The Vanishing Foothills: A Memory Of The Herriman Bench

In the early 1990s, the Herriman foothills in the southwestern Salt Lake Valley were a wild, sweeping expanse of open sagebrush-steppe. The benchlands were covered in silvery big sagebrush, bright yellow rabbitbrush, and scattered low-growing prickly pear cactus. On a cold winter bird count, our group trekked into those open foothills and came upon an unforgettable sight: a wild Golden Eagle perched majestic and still atop a massive boulder, surveying the vast valley floor below. Today, that open habitat has been almost completely swallowed by suburban housing developments, and Golden Eagles are rarely, if ever, seen perching in those lower foothills. Over the last three decades, even the remaining little "islands" of natural habitat—the isolated gullies, dry draws, and foothill patches—are rapidly being paved over and filled with new construction. As the city grows more dense and compact, there are fewer and fewer places where people can step into open ground, look up, and experience the quiet awesomeness of a wild apex predator in its natural element. Just today, I drove down a familiar street where an old horse pasture used to sit—a quiet green memory of the valley's rural past. Today, the earthmovers were gone, the development was complete, and a row of high-density townhomes with perfectly manicured, artificial lawns had taken its place. It served as a stark reminder of how rapidly our baselines shift. The wild is woven deep into the human soul, and it begs a troubling question for future generations: what will our souls yearn for when the wild has been pushed so far from where we live?