PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

"A New Highway...Through a Mountain!"

During the 1929 travel season, Pipe Spring National Monument experienced its highest visitation since establishment. But the winds of change were starting to blow. As mentioned earlier, the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway was dedicated and opened to traffic on July 4, 1929. The road's impact on both travel past and visitation to Pipe Spring National Monument was nearly immediate for beginning in the 1930 travel season, commercial tours no longer took the road that passed by the monument. Nor were many private auto-tourists inclined to take the longer and less scenic route, even though the distance from Zion to the North Rim had been reduced by the Rockville shortcut.

49. Kanab Lodge, ca. 1928
(Courtesy Union Pacific Museum, image 8519).

Union Pacific published its 1929 maps and promotional literature offering trips to the North Rim via the new highway. Only one trip traveled the Pipe Spring route, a tour of Zion, Bryce, and Cedar Breaks, with the footnote that the Zion road would be taken as soon as it was completed. It offered only a 15-minute stop at Pipe Spring. [625] Beginning in 1929, UP's tour scheduled a new stopping place for lunch: Kanab, Utah.

From that year on, all of UP's tours exclusively took the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway in its park-to-park travel. That year's promotional maps showed both routes to the Grand Canyon. In later years, UP's promotional maps would either show the Pipe Spring route by a very faint line or not show a road there at all. The company's venture with tour buses in southern Utah proved so successful that in 1929 Union Pacific and Northwestern bought out a bus company called Interstate Transit Lines and launched a series of interstate bus routes, soon paralleling all its major rail routes with bus service. By 1931 Utah Parks Company was running 65 buses in its circle tour of southern Utah parks and the North Rim. [626]

50. Union Pacific promotional map, May 1929
(Courtesy Union Pacific Museum).

51. Cover of Union Pacific's publication on Zion—Mt. Carmel Highway, 1929 (Courtesy Union Pacific Museum).

Heaton's monthly reports to Pinkley indicate the new road did not impact visitation to Pipe Spring during the 1929 travel season. [627] The decline became noticeable, however, by early 1930. At the end of January 1930, Heaton reported, "Very few cars and visitors this month aside from the mail truck. There has not been more than two cars per day this month. This is probably due to the fact that the Zion-Mt. Carmel road is now open to travel." [628] Another factor in low visitation that month was most certainly the weather, for one of the worst snowstorms to sweep over southern Utah occurred between January 9-18, 1930.

Still, Heaton's observations about the impact of the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway on Pipe Spring travel were an ominous sign of things to come or - it might be more accurate to say - not to come. For the month of February Heaton observed, "There has been very little travel this month and it has been all local people. The Zion-Mt. Carmel road has been opened to the travel and that has taken the travel from this way." [629] Again in March, Heaton reported, "...very little travel this month." [630] By summer Heaton still reported low visitation even though road conditions were improved due to rains. He wistfully wrote, "...wish more travel would come this way." [631] Things did not pick up in July, usually the heaviest travel month for the region's parks. Heaton's report for July stated, "There is very little to report.... Only one car camped here this month and an average of one car of tourists per day and only about half of them stop." [632] Two years later Heaton reported that visitors who came generally drove out from Fredonia, rather than from Short Creek: "After spending an hour or more here they return to the highway and continue on their way to Grand Canyon, Bryce or Zion National Parks." [633]

While visitation in Zion rose 65.6 percent the year after the opening of the new highway, visitation figures for Pipe Spring dropped dramatically. From the estimated 24,883 Pipe Spring visitors reported for FY 1929, only 8,765 were reported for FY 1930, a 65 percent drop. [634] (The drop corresponds almost exactly with the amount of increase in visitation to Zion and Bryce Canyon for the same period.) In 1931 visitation to Pipe Spring dropped to an estimated 2,300; in 1932, only 2,100 visitors came to Pipe Spring. [635] Thus in just two years after the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway was completed, Pipe Spring National Monument experienced more than a 90 percent decrease in visitation.

52. "If it's a National Park..." Union Pacific advertisement, ca. 1930 (Courtesy Union Pacific Museum).

Zion National Park's travel statistics for FY 1930 recorded another marked trend: while the number of people driving automobiles to Zion nearly doubled between 1929 and 1930, the count of those coming by train dropped by about 20 percent. [636] As more people took their personal cars on vacation, their destinations and routes were no longer constrained by Union Pacific's planned tours. One would think this would have lessened the impact of the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway on Pipe Spring, but it did not. Because the spectacular new highway with its mile-long tunnel cut through solid rock was a not-to-be-missed attraction in and of itself, its construction resulted in a permanent rerouting of tourist traffic traveling from southern Utah parks to the Grand Canyon's North Rim. Shortly before the 1930 travel season, Union Pacific published a large format, five-page advertising brochure on the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway, complete with panoramic photographs of Zion scenery taken from the vantage point of the new road. The publication proclaimed that the new $2 million, 24-mile highway "is one of the most spectacular scenic roads in America, if not the whole world." [637] It also stated that one of the new road's chief advantages was that the shorter distance between parks resulted in a $15 reduction in the cost of the tour. The amount of driving distance saved, however, completely depended on what parks one was visiting. If one traveled from Zion to Grand Canyon, the new highway was only 18 miles shorter than the old route past Pipe Spring. On the other hand, if one traveled from Zion to Bryce Canyon, a distance of 61 miles was saved. The new road provided an obvious boost to visitation at Bryce Canyon, but then Bryce Canyon had just been elevated to national park status. The new park's visitation doubled between the 1929 and the 1930 travel seasons. [638]

