BEAVER COUNTY, Utah — This month’s Max Tracks took me to a place whose name is impossible to forget, even when few people 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, hoarse plea of ​​a parched wanderer.

The 8,000+ foot peaks form the western edge of the Wah Wah Valley, where, you guessed it, the Wah Wah Ranch lives and works.

A 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 incredibly bright, even artificially. Get closer and it’s a wonderful natural anomaly.

According to the Utah Geological Survey, a volcanic eruption more than 30 million years ago fused various materials into a white stew called Tunnel Spring Tuff. The lower layer uplifted at a fault line, creating a new mountain at the northern end of the Wah Wah Range. Natural erosion has washed away the softer rock and soil, revealing a white peak encrusted with tiny quartz crystals.

A hike on the mountain slopes reveals more character.

Geologists call the mini-caverns “tafoni,” and the larger ones seem designed for a reclining person, sparking the imagination of children and child-like adults.

I remember the first time I heard about this place. It was at the Utah State Capitol almost exactly two years before my visit.

“I live on Wah Wah Ranch, I own the spring complex. That’s it for me,” Mark Wintch said at the time, fighting efforts to draw water from the ground beneath his ranch.

With that in mind, I knew someone lived somewhere in this largely unoccupied landscape.

I knocked on the ranch door, which in early fall featured a porch that served as an inviting place to sit and talk to Nicki Wintch.

“I didn’t grow up in that world,” she said.

But Nicki has learned to love it.

“My mother-in-law told me, the desert has its own beauty. You just have to look for it,” she shared.

It was more than 25 years ago when she and Mark left college in Logan to run the family operation.

“But it was a very new world for me, and then especially moving here, where we’re 25 miles from the nearest neighbor, and, you know, there were just two of us here,” Nicki recalls, “and I had to learn how to drive a stick shift and, yes, drive a tractor and, you know, bottle feed baby calves.

“I called my mom a lot at first. I called my mom a lot.”

Nicki is the mother of six children raised on the ranch. Three of their children are adults, including a daughter who is married and ranches 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 with my back,” Nicki said. “But I figure they love it, just like he does. He loves the lifestyle. And so do they. They really love it.”

As we talked, Mark and the kids were in the hills. It was time to round up the cattle to move them to their wintering grounds.

“I’m usually the lunch lady or the one who brings treats and water because I’m better in a truck than on a horse,” Nicki admitted.

Nicki thanks Mark for their children’s independence and love of the land. However, in this family story, it is she who adapted to the unknown.

“Did you have any idea that this was a possibility?” I asked Nicki.

“So he would tell me when we were dating, and I would tease him about it all the time. He would say, ‘You know, that’s probably where we’ll end up. Most likely, we’ll be at the ranch, and that’s it is going to be a lot of hard work and we’re never going to have a lot of money,” she replied. “And I always say, ‘Dang, you were right,’ because it’s a lot of hard work and we. we don’t have a lot of money !'”

Nicki is not alone at the ranch. Many of their 1,200 head of cattle are already penned in, and as we began walking 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 crouching in a corner or under a vehicle. Bullet was clearly aware of his responsibility to keep Nicki safe while the rest of the family herded the cattle in the hills.

The hills are full of history, including old mining towns. A town called Newhouse sits on Wintch land, and a beautiful old building nearby has been meticulously reconstructed from the ghost town.

“It was a train depot,” Nicki explained. “And so, before this house was built, it was the ranch house. They brought it back here in pieces and put it back together.”

The Utah Historical Society offers photos, articles and stories about the area that was once a center of silver mining to rival any other place in the world.

The largest of the towns was Frisco, which the company wrote: “In 1879 the United States Annual Mining Review and Stock Ledger called the Horn Silver Mine “unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now in operation.” “.

Perhaps the most impressive structure still standing was a company store or perhaps the bank. The city had the characteristics of a wild boom town.

“Like many boomtowns in the West, its streets were lined with saloons (21 by one count), casinos, and brothels,” the historical society writes.

One writer called it “Dodge City, Tombstone, Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one”, noting that the murders occurred so often that city officials contracted for a wagon to pick up the bodies and take them away to Boothill for burial.

Eventually, Frisco’s reputation was so tarnished that Marshal Pearson of Pioche, Nevada, was hired to clean up the town. He reportedly told lawless elements that he had no intention of making arrests. Instead, he planned to shoot anyone he saw breaking the law on sight.

He is said to have killed six outlaws on his first night in town.

The Horn Silver Mine collapsed in 1885, with enough warning signs that no one died except the town itself was abandoned in 1920.

Although located in a beautiful location, the city did not possess the region’s most valuable resource. There was no water source.

Even though the money came from the land, there was enough money to transport water by bus and train. When the mines stopped producing, the location was no longer viable.

Today, Frisco is marked by its five coal kilns, conical rock structures rising up to 30 feet, sentinels at the eastern end of the Wah Wah Valley. Now one of Utah’s most overlooked places, it offers natural beauty and solitude to visitors, and provides a place of sustenance, comfort and tradition for a resilient Utah family.