Then and now, Moab is next level

MOAB — "This is the most beautiful place on Earth."

"Every morning I watch the sun come up over the La Sals, it's like, right outside my door. It's kind of surreal that I get to call this home."

The above statements are about the same place.

Spoken 69 years apart.

The first quote is from Edward Abbey, the environmentalist and naturalist who, as a young park ranger in 1956-57, spent two seasons living in a government-issued house trailer a few feet off a rutted dirt road that led to Balanced Rock in what was then Arches National Monument (it's now Arches National Park, and the roads are paved).

The words are how he starts his iconic book about that experience, "Desert Solitaire."

The second quote is from Brad Walker, the manager of Utahraptor State Park, the newest of Utah's 46 state parks that held its grand opening this past May. Brad and his wife live in a government-issued staff house right on the property, just 6.6 miles as the crow flies from Balanced Rock.

Neither man can quite believe the beauty that surrounds them.

Although the similarities drop off rather quickly after that.

After his two years at Arches, Abbey went on a lifelong campaign doing his best urging people not to come.

Brad's attitude: The more, the merrier. He'd like everybody to see what he's seeing.

Dinosaurs, a life-form that preceded Abbey and Walker, and all other human beings, by 100 million years, are the catalyst that created Utah's newest state park.

Over the past half century, paleontologists have dug up more than 5,500 bones in the area's rocks, leading to discoveries of several dinosaurs heretofore unknown to mankind. That includes a huge long-necked planteater that pays tribute to its future hometown by being named Moabosaurus.

The most famous is one called Utahraptor, the park's namesake dinosaur that, in its day, measured 20 feet long, 5 feet high and weighed over 1,000 pounds. It was a carnivore and was 10 times the size of the more celebrated velociraptor of "Jurassic Park" renown. One would not want to share a campsite with a Utahraptor. Unless it's petrified.

The idea for the park sprouted from the fertile mind of a then-10-year-old boy in Utah County named Kenyon Roberts. A keen student of all things dinosaur, in 2018, Kenyon lobbied then-state Sen. Curt Bramble to pass a bill designating the Utahraptor as the official state dinosaur. Once that was accomplished, he pushed for the area where the Utahraptor was "discovered" (by Utah State paleontologist James Kirkland) to become a state park.

Kenyon, now 17, was there in May to cut the ribbon that opened the park.

Brad Walker was there, too, thanking his lucky stars that, after just two years in the Utah park system, he had landed such a plumb position.

"It's a perfect posting. I still pinch myself every morning to make sure it's real," he says. "I don't even consider it a job. It's a lifestyle."

An Indiana native, Brad has become a mini chamber of commerce extolling Utah's outdoors.

"First of all, the whole state of Utah, by the way, is a park," he says.

But Moab? Moab's upper level.

"Choose your adventure," he says, "whatever your recreational vices, Moab has it in spades."

The newest state park hasn't been overrun with visitors yet, says Brad (eerily echoing what Abbey probably said in 1957). Partly that's due, he guesses, to the hot summer months, and partly because word of mouth is just starting to pick up.

"The quarry and the bones are the big draw," he says, "but we are also a fantastic base camp for all things recreational. This state park captures the breadth of Utah's allure."

The park's brand-new campgrounds have 61 modern spaces and 27 primitive spaces. Cost per night is $50. That's about what a Moab hotel would cost … in 1960.

"And I know this is a weird thing to tell somebody to do," says Brad, grinning, "but you should poke your head in our restrooms. They're the nicest ones I have ever seen in my entire life."

I think it's safe to say that's something Edward Abbey never said in his entire life.

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