About 1930, Union Pacific's advertising wizards hatched the slogan, "If it's a National Park it's probably on the Union Pacific." By then 13 of the nation's 19 national parks were either directly on UP rail routes or could be conveniently reached by UP service, such as the Utah Parks Company's bus operations serving the Cedar City tourist railhead. It was most likely a very effective advertising message but carried with it the veiled implication that what wasn't on their route perhaps wasn't worth seeing. By the 1940s, a number of UP's promotional maps did not even depict the old route past Pipe Spring and certainly never advertised it, as UP had (by including it in their itinerary) from 1924 to 1929. The fortunes of Pipe Spring, "monument to western pioneers," seemed destined to suffer the whims of tourism. As the demands of motoring tourists (and those who served them) contributed to the monument's establishment in 1923, so did their changing travel patterns lead to near abandonment of Pipe Spring National Monument after 1930.

53. Sketch map of Southwest Utah and Grand Canyon, 1930
(Courtesy Zion National Park).
(click on image for an enlargement in a new window - ~96K)

Union Pacific wasn't the only agency changing its maps. A map of southwestern Utah and northern Arizona included in the general circular for the 1930 travel season, issued by Zion and Bryce Canyon, also indicated that the Zion-Mt. Carmel route was the one to take from Zion to reach either Bryce Canyon or the North Rim. Major routes were depicted in bold, as opposed to the fainter line of the old route that passed Pipe Spring. At least the Park Service circular that contained this map included a few enticing paragraphs describing the monument:

Pipe Spring, now a national monument, contains the finest spring of pure water along the road between Hurricane, Utah and Fredonia, Arizona, a distance of 62 miles, and some beautiful shade trees, and to travelers it is a welcome oasis in the desert...

Pipe Spring is an attractive place for motorists using the old road to stop and eat lunch... [639]

The circular fails to mention that camping was allowed at Pipe Spring, only saying that comfortable accommodations could be had in Fredonia and Kanab. Neither is there any reference to the history of Pipe Spring.

It would not be accurate, however, to view the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway as the sole reason for the dramatic drop in visitation to Pipe Spring by 1932. Travel statistics to nearly all southwestern national monuments show a marked downward trend after 1929. While a steady increase in visitation was experienced in the late 1920s, this trend began to reverse after the Wall Street stock market crash of October and November 1929. Overall visitation to all southwestern national monuments was at its peak for the 1929 travel year: 567,667. The following year, the figure dropped to 472,095. In 1931 it fell even further to 392,011, representing a 69 percent drop in only two years. One might argue that the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway caused Pipe Spring's initial 65 percent decrease in 1930, but that the continued decrease in 1931 and 1932 (the other 25 percent drop) was caused by the effects of the onset of the Great Depression.

While the completion of the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway spelled trouble for Pipe Spring, a road disaster in Zion could just as easily bring about good times again. In September 1932 the road's mile-long tunnel was blocked by a cave-in and was closed for the entire month of October. Heaton reported, "...the contractors on the Zion road had some bad luck by having the tunnel blocked by a cave-in. I don't wish Zion Park any bad luck but their bad road has boomed my travel. It sure puts new life into a fellow after two years of depression in travel to see cars coming and going all hours of the day and night. It is like it was before the Zion-Mt. Carmel Road was opened." [640] Visitation at the monument went from 411 visitors in September to 750 in October with an average of 10 cars per day. By November the tunnel had reopened and visitation was down to 165, mostly local travelers.

Throughout his tenure at Pipe Spring, Leonard Heaton demonstrated a willingness to follow whatever direction he was given by Park Service officials. There were times though, particularly in the early 1930s, that the monument received few official visits. On July 1, 1930, Heaton had to travel to Kanab to meet with Horace Albright, as the director either wasn't inclined or didn't have time to make the 15-mile drive to Pipe Spring on the poor road from Fredonia. At such times Heaton used his own judgment in administering the monument, just as former Director Stephen T. Mather had advised him. Two things began to alter this pattern: 1) the push beginning in 1929 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to obtain water from Pipe Spring for the Kaibab Paiute, and 2) the launching of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, most enacted by Congress beginning in March 1933.