Follow the tour from start to finish: the welcome at the first stop, then for each stop the story you hear on the way there and what you see when you arrive.
Welcome to Red Hollow, a short slot canyon tucked behind the town of Orderville. It's about half a mile up a sandy wash to a narrow slot and a dry waterfall where everyone turns around.
One safety note: slots and storms don't mix. If rain is building over the cliffs to the east, save this one for another day.
I'll tell you a story at each spot and stay quiet in between.
The town behind you has one of the most unusual stories in the West.
In 1875, a group of Mormon settlers moved up this valley from Mount Carmel to try an experiment called the United Order. Everything was shared. Nobody owned private property. Families lived in matching apartments, wore clothing made by the town's own workshops, and worked for the community instead of for themselves. They even named their town after it: Orderville.
Every day, the whole town ate together in a big dining hall: breakfast at seven, lunch at noon and dinner at six, more than eighty families at a time. And for a while, it worked. In its first few years, the community's wealth more than tripled.
The path drops into the sandy wash. Watch the colors of the walls as you go.
You're in the wash now. As you walk, watch the rock change color: white at first, then pink, then deep red the closer you get to the slot.
This is Navajo Sandstone, the same rock as the White Cliffs of the Grand Staircase and the great walls of Zion, just down the road. About two hundred million years ago, this whole region was a desert of enormous sand dunes, one of the largest dune fields the continent has ever had. Look for long, slanting lines in the rock. Those are the faces of ancient dunes, frozen in stone.
The red comes from iron. A thin coating of iron oxide, basically rust, stains the sand grains. The more iron, the redder the rock.
The wash splits ahead. Stay to the left, toward the red walls.
Stay left here. The right fork is a white ravine that never narrows. The slot is up the left side.
Now, a story from Orderville that kids love. In the United Order, everyone wore the same homespun gray clothes. One young man collected the bits of wool that came off the lambs' tails, sold it on a trip to market, and bought himself a pair of real store-bought pants. He wore them to a dance in the dining hall.
The town's board wasn't amused. They made him hand the pants over, to be used as a pattern for the town tailors. So other boys came up with a plan: they wore out the seats of their gray pants on the grindstone, so they'd qualify for new ones. It's often called the great pants rebellion.
Ahead, the walls rise and close in. You're getting near the slot.
Look how the walls have grown. Canyons like this are carved by water, but not the gentle kind. Most of the year, this wash is dry. Then a summer storm hits the cliffs upstream, and a flash flood roars through, carrying sand and rocks that scour the bottom like sandpaper. Flood by flood, the water follows a crack in the sandstone and cuts down faster than it can widen. That's how you get a slot.
People have lived with these floods for a long time. The first settlers came to this valley, known as Long Valley, in 1864. Two years later, during the Black Hawk War, they abandoned it. Settlers returned in 1871 and founded Mount Carmel and Glendale. A few years later came Orderville.
Here's the slot. Take your time, and help each other over the rocks.
Welcome to the slot. In places you can touch both walls at once. This narrow stretch is only about a hundred yards long, and the rocks you scramble over get rearranged by every big flood, so it's never quite the same twice.
Listen. Slots like this are full of echoes. If you hear a song of falling notes, it may be a canyon wren, a little brown bird that loves rock walls like these.
Long before any town was here, this was Southern Paiute country. Paiute families moved through these valleys with the seasons. One old record names a band that lived in Long Valley near here as the Red Foot of the Hills People. The name of Kanab, just south of here, comes from the Paiute word for willow.
The slot ends just ahead at a dry waterfall.
This is the end of the line: a dry waterfall, taller than a person. When a flood comes, water pours over this lip. Today, it's the place to turn around.
So what happened to the United Order? A flood in 1880 destroyed the dining hall. Then the railroad and the mines brought cheap store-bought goods, and the town's homemade ones started to look old-fashioned. Many of the Order's leaders were jailed or went into hiding under the new federal laws against polygamy. In 1885, church leaders advised the members to disband. They agreed, reluctantly, and most of the property was sold at auction.
On your drive south, you'll pass Mount Carmel, where the painter Maynard Dixon built a summer home and studio in 1939 and painted these cliffs. Thanks for exploring Red Hollow with me.