After a classic Western battle between the local government and conservation groups, the first 28 miles of the Burr Trail were paved, and the rest became a patchwork of paved and unpaved sections. Garfield County wanted to breathe some life into a moribund economy. The Sierra Club, the National Parks and Conservation Association and others sought to preserve the Burr Trail’s primitiveness as well as the pristine nature of the surrounding country. The resulting road is a monument to environmental gridlock.
In 1987 Garfield County figured it could increase tenfold the meager traffic along the dirt road by paving it. With the decline of mining and ranching, recreation had become vital to the county’s livelihood. (By 1994, two national parks that sit in Garfield County, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef, would attract 2.5 million visitors to this county of 4,000 people.) But when word of the paving reached major environmental groups, they went to court, lobbied Washington and churned out press releases that conjured up a nightmare scenario: Winnebagos and Dodge Caravans cruising along a modern highway.
Any hope for a quick resolution faded when the Burr Trail became the center of an esoteric but important dispute over who controls the fights of way of thousands of backcountry roads, stock trails and even dog-sled routes that traverse millions of acres of federal lands. In January the Department of the Interior is due to issue new guidelines to sort through thousands of right-of-way claims, including Garfield County’s for the Burr Trail.
Perspectives on the Burr Trail dispute are as fluky as the winds down in the canyons. Anti-paving guerrillas have painted their battle cry on a new concrete bridge: KEEP IT LIKE IT WUZ. But Paul Hansen, a former rancher who’s selling off his Boulder land, says that “saving” the Burr Trail by keeping it out of county hands “is a fat man’s deal. You go there and sit looking out at the rocks and say, ‘Gee, that’s pretty!’ But you sit there long enough without a job and get hungry enough, and you’ll start thinking differently.”
Some of the restless young people who wait tables and work the sales counters at the marina in Bullfrog would just as soon the county paved over the whole trail; it would give them a shorter route to Las Vegas. “They call it a scenic road. I don’t know why,” says a waitress at the Defiance House Lodge. “There’s nothing between here and Boulder.”
But to others, the allure of the trail’s remoteness–a remoteness now ensured by its rutted and washboardy dirt sections–is powerful, especially in the winter, when you might not see a single person or vehicle all day long on those stretches. To those people, “nothing” is everything–because emptiness, like mining and ranching, is a fading commodity in the West.
