Bluff | The USA: Landscapes and Urban Spaces

We were hoping to stay two nights in the town of Bluff, about 30 miles from Mexican Hat. When we arrived to find cliffs enclosing the flat valley floor, we were very glad we had chosen the town as our destination. The first motel we tried, the Mokee, had a vacancy, and the price for a well-equipped, very clean and recently up-graded room was so competitive that we agreed to stay without checking nearby options. Research undertaken later confirmed that we had secured a very good deal.

Bluff had a population of about 300. With Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks State Park and Hovenweep National Monument all within easy reach with your own transport, the town existed largely to meet the needs of tourists, but it was just large enough (yes, I kid you not) to have facilities such as gas stations, small shops, diners and a post office to meet the everyday needs of a permanent local population that did not depend on tourism. Amazingly, the oldest part of the settlement had a historic “city” loop, which was no more than the road enclosing two or three blocks, one block of which had Bluff’s meticulously reconstructed fort. However, we both liked Bluff, and not only because the fort had many artefacts and displays reflecting first people and pioneer lifestyle and culture dating back about 250 years.

We went for a walk as far as Twin Rocks. We looked around the grounds of Desert Rose Inn and Cabins, perhaps the town’s best lodgings; admired the eroded cliffs that squeezed against the linear town; saw three of Bluff’s more substantial but still quite modest Victorian-era houses; found some fencing and other facilities that constituted the land set aside for rodeos; noted that quite a lot of old motor vehicles had been left to rot outside; took photos of some of the roadside signs evoking the recent past; and encountered a slim desert fox and half a dozen rabbits. I warmed to Bluff, just as some artists and craftspeople had. Artists and craftspeople had settled in the town in recent years, the region’s remarkable visibility being an attraction almost as great as the nearby natural wonders.

The Fort, Bluff, Utah

Bluff, Utah

We eventually arrived in Hanksville and took a room in the Hanksville Inn. We were charged $77 a night without breakfast. The room was expensive, but we were grateful for somewhere to stay (the only other functioning motel seemed to be full). We had chats with the owner who had been running the motel with his mother for a few years, but neither were very concerned about its appearance except for the clean and comfortable rooms. The owner provided a room free of charge to a man who did small jobs around the place to keep it ticking over. The motel had some shabby and dysfunctional aspects, which more or less reflected the reality of Hanksville as a whole. However, the town had its eccentricities and I soon grew to like the place more than first impressions suggested I would.

The relatively few people who lived permanently in the town or during what passed as the summer tourist season seemed to be loners content with their own company and determined to subsist as independently as they could (no doubt a majority voted Republican in the belief that small government was better than big government). There were two gas stations, but one was rarely staffed. The other much busier gas station had a store (Hollow Mountain) occupying a small cave in a vast eruption of rock, a cave which had been enlarged as the owners met the needs of people with more sophisticated requirements in terms of food, drink, maps, guidebooks and souvenirs. Near the gas station was Blondie’s Eatery and Gift Store, which served a limited range of items for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It pulled in the customers because the local competition was almost non-existent. Across the road was the town’s best lodging option, but the night we wanted to stay, it had filled with a large number of bikers, all of whom were middle-aged or elderly. Next to the best lodging option was a derelict gas station and, on the bone-dry, flat and scrub-clad ground nearby, six houseboats in various stages of decay. Some of the houseboats had been left by their owners for safekeeping (however, there was no fence worthy of its name enclosing the land). The others had been acquired by a local man who intended to restore them to their former glory, perhaps with a view to selling them to make a profit. It is worth pointing out that the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was the nearest sheet of water on which the houseboats could sail or be moored. It was about 40 miles away.

Toward the west end of the town and not far from the small post office (we were amazed how many small settlements still had post offices in the US. What a contrast with the UK where post offices in small towns and villages were closing at an alarming rate) was an abandoned motel with about a dozen small rooms. Someone, perhaps the last owner of the motel, had collected hundreds of spare parts for motor vehicles and agricultural machinery and welded them together to make figures of prehistoric and contemporary animals, and people engaged in activities such as playing musical instruments. There was also some wooden fencing. It was part of a small rodeo or large corral. Nearby were lots of bales of hay to feed livestock. Landmark buildings did not exist in Hanksville, perhaps because the settlement amounted to no more than the intersection of Highways 24 and 95 and about six nearby streets, but some old wooden buildings lurked in shadowy spots. Officially, the population was about 200. It had declined from almost 400 in 2000.