Settling Bluff

Learn about the harrowing expedition that settled the tiny San Juan County community of Bluff!

In 1888, a hardy group of Mormon settlers founded the town of Bluff, Utah. The party, which has since become known as the Hole-In-The-Rock Expedition, had been sent to present-day San JuanCounty to establish a religious mission among the local Indians and open the region to further white settlement.

By November of 1879, the settlers, who came from towns across southern and central Utah, were congregating at Forty-Mile Spring just south of Escalante, and immediately realized they were up against some of the most rugged and forbidding terrain in the western United States. The trail they planned to follow was supposed to be a "short cut" that would take them directly across the Colorado River, and lop almost 500 miles off their trip. Instead, what they encountered was a narrow notch in the canyon wall, nicknamed the Hole-In-The-Rock that led down to the Colorado River more than 1000 feet below. Opting to take their chances going down the steep crack, the expedition blasted, chiseled, and shoveled a path toward the river. When they neared the bottom, the settlers realized their only hope of reaching the river safely would be to build their road out from the canyon wall. So they pounded oak timbers into a series of holes they had drilled into the rock and then drove their wagons down the wooden road to the ferry that would take them across the Colorado. On the far bank, the group clawed their way back up another canyon face and across more rugged ground, until, exhausted and hungry, they drove their wagons into the flatlands along the San Juan River where Bluff now stands. It had taken the settlers nearly six months to travel a distance they thought would only take six weeks.