Old La Sal History: Roots, Memory, and Living Presence

Old La Sal is one of those places that can look empty at first glance, but the longer you stand in it, the more it feels alive. Tucked beneath the La Sal Mountains in southeastern Utah, Old La Sal carries the memory of ranchers, flood-prone streets, working families, scattered homesteads, and the kind of quiet that seems to hold on and seep into your very bones.

This reflection is part of my Retreat Reflections series at Deer Creek Retreat, but to understand why this land means what it means to me, it helps to go back a little further. Before I ever had the words for a spiritual connection, before Deer Creek Retreat had a name, and before I knew how I viewed the world or god, there were already roots in this mountain retreat—family roots, place roots, and the kind of memory that gets into your soul before it ever reaches your understanding of a higher power.

Old La Sal History and the Kind of Place That Stays With You

Old La Sal was once a thriving cow town. Settlers came into the valley in the late 1800s because the La Sal Mountains offered water, grazing, and the possibility of building a life. Families raised cattle, cut timber, tried mining, and made do in a landscape that was beautiful but deadly.

For a while, Old La Sal held together as a real frontier community. There were homes, ranch buildings, a store, and a post office. Cattle moved through the valley on their way to market, and the place had enough energy and the kind of grit to make one feel solid, like it would last forever.

But permanence is always a risky word out West.

Old La Sal was built in a spot that looked workable until the cloudbursts came. Floodwaters rushed down the main street often enough that people finally got tired of pretending the land was going to cooperate. By the late 1920s, families began moving a few miles away to Coyote Creek, closer to the highway and less isolated. In time, Coyote became New La Sal, and the old site slowly slipped into memory.

Mining passed through the region too, just as it did in so many parts of southeastern Utah. Gold, copper, and later uranium stirred hopes and drew people in, but ranching and livestock proved more durable than most mining dreams in the La Sal area.

That is one of the things I love about Old La Sal history. It is not flashy. It is not the history of a place that won. It is the history of a place that endured. Even now, Old La Sal feels less like a monument and more like an echo—faint foundations, open pasture, traces of old ghosts, and a dusty valley that tries to remember the people who made a life there, even if it was for a short time.

My Moab Roots Came Before My Faith Did

When I think about roots, I do not first think about religion or spirituality. A church building or a dusty old book. I think about fun, free, and a rugged mess. Its my childhood. We got banged up by the rough bike rides, the rock climbing, and sliding down sandhills hoping not to scrap our elbows or knees.

We moved to Moab in 1980, just after my mom died, coming from Bellingham, Washington where I was born. I started first grade at Southeast Elementary, which is torn down now. I went to middle school in the building that serves as Moab city hall now. I graduated from Grand County High School in 1992, home of the Red Devils. I lived in Moab my entire childhood from 1980 to 1993, also known as a Moabite. In a lot of ways, my hometown created a spirit in me before I had any idea what life had in store.

Back then, Moab was much smaller than it is now. It hadn't been discovered on the world scene as the tourist trap it is today, with the jeeping, hiking, river rafting, and mountain biking. It was empty and teh town felt free like our own personal playground. We rode our bikes anywhere, all over town. In the summer, we spent long hot days hiking up Mill Creek Canyon, swimming at the power dam and Left Hand, and roaming the valley side hills, many times it felt like the red rock country was a part of our DNA.

I came from a family that did not have much, but at the time it felt like enough. I remember I didn't want to miss a thing, so I tried everything that came my way. And in a lot of ways, were we had nothing, in the same breath we could say we had everything. It was our perfect little slice of heaven.

Those were my roots.

Not spiritual roots, not yet.

Place roots.

Family roots.

Creek-water, sunburn, red dust, and a small town with enough freedom to make a kid feel like the whole world was open to posibilities.

However, adulting came hard. And I started to look for meaning. I did not start my religious path in Moab. My roots were not about God in any conscious sense back then. I remember in high school being skeptical. I know I was searching. I remember I wanted, no, I needed answers, but for many years I mostly only found questions. Looking back now, though, I can see that Moab was already shaping my spiritual life. Long before I had language for faith, a taste for the spiritual, I was being taught something by those dry and dusty canyon walls, creek beds, the silence, and the overwhelming sky. I just didn't know it yet.

