Adventures in Utah’s Remote, desolate, and radioactive Fry Canyon

In Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, four roughneck misfits set out to destroy paved roads, dams, and other signs of encroaching industrialization in their remote Southwestern homeland. The novel’s set in the sere desert plains and canyons of southeast Utah, specifically the tiny hamlet of Hite and the area surrounding the White and Fry river canyons. For misanthropes or folks who just can’t stand a crowd, there aren’t many places better. Fry Canyon, where Andrew Burr shot this photo feature, is home to one of the few buildings between Blanding, 50-plus miles to the east, and Hanksville, 72 miles to the west: The Fry Canyon Lodge — now closed and ringed with barbed wire.

Fry Canyon, a tributary of the larger White Canyon, sits 300 miles southeast of Salt Lake City in San Juan County, a short drive from Lake Powell. It’s a slot canyon, 20 feet wide and 150 feet tall in points, with depths upwards of 500 feet in the broader sections. The roads that lead to the canyon, like most of the roads and structures in the region, are remnants of the uranium-mining boom of the 1950s, fueled by the Federal Government’s Cold War nuclear proliferation push. To this day, the groundwater in the area is radioactive. (Fear not, the canyon and its surroundings are safe . . . just don’t venture into any abandoned mines.)

Burr, a photographer and Salt Lake City resident, first spotted hints of a hidden climbing bounty in Fry Canyon while on a canyoneering trip in 1999. As a desert-sandstone aficionado, he recognized the big blocks in the bottom of the canyon as Cedar Mesa sandstone (somewhere in hardness between Wingate and Cutler sandstones), good for climbing, with a mix of quality stone and choss. Over the years, he returned to the idea of taking climbers down into the canyon, but it wasn’t until November 2007, after a series of rope-work-heavy big-wall photo shoots, that shooting some down-toearth boulders in a quiet canyon really sounded good. He called on his friends and fellow SLC’ers Justin Wood, Melissa Lipani, Adam Holmes, Timmy Alexander, and Peter Vintoniv. The team made two trips, camping at the rim of the canyon, within eyeshot of old Anasazi dwelling structures, and exploring the scrubby corridors for routes and problems. “From my first visit, I knew what the boulders at the confluence of the Fry and White canyons looked like, so I got on Google Earth — I looked for boulders similar in size and marked them on the map,” says Burr. “One, I marked the ‘Couch Boulder,’ because it looked about the size and shape of a couch. When we got there, it was as big as a houseboat — you could put three or four sport routes on the thing!”