Coming up in The Payson Chronicle

 Santaquin Canyon: The Stone Spine And Green Heart Of A Small Utah City

Ute Chief Santaquin (1837-1911), after whom the city and canyon were named.

 

Santaquin Canyon was close to home and heart for Myron Olson (1919-2015). The Santaquin native is pictured (left side) as a young man employed in sign making and other tasks for the forest service while employed with the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) work relief program during the Great Depression. (No immediate identification available for the three individuals pictured to the right.)

  

SANTAQUIN, Utah — Tucked into the southern limb of the Wasatch Range, Santaquin Canyon is at once intimate and rugged: a narrow gorge that rises quickly from the valley floor into forests and jagged ridges, a seasonal creek that threads the canyon bottom, and a patchwork of old picnic groves, lone campgrounds and switchback roads that bear the traces of both geological time and human lives. For generations the canyon has been a place where Santaquin residents escape heat and suburbia, where anglers and mountain bikers seek shade and singletrack, and where the long story of central Utah—indigenous lifeways, Latter-day Saints’ settlement, small-scale industry and modern recreation—can be read in stone and stream.