My Brother Todd and the Roots You Do Not Understand

If you had known my brother and me as kids, you would not have guessed where this story has gone today.

Todd and I were brothers, but we did not exactly move through childhood arm in arm. We fought. Sometimes hard. My dad worked most days, so there was not a lot of adult supervision. We were dirt poor, by all standards, short on structure, and full of more energy than wisdom. Some of that energy burned off down at the creek, which moved by our house. Some of that energy burned off in the yard. Some of it turned into the kind of fights brothers remember long after they are supposed to have forgotten them.

Todd had a chipped front tooth for his entire life, and, I hate to say it, I was the reason. We were kids, fooling around, and I had a big steel ball in my hand. I don't remember what I was thinking—if I was thinking at all—but I dropped it on his face while he was lying on the bed while I stood over him, and, then the unthinkable, it chipped his tooth. My dad was furious. And I had a visual reminder, everytime I looked at him I could see my childhood mistake.

Another time, we got into it bad enough that I ran around the house and up a ladder leading to the roof. Todd followed. Standing looking down, I had nowhere to go, so I decided to jump off the house. Painful mistake, because I landed wrong and messed up my ankle bad enough that I couldn't walk on it right for weeks. Sprained it, broke something, who knows. We didn't have insurance or money for a doctor's visit so I suffered and never really found out how bad my injury was. Well, that was life then. You were hit, limped, you waited, and eventually you got back up.

Todd was tall—somewhere around six-three or six-four. He was pale, because of anemia, and most people were surprised when I told them we were brothers. Even growing up in the that same house in downtown Moab, we seemed to move through the world differently. He never left Moab. He worked at the local grocery store and lived in my dad’s house his whole life. However, I moved away, searched for something more, doubted the hand life dealt, and only later began trying to make sense of who I was and what I believed.

And yet, for all the ways we were different, me and my brother were rooted in the same soil.

Same little town.

Same red dirt.

Same Mill Creek water.

Same hard edges.

Same house where two boys with too much energy and too little money tried to figure out how to be brothers.

That matters to me now. It reminds me that roots are not always tender. Sometimes they are rough, half-buried, and hard to understand while you are living them.

Old La Sal, My Uncle “Ray,” and a Life Close to the Land

When I think about Old La Sal roots in a living, breathing sense, I think of my uncle—I'll call him Ray.

Ray has lived around the corner from the property for decades. He is a sportsman, a hunter, a survivalist, and one of those men who can make do with what he has because “making do” is not a slogan to him. It is just life. He loves the solitude out there. He has always called it God’s country, and while I did not always know what to do with that phrase, I understood the affection in it. He meant it.

My dad built Ray’s cabin around the same time Todd bought the property that would eventually become Deer Creek Retreat. Ray helped building his slice of paradise, of course. Men like him always help. They do not make a big speech about it. They just keep moving, solving problems with what is in front of them.

Today when I visit Ray’s cabin, it is usually not for anything dramatic or for want. We sit. We talk. We look out. That is part of the rhythm. One of my favorite memories, though, is the most ridiculous. I once stepped out an outside door and saw a sign that read: No peeing off the porch. I laughed, read it out loud, and asked what in the world that was about. My aunt said she could not seem to get Ray to stop peeing off the porch. Her complaint the grandkids played out there in the dirt, so she made the sign. Apparently, the sign worked. He stopped.

That is Old La Sal too.

Not just grand beauty.

Not just spiritual language.

Real people. Rough edges. Porch humor. The kind of everyday life that keeps a place from turning into a postcard.

Ray’s knowledge of the land runs deep. On one trip, my son was with us when we saw a rabbit. Using Ray's small-game license, and the handy 22 long rifle left in the truck, Ray guided the moment like it was second nature. We pilled out of the truck, my boy took aim and shot that rabbit. Right there on the spot, Ray skinned and gutted that little animal by hand, without even needing a knife. They took it back to Deer Creek, prepped it, cooked and ate it. This special memory was not tourism. It was not performance. It was rooted knowledge, lived experience, and a man who knows how the land works because he has spent a lifetime there.

