�����ԹϺ���

Utah had a problem. Shown a photo of Delicate Arch, people guessed it was in Arizona. Asked to describe states in two adjectives, they called Colorado green and mountainous but Utah brown and Mormon. It was 2012. Up in the governor’s Office of Tourism, hands were wrung. Anyone who had poked around canyon country’s mind-melting spires and gurgling green��springs knew it was the most spectacular place on the continent—maybe the world—so why did other states get the good rep?

The office hired a Salt Lake City��ad firm called Struck. The creatives came up with a rebrand labeled , a multimedia campaign to extol the state’s national parks: Zion, Bryce Canyon, , Canyonlands, and Arches. By 2013, a 20-story mashup of red-rock icons towered as a billboard over Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. A San Francisco subway station morphed into a molten ocher slot. Delicate Arch bopped around London on the sides of taxicabs. The pinnacle was a 30-second commercial that was—let’s face it—a masterpiece.

An attractive, young, and somewhat cool family of four—Dad sports shaggy hair to the chin, stubble, and wraparound sunglasses—takes a road trip for the ages. They��splash��through the trippy slo-mo waterdrops of a slot canyon seep, spin��beneath��psychedelic pillars the voice-over calls “giant orange drip castles,” behold��a rapturous explosion of Milky Way stars framed by rock walls, punch their��J-rig through a gargantuan wave in Cataract Canyon. Then finally—and this is the shot I’m sort of��embarrassed to admit still fills my eyes with tears—the little girl, who’s about ten��years old, scrambles along a slickrock bench with a headlamp in the dark until she catches a heart-stopping sunrise glimpse of…��.

“I was like, Holy crap,” says Lance Syrett, chairman of the state’s , remembering his first viewing. “You get that feeling—like hair standing on end—this is lightning in a bottle!”

I lived and guided in these canyons for over a decade, and the ad plucked all my heartstrings. It evoked the hardscrabble seclusion of Ed Abbey and the mad descent of Everett Ruess and the soul serenity of Terry Tempest Williams, yet it promised that you don’t have to be a hermit or daredevil: the Cool Family Robinson managed to follow their bliss, apparently, in a Subaru.

“It was laughably simple,” says Alexandra Fuller, the former creative director of Struck. “Taking natural features that have been there forever and parks that have been there for decades��and putting it together with a new brand.”

The campaign introduced to the mainstream a type of adventure that for decades had only a cult following. Unlike traditional park fare—peaks, woods, wild animals—canyons are an acquired taste, less achievement and more mystery, an immersion into the stone innards of creation that can be at once sensual, hallucinatory, and religious.

The Mighty Five campaign was a smash.��The number of��visitors��to the five parks jumped 12��percent in 2014, 14 percent in 2015, and 20 percent in 2016, leaping from 6.3 million to over 10 million in just three years. The state coffers filled with sales taxes paid on hotels and rental cars and restaurants. The Struck agency brags that the state got a return on its investment of . The clink of crystal flutes bubbling with Mountain Dew echoed across the land.

And then, on Memorial Day weekend of 2015, nearly 3,000 cars descended on Arches National Park for their dose of Whoa. Inside, all 875 parking places were taken, with scores more vehicles scattered catch-as-catch-can. The line to the entrance booth spilled back half a mile, blocking Highway 191. The state highway patrol took the unprecedented step of closing it, effectively shutting down the park. Hundreds of rebuffed visitors drove 30 miles to Canyonlands, where they waited an hour in a two-mile line of cars.

Since then, Arches has been swamped often enough to shut its gate at least nine��times, including the��most recent��Labor Day weekend. Meanwhile, in Zion, hikers wait 90 minutes to board a shuttle and an additional two to four hours to climb the switchbacks of Angels Landing. There, visitors sometimes find outhouses that, although specific to excrement, might well express the condition of the Utah parks as a whole:

“Due to extreme use, these toilets have reached capacity.”

A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s novel����tells of a young man who heads west from Kentucky, hoping to track down his mountain-man uncle. But when he reaches Montana, Uncle Zeb has soured.

“The whole shitaree! Gone, by God,” laments Zeb. “This was man’s country onc’t. Every water full of beaver and a galore of buffler any ways a man looked, and no crampin’ and crowdin,’ Christ sake!”

“It ain’t spoilt, Zeb,” someone dissents. “Depends on who’s lookin’.”

“Greenhorns on every boat, hornin’ in and sp’illin’ the fun. Christ sake!” Zeb says. “Why’n’t they stay to home? Why’n’t they leave it to us as found it? God she was purty onc’t. Purty and new.”

The year was 1830.

I’ve heard Uncle Zeb in my own rants over the past 25 years, lamenting the ruination of my personal West: the canyons around Moab��circa 1990. They remain in my memory purty and new: a hardscrabble outpost where just about any dirtbag could roll into town, get a job washing dishes or rowing rafts, park a rig on dirt roads galore and live rent-free, no crampin’ and no crowdin’.

It’s no longer the same place. Moab is the gateway to Arches—the second smallest of the Mighty Five, where famous landmarks like Delicate Arch, Fiery Furnace, and the Windows are reached by a single dead-end road. More than any other town, it has borne the brunt of the tourism spike. While the county population has grown incrementally in 30 years, from roughly 6,500 to 9,500, and where there was once a dozen or so low-rise, low-rent, mom-and-pop inns with names like the Prospector Lodge and the Apache Motel (“Stay where John Wayne stayed!”), there’s been a flabbergasting growth in lodging: there are now 36��hotels and��2,600 rooms, plus 600 overnight rentals and 1,987 campsites. There’s no way to track how many people occupy each, but on a fully booked holiday, with a moderate estimate of three tourists per unit, that’s at least 15,000 people, vastly outnumbering the locals. extend from tip to tail, and the two-mile drag down Main Street is a 30-minute morass.

