12/31/2022 0 Comments Sue's restaurant town and countryAs late as 1940, the mail there was delivered via an eight-hour trek by mule team the first lights did not flicker on until Christmas Eve, 1947. Still largely unpaved, still treacherous in bad weather, it connects the town of Escalante to the tiny hamlet of Boulder, long reputed to be one of the most remote settlements in the continental United States. Today, the entire route built by those men is known as Hell’s Backbone Road. They laid a span across it, and called it Hell’s Backbone Bridge. Midway up, the ridge they were following gaped open and plunged fifteen hundred feet to the canyon floor. The men nicknamed the project Poison Road: so steep that a single drop would kill them. During the Great Depression, when the whole state turned into a kind of Poverty Flat, the Civilian Conservation Corps sent a group of men to the region to carve a byway out of a virtually impassable landscape of cliffs and chasms. Head east from Dead Mare Wash and you’ll end up on Deadman Ridge, looking out toward Last Chance Creek and down into Carcass Canyon. Head south from Poverty Flat and you’ll end up in Death Hollow. In south-central Utah, where the topography is spectacular, desolate, and extreme, the pessimistic tradition in place-names runs strong. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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