The Old Spanish Trail, Utah

While we were camped in the Paria River area we were intrigued by what looked like an old road leading out of the wash behind the campsite.  Whazoo had noticed it and asked that we check it out after they left.  NOTE: In some of these pictures it is hard to see the roadbed. If you zoom in to enlarge the pictures it may be easier.

You can see it as a faint line running slightly upwards from right to left, in the upper section of the picture. It actually shows as a line of greenery and it runs behind the butte immediately above the 2
campers. We got up one morning and decided this was a good day to check out the road. It was indeed an old road...very old. Whazoo had surmised that it might be part of the old Morman "Honeymoon" road to St. George, Utah. Actually it is part of the "Old Spanish Trail, built for mule trains around 1829. The Spanish Trail connected Spanish settlements at Santa Fe and Los Angeles. The trail was 2,700 miles long. The section we were on was actually a secondary route used mainly for travel between Utah and Santa Fe, and followed a trail used by Spanish Padres Dominguez and Escalante some 50 years earlier.

Here we are standing on the road bed which curves away from us to the right and is cut by a wash, then continues off the picture at center right behind the dark green bush. We followed the road up the escarpment and over the top, along the ridge until it crested the ridge and dropped down to meet the existing route 89 for a short distance before wandering off again roughly paralleling the highway.  In a few hundred yards it again crosses the highway and follows along north of it.

 

You can see the road bed heading up and through the cut in the ridge

Here you can see that the old road has come around the butte and is meeting the course of the new Highway. We were pretty amazed to see so much of the road bed in relatively good shape after almost 200 years. It is hard to see in the pictures, but it was actually quite easy to follow along and the engineering of the road bed was impressive.