Boulder, Utah, was the last town in the United States to have its mail delivered by mule, and the arrangement lasted until 1940, since no road reached it. The village sits at about 2,000 metres on the edge of the Aquarius Plateau in south-central Utah, a tiny community of ranches, a few houses and a lodge, with red sandstone cliffs on one side and pine and aspen forest on the other. The nearest big towns are far away, and the village still has a feeling of being at the end of something, which for generations it was.
The surroundings are among the finest in the Southwest. The Anasazi State Park Museum here preserves the remains of a village of the Ancestral Puebloans, who farmed this high ground about nine hundred years ago, and displays pottery and tools found on the site. Nearby, Boulder Mountain, the high plateau forest, is dotted with lakes and trout streams, and below it the land drops through slickrock canyons toward the Escalante River, in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a wilderness of arches, domes and narrow slots cut in sandstone.
The road here is Scenic Byway 12, one of the great roads of the American West. South of Boulder it crosses the Hogback, a narrow ridge where the road runs along a crest with steep drops on both sides, and then dips toward Escalante through a landscape of white and orange rock. To the north, it climbs over Boulder Mountain through forest to Torrey and the red cliffs of Capitol Reef. Bends are long and open, the surface is generally excellent, and traffic is light, though the road can ice over at the top in winter and gets cold even in summer. Another route, the Burr Trail, heads east from Boulder through spectacular canyon country, partly paved and partly gravel.
Services are sparse. Boulder has a lodge and a couple of places to eat, and there is a little fuel, but it is wise to fill up in Escalante, about forty kilometres to the south-west, or Torrey, to the north. Distances are large and cell coverage is patchy. Spring and autumn offer the best weather, and the stars on a clear night are magnificent.