What was the first outdoor space that you loved? With people and objects, this question is more straightforward: first kiss, first bike, etc. It’s harder to pin down places — perhaps encountered almost by accident, that sparked a jolt of wonder and flood of reverence for the first time. My first love, I’ve long believed, is the summit of Mount Timpanogos. But if I consider the more complex experience of love, with all of the dedication, pain, and heartbreak that love invokes, I’d have to say my true first is Sand Hollow.
In the spring of 1997, I only knew this place as the “Sand Dunes off Flora Tech Road.” The dunes were a fairly nondescript cluster of sandstone outcroppings and waves of orange sand in what was then undeveloped land between Hurricane (pronounced Her’kun) and St. Geoge, Utah. Locals occasionally accessed the dunes for four-wheeling escapades, but they were otherwise unknown and quiet — the ideal getaway for high school seniors on the cusp of being released into the world like so much sand.
It was May 26, one week before graduation, and it was one of the first trips I ever embarked on without parents or relatives. My friend Liz worked out most of the logistics — finding an RV park where we could camp, gathering up a tent and propane grill, and preparing elaborate meal plans that we couldn’t cook due to the fact it was spring in Southern Utah and insanely windy. (Yes, we had to throw away the half-cooked and sand-dusted chicken kabobs and resort to cereal in the car for dinner.) Also, that tent we’re setting up — we did not stake it down well and at one point it blew into a tree with all of our sleeping bags inside. We were fresh-faced newbies for all of this, but we learned important lessons.
On Saturday morning, we loaded up my friend Liz’s Chevy Cavalier with too many snacks and too little water, then rumbled along the washboard road to nowhere. Driving out Flora Tech Road was like driving into the Australian Outback without a map. All that lay in front of us was a barren expanse, a sea of sand, salt brush, and redrock islands. We parked in a dusty pullout beneath a random sandstone outcropping, clambered out of the car, and trudged to the top of a barrier dune. Everything beyond was roadless, trailless, seemingly undiscovered.
I had been feeling ambivalent about graduation. It’s true that I did not enjoy the routine of school and couldn’t wait to be free of it, but I already understood that “freedom” was a delusion. I’d work a part-time job through the summer and in the fall start classes at the University of Utah. I didn’t have a major lined up. I hadn’t a clue which career I wanted to pursue or what kind of adult I wanted to become, and I already resented the necessity of choosing a predetermined path. Looking back, I wanted then what I still want now — for life to be an adventure with discoveries around every corner, even at the expense of security and comfort.
It was fitting that, one week before graduation, we stole a weekend to wander aimlessly through sand dunes. We explored alcoves, climbed sandstone towers, jumped from high ledges, buried ourselves in the sand, acted out scenes of crawling through the desert, became unbearably thirsty, scraped our knees on the rocks, sunburned our arms and legs, and laughed maniacally like children in a playground. I’d never felt so free. There were no rules, no set paths, and no one to tell me where I needed to be or when. We wandered, and at times became a little bit lost, until we followed our erratic footprints in the sand and found our way back to the car.
Life, of course, would continue to rumble down its path, but for years these dunes remained a comforting space to seek out from time to time. The tranquility of this place is difficult to describe. There was the way the silence felt eternal, even when the wind was howling. We could wander all day and wend through rocks without any direction. We were always a little bit lost but never hopelessly lost. We could climb and dig and jump like small children, and also sit quietly and gaze toward the expansive horizon. The place was simultaneously ancient and ethereal. We found clay pottery shards in a hollow. Piles of sand shifted before our eyes.
I was a senior in college when I first heard about the plans to flood this place. Sand Hollow would be an “off-stream reservoir,” diverting water from the nearby Virgin River and holding 50,000 acre-feet in an appropriately named hollow of sand. The dunes, the rocky outcroppings, much of it would be underwater. I was apoplectic. Under the encouragement of an environmental science professor, I researched the project and wrote letters to my Utah congressmen and the governor. I waxed poetic about the beauty of the place, the rare unspoiled nature of it, and how could the state even consider such a wasteful despoiling of the desert just so residents in Washington County could water their lawns and build more golf courses? It was obscene.
I shouldn’t have been surprised — yet I was deeply demoralized — when I received no response save for a single form letter from the office of Gov. Mike Leavitt that made it clear not even a low-level staffer had read my letter. Sand Hollow Reservoir would be completed in 2002. The adjacent state park would become one of the state’s most visited destinations. The very existence of Sand Hollow Reservoir served as a reminder that there’s nowhere safe to place my heart. Anything — anywhere — can be taken away.
Last November, I embarked on a trip to Zion National Park with my friend Danni and my husband Beat. We just happened to end up at an AirBnB that was a few blocks from the reservoir. In the 25 years since my first trip to Her’kun, a sprawling neighborhood of subdivisions has grown up from this once barren expanse of sand and rock. For several days we commuted from the apartment through miles of neighborhoods on our way to the park. I marveled and how it could have ever been a single washboarded road to nowhere.
On the final day of our trip, I set out for a run from the front door. The morning was fiercely windy, with the same gritty blasts of sand I remember so fondly. Rather than run south toward the reservoir, which did not appeal, I followed a nondescript doubletrack west into the wall of wind. At each turn, I wondered if this was perhaps a place I once stood.
I stopped for a breather at the edge of a sandstone outcropping, looking north toward the Virgin River corridor. In spite of myself, I smiled at the beauty of the place. There’s a lesson here about letting go of my fear about the passing of time. Someday the reservoir will be gone and these rocks will still stand, until they too erode to sand. But there’s something about love that remains.