The word devil appears in the names of many places around the world. In North Africa and the Middle East the Devil’s Garden refers to an area along the Mediterranean coast where landmines from WW2 are still buried. Most people are familiar with Devil’s Tower in Wyoming from the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Around 1985 Peter visited Devil’s Postpile National Monument in Mammoth Lake, California. The 60 foot tall postpiles of columnar basalt resemble black fence posts stacked vertically. These formations were formed 100,000 years ago when lava flowed through the area and then cooled. Other devil named locations are The Devil’s Den, Devil’s Backbone, The Devil’s Kitchen, Devil’s Slide and the Devil’s Cauldron to name a few.
There are two Devil’s Gardens in Utah. Devil’s Garden Trail area is in Arches National Park. The area was officially named by two land surveyors, Frank Williams and Silas Martin in 1906. In the mid 1860’s early settlers used the name devil to refer to the area’s high summer temperatures, limited resources and hard to navigate treacherous terrain. They thought the landscape was so rough that even the devil could not traverse it. Aside from that the area was home to quicksand and rattlesnakes.
The other Devil’s Garden is in Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument. The monument’s name comes from the many layers, or steps, that represent 5 distinct rock formations, and many sub-layers of geological time that span millions of years. The monument consists of 1.87 million acres of land and is composed of winding slot canyons, arches and strange looking sandstone rock formations. The Devil’s Garden area is 640 acres. See Peter’s painting Into the Devil’s Garden from 2009. This particular group of colorful rock formations reminds me of round capped mushrooms.
In 2001 Peter painted Back of the Devil’s Kitchen. You can find an image of the painting on the Southwest page here. The spire rock formations in this painting are in Canyonlands National Park in SE Utah. The deep canyons in the park were carved out by the Green and Colorado Rivers. Canyonlands became a national park on September 12,1964. At this time the park consisted of 257,640 but by 1971 it had been expanded to 337,598. Even though it is the largest national park in Utah it is the least visited. This is attributed to its rugged terrain and accessibility challenges.