Woodside, Utah

First timer?  In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-every-three-or-four days blog), I have my computer select a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”  I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location.  To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is and what the various numbers and abbreviations mean in the first paragraph), please see “About Landing,” (and “Abbreviations” and “Cryptic Numbers”) above.

Landing number 2187; A Landing A Day blog post number 615.

Dan:  Geez.  If I don’t landing in NV, I land in . . . UT; 82/61; 3/10; 9; 150.8.  Here’s my regional landing map:

And my local landing map (showing that – what else – I landed way out in the boonies):

 

Am I sounding a little bitter?  Forgive me while I do the statistics.  Since landing 2111, I’ve landed 77 times.  Over that span, I’ve landed in NV 9 times and in UT 7 times.  That’s 16/77, or 21% of my landings have been in those two states!   That’s in spite of the fact that these two states make up 6.4% of the area of the lower 48.  So I’m landing here at triple the rate that I should.  Oh well, moving right along . . .

Since I’m using Google Earth (GE) for part of my watershed analysis, I’ll jump right to my trip on in:

 

Staying with GE, here’s a shot showing that I landed behind some bluffs (the “Book Cliffs”), and that I landed in the watershed of the Price River (4^th hit):

 

Zooming right up to my landing, here’s a GE shot that shows I landed on the side of a totally-wilderness valley of an unnamed tributary to the Price River:

 

Zooming back some more, you can follow the valley as it makes its way towards the Price:

 

And here’s one that shows its entire course:

 

Amazingly, I found a GE Panoramio shot (by UDink) that actually shows where my unnamed tributary discharges to the Price:

 

To make the drainage path a little clearer, I added a blue line:

 

Here’s a GE shot showing StreetView coverage, with the orange dude on the Route 6 bridge over the Price River:

 

Here’s what the orange dude is looking at (a pretty spectacular scene, if I don’t say so myself):

 

Here’s a boring old StreetAtlas map showing that the Price discharges to the Green River (32^nd hit); on to the Colorado (171^st hit):

 

Returning to GE, check out this shot of where the Price & the Green meet up:

 

As a Jersey guy, this kind of landscape just blows me away . . .

So I landed near Woodside.  Here’s what Wiki has to say:

Woodside is a ghost town located on the west bank of the shallow Price River in the nearly uninhabited eastern part of Emery County, Utah, United States. Its fenced-in filling station is one of the only signs of human activity along the lonely stretch of U.S. Route 6 between Wellington and Green River.

Attracted by relatively abundant water and an extensive growth of cottonwood trees, early settlers founded a settlement along the railroad known as Lower Crossing.  As the town grew, adding a few stores and a blacksmith shop, it was renamed “Woodside” for the cottonwood groves.

One of Woodside’s biggest challenges was the Price River itself. The streamflow was highly variable, peaking early and nearly drying up by late summer. The river’s large drainage basin also meant that even a distant cloudburst could bring a destructive flash flood.

Despite these problems the town continued growing. A hotel and stockyards were built adjacent to the railroad station, and Woodside became a supply point for neighboring ranches.  In 1900 the population stood at 114; it had almost tripled by 1910, when it had schools, saloons, and a large hotel, and the population had reached 328.

In the late 1920s Woodside’s livestock shipping facilities and railroad station were taken away when the railroad consolidated much of its operations in Helper.  This blow was followed by severe droughts in the 1930s, and by 1940 the population had dropped to 30.

In the 1940s Woodside became a minor tourist attraction. In the 1880s the railroad had dug a large water well here, which had later turned into a cold bubbling mudpot driven by naturally-occurring pressurized carbon dioxide gas. The hole was developed into a cold water geyser, along with a filling station, store, and cafe.

The cafe and store burned down around 1970, and the geyser and filling station are the only remnants of Woodside.  The geyser formerly spouted as high as 75 feet, but is much lower now.

A tanker truck explosion scene in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise was shot in Woodside; the town was bought by Roy Pogue in the early 1990s.  In 2012 Pogue decided to sell the townsite.

Three things of special interest:  1)  the geyser; 2) Thelma & Louise and 3) Roy Pogue is trying to sell his town.

Here’s a 1970 shot of the geyser, which I lifted from Roy Pogue’s real estate website:

 

You can see the restaurant / gift shop that evidently burned down soon after the above photo was taken.  I wonder if the geyser can be restored with “some investment and imagination?”  Here’s a GE Panoramio photo by Chris Colt showing what I presume to be a recent picture of the geyser:

I think it needs a little work to make its way back to a full-fledged tourist attraction . . .

Anyway, Roy Pogue has put together quite the website making the pitch to sell 700+ acres for $3.9 million.  Here’s the header:

 

It’s definitely worth a perusal.  Click here to check it out.

John Glionna from the L.A. Times wrote an article about the sale in 2012.  Here are some excerpts:

WOODSIDE, Utah — Roy Pogue has loved a lot of things in his 63 years — like his wife, Chris, and her little Daffy Duck tattoo, not to mention the couple’s six children.

Yet few things have made his heart go flip-flop more than a dry-gulch piece of land out in the middle of Utah’s nowhere.

Sometimes, love truly is blind. A lot of words describe Pogue’s backside-of-beyond parcel, where rust rules and the thermometers have all surrendered to the cold and the heat. One of those words is Godforsaken.

More than 700 dusty, rocky acres in all, the spread sits along the trickling Price River, under the boxy shadow of the Book Cliffs. Like Pogue himself, a man in bib overalls, handlebar mustache and well-oiled cowboy hat, the property exudes a bit of Wild West panache: At its core is a creaky old ghost town complete with an abandoned gold mine, cold-water geyser and a supposed onetime hide-out for the outlaw Butch Cassidy when he wasn’t riding with the Sundance Kid.

Over the years, he made ends meet by ranching, farming (yes, farming) and running his gas station. And for a long time he made it work. For 70 miles along isolated U.S. Route 6, between the towns of Price and Green River, it’s been just Pogue and a herd of free-range llamas. But maybe not for much longer.

After decades of sweat, labor, battles with the federal government over cattle and water rights, fights with his wife, who prefers people to llamas — and, finally, declining health — Pogue performed the toughest chore of his life: pounding in the for-sale sign.

“This place has meant so much to me,” he said, sweating under a relentless midday sun. “It’s the closest thing to real freedom I’ve ever known in my life. At this price, it might be a cold day in hell before someone buys it. And maybe that’s good.”

John Glionna can turn a good phrase.  I particularly like:  “Pogue’s backside-of-beyond parcel.”

And then there’s the tank truck scene from Thelma and Louise, filmed right here in Woodside:

 

I’ll close with this lovely GE Panoramio shot of the Price River, just downstream from its passage through the Book Cliffs, by frequent contributor LSessions:

 

That’ll do it.

KS

Greg

 

© 2015 A Landing A Day