Cosmic Ray Center detects a specific type of particle, called an “ultra-high-energy cosmic ray,” thought to be the nucleus of an iron atom. These particles have traveled at very high speed to arrive at our planet from up to 160 million light years away. They are extremely rare — a similar cosmic ray installation in Argentina, observing over 1,100 square miles of the earth’s surface, detected the arrival of just one such particle every four weeks.
The project in Utah is the largest such observatory in the northern hemisphere. It has been collecting data since 2007 using detectors placed in the nearby desert. Some are positioned in a triangle roughly 19 miles on a side, while others are spread across an additional 300 square miles.
These instruments detect two manifestations of cosmic rays: very faint flashes caused when arriving particles hit gas atoms in the earth’s atmosphere, and also the result of such a collision — a cascade of other particles called an “air shower.”
Heading west out of Delta, Route 50 passes southeast of the research area.
From September 1942 to October 1945, 11,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry — the majority American citizens — were involuntarily moved to the Topaz War Relocation Authority Camp. The camp was about fifteen miles northwest of Delta, Utah. These photos show the site of the camp as it exists today.
Most of the internees were from the San Francisco Bay Area. They were sentenced, without trial, to live in a remote area where daytime summer temperatures climbed above 100 degrees and nighttime winter temperatures could drop below minus 20.
Entire families were relocated and assigned to live in rickety barracks, which used tar paper for insulation. “Block 4,” shown in the photo above, was one of thirty-four “residential blocks” at Topaz. Each residential block included twelve barracks, each one divided into six apartments. Some of the barracks were unfinished when people arrived, lacking, for example, actual windows to fill the window openings.
Each block also included latrines for men and women, a recreation hall, a mess hall, and four showers for men and four bathtubs for women. People lived in these conditions for three long years, until late 1945.
Between 110,000 and 120,000 people were held at camps such as Topaz. During the 1980s, the U.S. government passed legislation authorizing a payment of $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of internment. President George H. W. Bush made a formal public apology.
Those steps followed a government report titled Personal Justice Denied, which found little evidence of disloyalty by American citizens of Japanese descent and concluded that banishment to the camps was the result of racism. At the time, however, each individual had to find a way to cope with what was happening.
One of those individuals was Chiura Obata, who before relocation was a faculty member in art at the University of California, Berkeley. During his internment, he drew on his professional experience to organize an art school, shown below, at which sixteen instructors taught over 600 students.
Obata himself painted throughout his internment. His work from that time was displayed recently in the exhibition “When Words Weren’t Enough” at the Topaz Museum, at 55 Main Street, Delta, Utah, on Route 50. The painting shown just below was painted on October 9, 1942, less than a month after Obata arrived at Topaz.
How could he do it? How could he paint works such as these and at the same time create an art school, while dislocated to an unforgiving environment far from the familiarity of his home and career?
Here’s what he said:
“In any circumstance, anywhere and anytime, take up your brush and express what you face and what you think without wasting your time and energy complaining and crying out. I hold that statement as my aim, and as I have told my friends and students, the aim of artists.”
– Chiura Obata, 1946, quoted in Topaz Moon
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Chiura Obata, Delta Utah, Highway 50, japanese internment, route 50, topaz internment camp, Topaz Museum, utah on January 4, 2017. Edit
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A sample of Route 50 scenery in western Utah.
