This is the Hogsback, an apt description if I ever saw one. Leave the road and you’d be well advised to say your prayers on the way down into one of the rough, dry gulches. The result is a road that seems to balance precariously on top of a long, high and steep mound of rubble with no runoff – indeed, with no room of any kind on either side of the tar. When that reached the height they needed for the road surface, they just tarred the top and painted on some lines. I haven’t been able to find out exactly how the CCC engineers dealt with this, but the road looks as if they just dumped a kind of dyke of soil and rock on top of the slickrock, a little wider than the road. The chosen route ran over huge outcrops of Desert Slickrock.

This is much of the reason why Utah 12 is not only a Scenic Byway but one of the much rarer All-American Roads.ĭesert Slickrock – would you like to build a road over this? And despite the fact that the ride up into Dixie National Forest had been a blast so far, we were still looking forward to the best part of Utah 12: the Hogsback. Fortunately my riding companions didn’t hold my misapprehension against me for Australians, riding through snow is more a novelty than an imposition. Nearly three kilometres up and enveloped by steadily falling snow, I discovered my mistake. As it was, I assumed that the notation ‘Summit 9400ft’ referred to the nearby Lion Mountain and not Utah Scenic Byway 12. Had I known the American definition when I consulted my map in the bar in Torrey, Utah with the temperature dropping visibly outside and snow threatening from lowering clouds, I might have chosen a different route. How was I to know that the word ‘summit’, which indicates the top of a mountain where I come from, can mean ‘the highest point along a road’ to our American cousins? You can add Australia to that, and make it three nations. “England and America are two nations separated by a common language.” – George Bernard Shaw (attrib.)

We missed out on the Poison Road, but the Hogsback made up for it.

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