Next Location: westbound eastbound
On a hillside above the Kaibab Plateau east of Kanab, Utah, spare, pale green grasses, blue-green sage and blossoming thistles glowed with life; the junipers aerosolized a tangy aroma. We were told that a soaking rain had recently spread its benevolence on the area before our visit.
In our search for mile 104 we found a curious marker– a 10-foot stake weathered to a silver sheen lying on the red ground, with three guy wires connecting the stake to three anchoring boulders. So we stood up the stake– the rusty guy wires tightened, controlling the pole’s location. I’m guessing the stake was used as a reference point for an early survey: we imagine the surveyor’s transitman, west of us at Mile 103, semaphoring directions to the stake handler. How old is the stake? Is the desert hot and dry enough to have kept the stake from rotting for 123 years, when the original survey was done? It could also have been left by Ralph Gentry, who resurveyed Mile 104 in 1912 or Bert Wakeman in 1936. So maybe it’s only 90 years old (in 2026).
Location: around 37o 0’ 4.95” North 112o 09’ 47.658″ West. We found a more likely spot for Carpenter’s Mile 104 in a nearby thicket— a jumble of large stones might have buttressed the now-missing surveyor’s monument on a pipe.
