Gerald N. Lund writes Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers' story

Gerald N. Lund writes Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers' story

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint have a special reverence for the Mormon pioneers, the early Latter-day Saint settlers who endured harsh weather, rugged terrain and many other difficulties while traveling from Illinois and Missouri to the valley of the Great Salt Lake in the mid-19th century. One of the most impressive pioneer journeys, however, is a sometimes poorly remembered trek through the desolate wilds of southern Utah.

One reason that best-selling author Gerald N. Lund felt compelled to revisit the story of the Mormon settlers who blazed a trail to southeastern Utah is because, for much of his life, he'd never known anything about them. His new novel, "The Undaunted: The Miracle of the Hole-in-the-Rock Pioneers," released on Wednesday, tells about events that Lund, a former LDS general authority, only learned about in detail after years of being employed in his faith's Church Education System.

For most Latter-day Saints in Utah, the name "Hole in the Rock" has a pioneer ring to it, but, for many, the details of the journey that made that name famous are sketchily recalled at best.

"I was born and raised in Utah," said Lund, who lives in Alpine and is widely acclaimed for his LDS historical fiction novels, including the nine-volume "The Work and Glory" series. "I'm ashamed to admit I knew virtually nothing about it. I have no memory of ever studying about it in Utah history."

The settlers were sent by LDS Church president Brigham Young and his successor, John Taylor, to establish communities that would have a stabilizing influence in a pocket of the Utah Territory -- the present-day Four Corners region -- where clashes between encroaching miners and ranchers and indigenous Navajo, Ute and Paiute Indian tribesmen had stirred up a restless, lawless atmosphere.

When the wagons set out from Cedar City, Lund said, the settlers assumed they would travel roughly 200 miles in about six weeks. "It took them six months," he said.

Lund said the story is even more impressive to him because, unlike the first pioneers to cross the Great Plains to Utah, the members of the Hole in the Rock group were not fleeing persecution. They were simply doing what their church leaders had asked, leaving behind prosperous, settled lives to take a risky journey into a region that was "one of the most desolate and unexplored areas of America at the time."

An impossible crossing

The harsh, trackless red-rock wilderness slowed down the travelers almost from the start, but they met their most impressive obstacle when they arrived at the Colorado River some distance above its confluence with the San Juan River, about halfway into their journey. Over thousands of years, the river had carved a deep, yawning gorge and impassible cliffs towered over its banks for many miles in either direction.

Hole in the Rock is the name given to the one place where the settlers thought they could negotiate the vertiginous drop to the river. The final few hundred vertical feet of their route are beneath Lake Powell today, but what can still be seen is breathtaking. Folk singer Sam Payne describes it this way in his song "These Are My People":

"Southeastern part of this state there's a canyon, drops hundreds of feet all the way down to the surface of Lake Powell. Hundred-and-fifty years ago, it dropped all the way down to the Colorado River. In those days pioneers lowered 80 wagons of stuff down that canyon without spilling a drop. I've climbed to the top of that canyon, turned around and thought of those pioneers, and said the only thing I could think of: 'No freaking way!' "

Clayson Lyman, a real-estate broker who lives in Orem and is the great-grandson of Platte D. Lyman, a captain of the Hole in the Rock pioneers, said he had essentially the same reaction when he saw the site for the first time on a river-rafting trip at age 13. (Lyman, who's 73, saw Hole in the Rock many years before the creation of Lake Powell in the late 1950s and early 1960s).

"My first reaction was that it's unbelievable," Lyman said. "It's unbelievable that wagons could actually be brought through there. It's just so spectacular."

The settlers used blasting powder to widen an existing notch in the cliffs above the river and then reduce the angle of descent -- sort of. "When Platte Lyman took the initial survey," Lund said, "he said, 'We're dropping eight feet per rod.' That's a 50-percent grade. Today we warn truckers when there's a 7- or 8-percent grade."

When they'd pushed the route straight down as far as they could, the settlers turned to one side and widened a narrow ledge in the sheer wall of the canyon so that wagons could creep downward with the cliff face on one side and open air on the other.

"The right side, where they tacked the road on is gone, it's washed away," said Utah State Historian Kent Powell. "You can still see the drill holes where they put the poles in to build it up."

True to history

Lund first visited Hole in the Rock in 1996 while assisting with a Church Education System program to send seminary teachers to LDS historical sites. A CES employee from southern Utah took Lund and other administrators on a four-wheel-drive tour, by SUV and ATV, of the eastern part of the route followed by the Hole in the Rock settlers.

The "mind-blowing" experience of seeing the country and hearing about the people who'd gone through it stayed with Lund after the trip. "By the time that was done," he said, "I was enthralled and said, 'Someday, this is a story I'd like to tell.' "

Because of time spent as a member of the LDS Church's Second Quorum of the Seventy, a church leadership body in which he served from 2002 to 2008, Lund hadn't written a novel for almost 10 years when he decided, spurred by hearing a colleague discuss the Hole in the Rock story, to start on "The Undaunted." The long layoff from fiction writing, he said, made it one of the more time-consuming novels he's written.

As with the novels in the "Work and the Glory" series, Lund created a handful of fictional characters and then placed them in carefully researched historical settings, having them participate in actual events and interact with actual people.

"I have two families that are fictional," he said. "Other than that, the book is peppered with the names of the actual pioneers. The leadership portrayed is the actual leadership."

Platte Lyman, for example, is a character in the book. Clayson Lyman never met his great-grandfather, who died in 1901, but his grandfather, Platte's son Albert, told him every detail of the story. Lyman grew up in Monticello, one of the communities seeded by the Hole in the Rock settlers, and said that he has a deep attachment to the area, visiting several times a year.

Orem resident Lamar Helquist has felt that connection as well. Helquist, 72, is a great-grandson of Jens Nielson, who came to Utah with the handcart pioneers and was another leader of the Hole in the Rock group. A number of years ago, Helquist and two daughters went backpacking near Hole in the Rock for three days.

"It was challenging, it was hot and we nearly ran out of water," Helquist said. "You think, 'It's hard enough to walk this.' They had to come through it with wagons and bring all of their livestock."

Lund said people often tell him that his writing has inspired them. "I like to remind them that I really can't take any credit for that," he said. "I'm just a storyteller. It's these people who did these things -- the power of these novels is knowing that the story is true."

'The Undaunted: The Miracle of the Hole-in-the-Rock Pioneers'

Author: Gerald N. Lund

Publisher: Deseret Book (Salt Lake City)

Publication date: Aug. 5, 2009

Length: 804 pages