A Spiritual Connection to the Beauty of Old La Sal: A Legacy of a Man with a Dream

Just how I remember it, the light hitting the red rocks of the valley that evening—producing the kind of late desert glow that makes everything feel older than it is, like the land is remembering something you’ve forgotten.

There I was in the house and Todd told our dad about his "new" property.

It wasn’t dramatic. No big announcement. Just Todd standing there looking at a piece of paper—part grin, part defiance—saying he’d signed a contract to buy five acres out in Old La Sal, Utah.

Five acres of what?

If you’d asked me in that moment, I’d have answered with one word: nothing.

Five acres of a long drive from nowhere. No restaurants. No gas stations. Just sky, dirt, and a handful of scattered homes tucked into the folds of the mountains.

I thought he was crazy.

He was barely out of high school, this kid who should’ve been spending his money on something normal—a decent truck, maybe, or an apartment in town. Instead, he was putting every spare dollar into a wild stretch of mountain desert near Moab that hardly anyone could find without directions.

It didn’t make sense.

But here’s the thing: Todd was never all that interested in making sense.

What He Saw That We Didn’t

If you’d driven out there in those early 1990s, it wouldn’t have looked like much.

A rough track of road.

A rise of land with the La Sals shouldering up behind it—Mount Peale and her siblings watching over everything.

Sagebrush. Dust devils. The kind of big, open sky that makes you feel simultaneously tiny and completely awake.

Most people would have seen the inconveniences first:

No water yet.

No power lines.

No neighbors close enough to hear if you yelled.

Todd saw something else.

Back then, Old La Sal was just a direction on the map to me—south and a little east of Moab, up into the La Sal Mountains where the asphalt gives way to gravel and the sky seems to stretch just a bit wider. I’d grown up with red rock in my bones, sandstone on the horizon, and that particular desert dust that sneaks into your shoes and never completely leaves. But Old La Sal felt different.

It was quieter.

Not the quiet you get late at night in town, when everyone’s asleep but the hum of refrigerators and distant traffic still hangs in the air. This was a layered, mountain kind of quiet—wind in the juniper, a crow in the distance, the soft scrape of gravel under your shoes.

It was that quiet that my brother Todd decided to stake his claim.

Todd was still young carrying a restless, half-formed energy of someone who doesn’t yet know the hard life can bring—but someone that is already leaning into it anyway. While most people his age were going to college, chasing steady jobs or drifting toward something safe, Todd was signing a private contract for a piece of land tucked into the mountains southeast of Moab.

If I had to name it now, I’d call it possibility. Back then, I didn’t have a word for it. I just knew that when he talked about “the property,” his eyes changed. He’d describe the way the light hit the mountains in the early morning, how the stars exploded across the sky at night, how quiet it got once the wind settled.

He talked about the land the way some people talk about a person they’ve fallen in love with.

It took years before I realized he wasn’t just buying dirt.

He was buying a kind of freedom.

Nothing improved. No water. No buildings. No plan anyone could see.

Just a feeling.

At the time, I couldn’t make sense of it. But looking back now, I think he understood something the rest of us didn’t. Some people don’t buy land because it makes sense.

Some people buy land because it calls them.

The Kind of Silence You Can Hear

Old La Sal isn’t loud about its beauty.

It doesn’t compete with Moab’s arches or crowds or polished trailhead signs. It sits back—higher, quieter, a little harder to reach. The La Sal Mountains rise up unexpectedly from the desert floor, and the air changes as you climb. It cools. It thins. It sharpens.

And then there’s the silence.

Not the empty kind—but the kind that feels full, like something is just beneath it.

Todd fit that kind of place.

He wasn’t interested in neat edges or finished projects. The land, over time, began to reflect him—scattered building materials, pieces of machinery, half-started ideas resting beside completed ones. It looked chaotic if you didn’t understand it.

But if you stood there long enough, you could feel the rhythm.

He was building something.

Not just structures—but a life where no one told him when to wake up, when to stop, or who to be.

Freedom, for Todd, wasn’t theoretical. It was lived, daily, in wind and dust and long stretches of solitude.

Deer Creek Retreat Before It Had a Name

Back then, it wasn’t Deer Creek Retreat.

It didn’t have a name. No branding. No listings. No guests arriving with weekend bags and expectations.

There was just Todd and his stubborn determination.

By 2000, he had paid it off completely. No mortgage. No debt. Just five acres in Old La Sal and the quiet satisfaction of owning something outright—something no one could take from him except time itself.

The land began to look like him.

If you had driven out there in those years, you might not have understood what you were looking at. But Todd did.

Industrious. Cluttered. Creative. Free.

There were piles of lumber that would one day become something. Old machinery resting like retired workhorses. Tools scattered in that “system” only the owner understands. It wasn’t curated or polished. It was lived-in, like a sketchbook full of half-finished drawings and bold ideas.

