Cathy Church, guide, hotelier
“We’re really not restricted that much, I think it was a big scare in the beginning, they were afraid.”
DISPATCHES FROM MONUMENTAL AMERICA: A LISTENING TOUR
You can’t miss the giant, military transport vehicles waiting in a lot next to the downtown strip in Kanab, Utah. Across the street from them, nestled beside a carp pond and shaded by catalpa trees, is Brookside Cottage B&B, owned by Cathy Church, who drives visitors into the Escalante inside those vehicles as if they were troops.
A Kanab resident since 1968, when “most of the houses were vacant,” she guided deer hunters before she got into the hospitality business. She bristled when the monument was established, because she wanted every dirt road inside to remain open. Likewise, she is friends with local ranchers who resented the specter of grazing fewer cows on the land.
Those issues, she said, shook out.
“We’re really not restricted that much, I think it was a big scare in the beginning, they were afraid,” she said.
But one thing she has remained adamant about: no coal mining in the monument. (Once she remembers saying exactly this to Robert Redford).
“I didn’t want a coal mine here, I don’t want our water sluiced out to where we would lose a lot of our water,” she said. “I don’t want coal trucks running through here every 15 minutes. These little roads can’t handle that. It really affects the people, the locals.”
And in her explorations of the region, she has seen what is at stake with the scenic resources.
“No matter what you do, you can see different places around that they’ve torn part of the mountain away,” she said. “And it’s all black and there’s nothing to replace that or restore that again.”