Another trip, we spent two weeks over Christmas in the main house at Deer Creek Retreat. We needed a Christmas tree, and Ray became the hero of the trip. We went onto his land, found a tree to cut, brought it back, and he and my aunt stayed to help the kids to decorate, they even let Ray put the star on top. It was not some magazine-perfect tree. It leaned a little. It was awkward, but it was ours. And I can tell you honestly: it was one of the most fun Christmases I had had in years.

Evidence... family, roots. Local roots. Connection roots.

It is not just about where you are from, its so much more than that.

Its about who shows up, what gets made together, and which memories become yours almost before you realize they are forming.

Why I Did Not Understand Old La Sal at First

Here is the strange part: for all my Moab roots, I had never actually been out to Ray’s place or Todd’s property when I was young. I had no interest. I was probably fifteen or sixteen when Todd bought the property, around the same time my dad was building Ray’s cabin, and none of it meant much to me.

I thought Todd was buying five acres of nothing.

I was wrong, of course, but I didn't know that yet.

Not until after Todd died in 2018 that I first stepped foot on the property. And something about that moment changed how I understood everything—my brother, the land, my family, even myself. The property did not feel random. It did not feel empty. It felt like a place where years of effort, solitude, family history, and quiet had all settled into the ground and were somehow still there.

That is the best way I can describe my connection to Old La Sal now. It is deeply spiritual for me, but not because I am trying to assign everyone else’s faith story to it. Mine and my extended family roots are mixed. My mom was a conservative Lutheran, a Christian. My dad converted after meeting her, but his family was all LDS, including uncle Ray. Todd later leaned heavily into Buddhism. But, I want to be clear here, I maintain, their faith journeys are their own. I want to honor that.

What I can say is this: every time I step foot on that property, something in me settles. It is not borrowed from my uncle’s worldview or my brother’s searching. It is my experience. The land does something to me. It slows me down. It clarifies things. It feels, to me, like a place where God has often met me in quiet.

Old La Sal and Deer Creek Retreat

That is why Deer Creek Retreat is not just a business decision or a nice view.

It sits in a valley with raw look at life. Old La Sal history is full of ranchers, floods, cattle, moves, endurance, and near-forgotten streets. My own roots are tied to a Moab childhood, Mill Creek, grief, searching, and coming back home. Todd’s roots are tied to stubborn freedom and a piece of land nobody else understood. Ray’s roots are tied to cabin life, hunting, improvising, survival and calling his corner of paradise in Utah, God’s country.

Deer Creek Retreat stands in the middle of all of that.

Which means that when guests come here, they are not arriving in cookie cutter hotel. They are stepping into a landscape shaped by memory, effort, family, humor, loss, and resilience. They are stepping into a place where the silence feels different from emptiness. Here, the quiet has texture. It holds history. It holds questions. Sometimes, if you stay long enough, it even begins to hold answers.

A Place to Consider Your Own Roots

That may be one of the hidden gifts of Old La Sal.

It does not just show you its roots. It makes you think about your own.

Who shaped you? What kind of family made you? What did you inherit that you are still trying to understand? Where did you first learn freedom, fear, love, grit, or wonder? What parts of your story still live in your bones, even if you left them years ago?

Old La Sal is a good place for those questions.

Not because it hands you easy answers.

But because it gets quiet enough for honest ones to rise.

If you have never sat in a valley of forgotten streets and living sky, there is room for you here. Come spend a couple of days at Deer Creek Retreat. Sit on the porch. Watch the light move. Let the La Sal Mountains do what they have always done—stand still long enough to remind the rest of us that not everything important has to be loud.

A Challenge to Experience the Old La Sal Roots

Old La Sal has been part of my story for a long time. It might be time to let it become part of yours.

If something in you tugged while you were reading—if you felt a little homesick for a place you have never actually been—don’t ignore that. Block off a long weekend. Come sleep under these mountains, feel the quiet for yourself, and see what rises when the noise finally drops.

Book the main house if you want room to spread out—family meals, kids playing in the field in front of the main house, conversations that stretch late into the night. Or choose the tiny home if you’re craving something more personal—just you, your thoughts, and the kind of quiet you can actually hear.

Cheers!

Justin