You could stand there and think, “What is all this?”

Or you could stand there long enough and feel what I eventually did: this was a man building a life on his own terms.

A place where no one watched the clock over his shoulder. Where the measure of a day wasn’t productivity but presence—how long he’d spent under the sky, how many small problems he’d solved with his hands, how thoroughly the quiet had seeped into his bones.

He saw potential in raw form.

He saw possibility where others saw inconvenience.

And maybe more than anything—he saw peace.

The Call That Changed Everything

Years later, life had carried me far from Moab, Utah. I was across the country, on the East Coast, moving through a completely different rhythm.

Then came the call that split my life into a “before” and an “after.”

It was spring, when my aunt's number lit up my phone.

You know something’s wrong before anyone says a word. There’s a weight in the silence, a delay that tells you this conversation is about to rearrange your world.

"They found Todd," she said.

Found.

The word hit first.

Found, as in: he had been lost.

Found, as in: this is final.

Grief doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in waves—confusion first, then disbelief, then the slow, heavy realization that the world has changed and isn’t going back.

From that moment on, everything moved in strange slow motion—fast in logistics, slow in feeling. You start making calls, rearranging plans, booking flights. You move through airports and terminals surrounded by people whose lives have not just been split in two.

Within a day, I was on a plane heading back to Utah.

And I remember this clearly: stepping off that plane in Salt Lake, then drove to Moab, as I got out of the car in Moab the air hit me in a way it never had before.

Same desert. Same sky. Same red rock. Same Moab.

But everything felt sharper. More final. More alive and more empty at the same time.

Walking the Land for the First Time

Experiencing Old La Sal after Todd died for the first time felt wrong, somehow. He bought the property, but I had never been out to see it.

The road seemed long. The turns deliberate. The mountains watchful.

And when I stepped onto that property, I realized something I hadn’t fully grasped before:

This wasn’t just land. It was a story that had stopped mid-sentence.

The scattered tools, the structures, the pathways he had walked a thousand times—they weren’t random. They were evidence of a life lived intentionally, even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else.

And now, somehow, that story had been handed to me.

Not because I asked for it.

But because there was no one else left to carry it.

A Legacy You Don’t Expect

Losing Todd meant losing the last piece of my immediate family. No parents. No siblings. Just silence where voices used to be.

But out in Old La Sal, that silence felt… different.

It wasn’t empty.

It held something.

Over time, I began to understand that the land wasn’t just something Todd had left behind—it was something he had poured himself into. And in a strange way, it became a place where I could still meet him.

Not in words.

But in presence.

His stubbornness started to look like perseverance.

His isolation started to feel like intentional solitude.

And what once felt like a burden—a responsibility I didn’t ask for—slowly began to feel like an invitation.

Deer Creek Retreat, Old La Sal Utah

Today, that same piece of land has a name: Deer Creek Retreat.

And while it’s changed, it hasn’t lost what made it meaningful in the first place.

The mountains are still there—Mount Peale and Mount Tomasaki rising in the distance like it always has. The stars still come out in numbers most people have forgotten are possible. The wind still moves through the trees with that same quiet persistence.

But now, something else happens here.

People arrive tired.

They come from cities, from noise, from schedules that don’t leave much room to think.

And slowly—sometimes within hours, sometimes over a couple of days—they begin to shift.

You can see it.

They sit longer. Breathe deeper. Talk less. Notice more.

The same land that once held my brother’s dream is now holding space for others to rediscover something they didn’t realize they’d lost.

And that’s the part I didn’t see coming.

The Spiritual Connection of This Place

Old La Sal doesn’t entertain you.

It doesn’t perform.

It invites you.

To slow down. To pay attention. To sit in the quiet long enough that your thoughts stop racing and start settling.

It asks better questions than most places do.

What actually matters?

What have you been avoiding?

When was the last time you felt still?

Todd may not have had the words for it back then—but I think this is what he was chasing.

Not escape. But finding a spiritual connection.

Bringing forth clarity. Solitude.

A Challenge: Come Test Your Own Mini Retreat

If you’ve read this far, there’s probably a part of you that’s already there—standing on the porch, looking out toward the La Sal Mountains, feeling that strange mix of quiet and possibility.

So here’s the challenge: don’t leave it there.

Block off a long weekend. Follow this link to book the main cabin if you want room to spread out—family meals, conversations that stretch into the night, the kind of space where memories actually have time to form. Or this link to book the tiny home if you’re craving something quieter, more personal—a place where it’s just you, your thoughts, and the rhythm of the land.

Come build your own version of this:

Morning on the porch. Midday under open sky. Evening beneath a blanket of stars.

Let Old La Sal ask you a few questions.

You might be surprised by your answers.

Cheers!

Justin