Rents have skyrocketed, because hundreds of homes are now used as overnight lodging. Camping now costs twenty��bucks a night, and workers pay upward��of $500 a month to share rooms in “bunkhouses” converted by employers.

I still own my little piece of the past, a single-wide on an acre of thistle on a dirt lane by a creek, and each time I return, my heart cracks a little at yet another plywood box stuccoed into a ComfortSleepDaysExpressSuites, at the jacked-up dune buggies revving down Main Street like the Shriners of the Apocalypse, and at the once secret swimming hole overflowing with greenhorns.

And so it was with a blossom of dread that I planned a Labor Day excursion to investigate this story. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now, and my trailer was rented, so I approached Moab as a regular tourist. Five weeks in advance, I snagged the last available ticket online for a guided hike through Fiery Furnace in Arches. The receipt said, “Expect possible delays at park entrance booth and on park roads.” In a town where I used to pay a hundred bucks a month in rent, even the middling motels now cost two hundred a night. My visit coincided with the opening of a new Hilton called the Hoodoo, which that weekend was charging a cool $330. Per night.

Hoo gonna doo that?

On Friday evening, I checked into a decades-old motor lodge��instead, where my room��was neither a cave nor a basement but resembled both. The lot was full. The place used to be a Ramada Inn, generally vacant enough that river guides and cocktail waitresses could easily sneak into the swimming pool after last call for moonlight skinny-dipping. Now there was a tall fence and you needed a key.

My curiosity beckoned me over a footbridge on a creek and down the hot streets to the Hoodoo, built over an old trailer park where I once responded to a roommate-wanted ad and was greeted by an old-timer with a plastic tube snaking from his nose to an oxygen canister that he toted on a small trolley. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that he’d been a uranium miner and his days were numbered. I was moved by his immediate adoption of “we” statements. “Here’s our radar oven for popping corn,” he said, pointing at the microwave. “And here’s the couch where we’ll watch the VHS.”

Nostalgia comes easy. We don’t just yearn for a place that’s gone, we long for our youth, when we had the freedom and wherewithal to bask in it. When I first moved here, the local alternative paper, ,��proudly boasted that it was “Desperately Clinging to the Past Since 1989.” Searching its archives last month, I : “More people are pouring into town than ever before.��The record-breaking visitation numbers at Arches National Park in 1991 now look puny compared to this spring so far. There were groups camping in parking lots, lining up at City Market, pitching their tents in back and front yards, occasionally without the permission of the homeowners.”

That was 1992. Those record-breaking visits to Arches back then totaled nearly 800,000 a year, half of what came last year.

We are stuck between two metaphors. Are we the boy who cried wolf, always convinced the whole shitaree is spoil’t, or the frog in hot water, who claims things are just slightly worse, but still OK, until it’s too late��and we’re cooked?

I ended up getting free rent in a garage that season, so I never watched Titanic with the old miner. I remembered him as I approached the shimmering glass and modernist cubes of flagstone at��the Hoodoo. Audis and 4Runners glimmered in the lot. A variation of a Joni Mitchell melody sang in my head: They paved a trailer park, and put in a paradise.��

Peering through the glass into the foyer, I saw only one person, a uniformed maid, bent low in the mood lighting, polishing with a white towel a pair of steel pigs.

Maybe we can think of the Utah Office of Tourism as Dr. Frankenstein, and its Mighty Five campaign as the glorious creature run amok. (Disclosure: �����ԹϺ��� has��run��ads from��the campaign, as well as other ads by the��Office of Tourism.)��“It has been said by others that it’s almost like some type of nuclear weapon,” says Lance Syrett, chairman of the tourism-development board that oversees the office. He’s the fourth-generation owner of a cluster of hotels perched on the rim of Bryce Canyon, and he speaks with a likeable country frankness. “They say it works too well. We need to lock it away and not use it anymore.”

I watched a video from this past spring, when Vicki Varela, director of the office, addressed a travel-industry conference in Cedar City, Utah. She wore a camel-colored blazer and an earth-tone scarf, exuding a can-do casualness that made her seem as approachable as a PTA mom and as capable as a Fortune 500 boss. She has proven a great bridge builder; when the federal-government shutdown of 2018 caused many parks to close for 35 days, Varela’s office brokered a deal between two hostile factions—the State of Utah and the National Park Service—to keep the Mighty Five open for Christmas. From the podium, she boasted that tourists spent $9.75 billion in Utah in 2018, which translated to $1.28 billion in tax revenue, or between $1,200 and $1,300 in “tax relief” for each household in the state. , putting it in Utah’s top-ten business sectors.

Of course��neither Varela’s office nor the Mighty Five campaign can take full credit for these booming figures or for the onslaught of tourists. Other factors helped. In 2016, the Park Service celebrated its 100th birthday, launching its own ad campaign; between 2013 and 2016, park visits jumped . The past five years have seen a recovery from the Great Recession, low gas prices, and a continued reluctance by Americans to travel overseas. The populations of the nearest big cities—Denver, Salt Lake, and Las Vegas—are booming. And social media creates its own viral marketing. Southern Utah is