BEAVER COUNTY, Utah — This month's Max Tracks took me to a place with a name impossible to forget, even when few people ever visit.
The Wah Wah Mountains, located in Beaver County between I-15 and the Utah-Nevada border.
"Wah Wah" — the name sounds like the desperate raspy request of a parched wanderer.
The 8,000-plus foot peaks form the western boundary of the Wah Wah Valley, home to one family living and working on, you guessed it, the Wah Wah Ranch.
One landmark I wanted to see in the Wah Wahs is called Crystal Peak. I had only seen it in photographs.
From a distance, it looks impossibly, even artificially bright. Get closer and it is a wonderful natural anomaly.
According to the Utah Geological Survey, a volcanic eruption over 30 million years ago melded diverse material into a white stew called Tunnel Spring Tuff. The low-lying layer lifted at a fault line, creating a new mountain at the north end of the Wah Wah Range. Natural erosion washed away the softer rock and soil, revealing a white peak embedded with tiny quartz crystals.
A hike to the slopes of the mountains reveals more character.
Geologists call the mini caverns "tafoni," and the larger ones look designed for a prone person, sparking the imagination of children and childish adults.
I remembered the first time I heard of this place. It was at the Utah State Capitol almost exactly two years before my visit.
"I live at the Wah Wah Ranch, I own the spring complex. It's my everything," said Mark Wintch at the time, fighting against efforts to take water from the ground below his ranch
With that in my memory, I knew someone lived somewhere in this largely unoccupied landscape.
I knocked on the ranch house door, which in the early autumn featured a porch that served as an inviting place to sit and talk to Nicki Wintch.
"I did not grow up in this world," she said.
But Nicki has grown to love it.
"My mother-in-law had told me, the desert has its own type of beauty. You just have to look for it," she shared.
That was more than 25 years ago when she and Mark left college in Logan to run his family's operation.
"But it was a very new world for me, and then especially to move here, where we're 25 miles from the nearest neighbor, and, you know, it was just the two of us here," recalled Nicki, "and I had to learn how to drive a stick shift, and, yeah, run a tractor. And, you know, bottle-feed baby calves.
"I called my mom a lot in the beginning. Called my mom a lot."
Nicki is the mom of six children raised on the ranch. Three of their children are grown, with a daughter married and ranching in Duchesne County and two sons who see the family ranch in their future.
"My husband always tells them, you know, you can make more money with your mind than I can with my back," Nicki said. "But, I'm like, they love this just like he does. He loves this lifestyle. And so do they. They really do."
As we talked, Mark and the kids were in the hills. It was time to round up cattle to move to their winter range.
"I'm usually the lunch lady or the treat-bringer and the water because I am better in a truck than on a horse," Nicki admitted.
Nicki credits Mark for their children's self-reliance and love of the land. However, in this family story, she's the one who adapted to the unknown.
"Did you have any idea this was a possibility?" I asked Nicki.
"So he would tell me when we dated, and I tease him about this all the time. He would say, 'You know, this is probably where we'll end up. Most likely, we will be at the ranch, and it's going to be a lot of hard work and we're never going to have very much money,'" she answered. "And I always say, 'Dang, you were right,' because it is a lot of hard work and we don't have very much money!'"
Nicki isn't alone at the ranch. Many of their 1,2000 head of cattle are already corralled, and as we started to walk around the ranch, a truck pulled up with Yondo, who has worked at the ranch for six years.
Also at the ranch, their dog Bullet stayed nearby. Every time I looked around, he was crouched around a corner or under a vehicle. Bullet was clearly aware of his responsibility to keep Nicki safe while the rest of the family was herding cattle in the hills.
The hills hold history, including old mining towns. A town called Newhouse is on the Wintches' land and a beautiful old building nearby was meticulously reassembled from the ghost town.
"It was a train depot," explained Nicki. "And so before this house was built, that was the ranch house. They brought it down here in pieces and put it back together."
The Utah Historical Society has photos, articles, and histories of the region which was once a center of silver mining rivaling any place in the world.
The most prominent of the towns was Frisco, which the society wrote, "by 1879 the United States Annual Mining Review and Stock Ledger was calling the Horn Silver Mine 'unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now being worked.'"
The most impressive structure still standing may have been a company store or maybe the bank. The town had the hallmarks of a wild boom town.
"Like many a boomtown in the West, its streets were lined with saloons (21 according to one count), gambling dens, and houses of prostitution," the historical society wrote.
One writer called it "Dodge City, Tombstone, Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one," noting that murders occurred so often that city officials contracted to have a wagon pick up the bodies and take them to Boothill for burial.
Eventually, Frisco's reputation had become so tarnished that Marshal Pearson from Pioche, Nevada, was hired to clean up the town. He allegedly told the lawless elements that he did not intend to make arrests. Instead, he planned to shoot-on-sight anyone he saw breaking the law.
He supposedly killed six outlaws on his first night in town.
The Horn Silver Mine collapsed in 1885, with enough warning signs so that no one died, except the town itself abandoned by 1920.
While in a beautiful location, the town didn't have the most precious resource in the region. It had no source of water.
While the silver came from the earth, there was enough money to haul water by coach and rail. When the mines stopped producing, the location was no longer viable.
Now Frisco is marked by its five charcoal kilns, conical rock structures rising as high as 30 feet, standing sentinel at the eastern edge of the Wah Wah Valley. Now one of Utah's little-known locations, it offers natural beauty and solitude to visitors, and offers a place of sustenance, comfort and tradition for one resilient Utah family.
