Castle Valley

Its summit is forest-clad, and among the forests are many beautiful parks.

On the south, it ends in a great escarpment, which descends into Castle Valley.

This southern escarpment presents one of the most wonderful facades of the world.

It is from 2,000 to 4,000 feet high.

The descent is not made by one bold step, for it is cut by canyons and cliffs.

It is a zone several miles in width, which is a vast labyrinth of canyons, cliffs, buttes, pinnacles, minarets, and detached rocks of cyclopean magnitude, the whole destitute of soil and vegetation, colored in many brilliant tones and tints, and carved in many weird forms, a land of desolation dedicated forever to the geologist and the artist, where civilization could find no resting place.

Then comes Castle Valley, to describe which is to beggar language and pall imagination.

On the north is the Tavaputs.

There are coyotes, wind in the cottonwood trees, a never-ending night sky, and once in a while, water comes and goes with a ferocity.

The Utah desert, with its raw beauty, has long been a muse for writer Terry Tempest Williams, who lives in Castle Valley.

Her environmental classic Refuge, an unnatural history of family and place, interwove a story of environmental crisis with her mother's battle with cancer.

In her 2026 book, The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, Terry explores miraculous moments of grace that call for our attention, even in spaces that may at first seem unremarkable.

And when they came in, I had a basket of stone hearts I had collected through the years.

And when each person came in, they took a heart.

We sat down in the living room and we talked about, for our neighbor's sake, one thing that we loved about Castle Valley.

It took an hour.

And we don't have that privilege.

This story ends where it began, in Castle Valley.

For almost all of my 50 years there, I was the ditch master of the valley's irrigation company.

That meant I was the one who got up before dawn to check the springs, clear the ditches, keep the water flowing to my neighbor's fields.

In the 1970s, sooner or later, almost every strong young guy in Moab went to work at the Atlas Uranium Mill or one of the three hundred mines or the trucking companies providing ore to the mill.

The wages were two dollars and sixty-seven cents an hour, so how could you resist? Four of my neighbors in Castle Valley were working there, too, so we would carpool for the twenty-mile drive down the canyon of the Colorado River to town, where the mill sat hulking beside the river in a poisonous miasma that crept up the river several miles and floated into Moab.

I remember we five big men crammed into one friend's little Datsun pickup truck, sitting on top of one another, heads bent against the windshield so tight that none of us could walk when we finally got to the mill.

We thought it was hilarious in a gallows humor kind of a way.

Bonds, royalty rates, methane fees, not front-page material, but the fiscal cost is not the only kind.

I left the Atlas Mill, but I stayed in Utah.

Eleanor and I built our life in Castle Valley, and over the years I ended up running the Grand Canyon Trust, one of the leading conservation organizations on the Colorado Plateau.

And uranium came back into view.

Then we have the new reality show, The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls.

And this one takes cast members from The Chosen away from the set and into rugged locations like Utah's Castle Valley, the Canyonlands and Colorado River, and many other remote places with Bear Grylls.

It was this celebrity survivalist.

I don't know if you've ever watched any of his shows before.

It's on the Porcupine Rim, which is near Moab.

And it overlooks Castle Valley, which is this incredible western view.

If you think of these...

Spires coming out of mesas across a gorgeous desert with reds and oranges across the valley.

Castle Valley is this iconic visual of the American West.

And you got to run along that morning.

I got to run.