How The West Was Awesome

My family has a cabin in Morgan County, about a mile north of East Canyon Reservoir. My wife's great-grandparents ran sheep on a couple thousand acres, some of which is now at the bottom of East Canyon. They lived in Porterville and built the cabin some for sheep business, but mostly for the deer hunt. Parley (my wife's great-grandpa) and his brothers/cousins/relatives made his house the base of operations during the hunt. Eventually, Edith (great-grandma) got fed up with the mess and stink of a bunch of deer hunters and kicked them out, so they built a cabin. This is a cabin in the original sense of the word. There is no electricity, no toilet, no shower, the water in the sink comes from a spring on the property. It is a cinder block box with a tin roof and an ace and a deuce painted on the gable.

In the next few years, the wives decided they would spend the hunt in Salt Lake, shopping and cavorting. This soon became a tradition, and it has stuck. Every third weekend in October the women head to Salt Lake while we head to the cabin. A grand time is had by all. (I will dedicate a post to hunting. Some people are turned off by it, but I actually found some common ground with a vegan because of it. It is all in the attitude.)

This weekend was our annual cabin preparation. We headed up with weed-whackers, shovels, paint, and cleaner to ready the cabin for the hunt. We got to the cabin around 10:30 on Saturday and worked till a few hours before dusk. When we were finished the cabin looked new, weeds cleared, fire pit rearranged, inside cleaned, outside freshly painted-

A short break before lunch and the last hour and a half before dark were spent shooting. We had two shotguns, .22 rifles, a .22 pistol, a .45, an 9mm, a .25, and an assault rifle. Add to that 180 clay pigeons, dozens of cans, some paper targets, family, and some close friends, and you have yourself a recipe for a great time.

The cabin, and the reason we can shoot like we did, is situated nicely in the bottom of a small valley in the middle of nowhere between East Canyon and Hennifer (don't feel bad if you've never heard of it, I think 18 people live there). Which brings me to the point of this already pretty long post - Utah.

I love Utah. In the hour we spent driving from our house in Murray to the cabin we went from developed urban metropolis to secluded nowhere. A short trip (on foot, shorter on 4wheeler) gets you to the top of a hill where you can see for miles and the only signs of human life are a barn and the faint outline of a minor highway. The trees were already beginning to take on their fall wardrobe and the evening air had that thin, crisp taste of fall. It was perfect.

I'm lucky, I am equally at home in the Salt Lake Valley as I am in rural Morgan County. As a planner I think that will serve me well. Rural and urban planning have different targets and different strategies, and I think that gets lost. In the four years I have been going up Weber Canyon to Morgan I have seen more development, most of which is not ideal, than I would like. If an entire county has managed to avoid installing a single stop light all the way into the 21st century, it deserves to keep that character. But the development I have seen falls into the "too small to plant, too big to mow" category. One acre lots which ruin the rural character, but fail to bring urban benefits.

If you look at almost any Smalltown, USA there is a clear pattern. A dense(er) town center surrounded by large agricultural properties. The small town feel means houses on smaller lots, close together. One acre lots are a false rural feel. Rural planers (in my admittedly less than experienced opinion) need to reevaluate how development happens. Envision Utah is doing some wonderful scenario planning for Morgan County right now. I hope the planner and the county will have the foresight to adopt and implement Envision Utah's ideas so the county will be able to maintain its character and maybe avoid stoplights for another century.