From Deserted to Star of the Desert: Tourists Flocking to Moab : Utah: Visitors and mountain bikers are lured to the town by two national parks. Some question whether that is a blessing or a curse.

MOAB, Utah — Music blaring from cars in the parking lots of Arches National Park violates the solitude of the southeastern Utah desert.

A mobile mountain bike repair shop sits astride the road leading to Slickrock Trail.

Traffic is snarled, property prices are soaring.

Tourists, alas, have found Moab.

The late author Edward Abbey might remobilize his “Monkey Wrench Gang” of eco-avengers if he could see what’s happened since he worked in the Arches park as a seasonal ranger in the mid-1950s, a time when the wind-hewn sandstone attracted an orderly 25,000 visitors a year.

This year, more than 800,000 will troop to the park. Abbey’s books, including “Desert Solitaire,” entice many of the visitors.

“Abbey caused it more than anybody,” said Scott Groene of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Everybody came in here with a copy of ‘Desert Solitaire’ in his back pocket.”

Once the hordes discovered Arches and neighboring Canyonlands National Park, the town of Moab, situated between the two parks and along the Colorado River, could hardly escape the onslaught.

Seven new motels have opened in the last year and many homes have been turned into bed-and-breakfasts to cash in on the recreation culture.

Some discouraged longtime residents have left. Others will follow. They cannot afford to live here anymore. Their houses have doubled or tripled in value, and they can’t pay the property taxes.

Those who stay, or have moved in recently, can sip a cappuccino or buy Indian artifacts at any number of stores. But they have to drive 90 miles to Grand Junction, Colo., for jeans or shoes.

Steve Patterson, who moved here from Telluride, Colo., to set up Eddie McStiff’s, a micro-brewery, pub and restaurant, says it’s too late to stop Moab from suffering the fate of other tourist towns.

“We are the people we warned ourselves against,” Patterson said.

Moab, like many Rocky Mountain areas, has become a haven for people fleeing the West Coast. Once a Mormon community of fruit growers and ranchers, it nearly became a ghost town after the collapse of the uranium boom of the 1950s. For decades, homes were cheap and hundreds were for sale.

But Abbey, by capturing in print the redrock and slickrock majesty of Moab’s environs, helped change that. And before his death in 1989, he saw the effects of his handiwork.

“We talked about it a lot,” said Ken Sleight, the inspiration for “Seldom Seen Smith” in Abbey’s anarchic “Monkey Wrench Gang.” “We rationalized. But it was the right thing to do despite all of this. Hopefully it will lead to preservation.”

Nobody likes rules less than Sleight, a real-life outfitter. He doesn’t like to be told where his horses can poop, but he reckons it will take a lot more rules to preserve what’s left of the Colorado Plateau.

“There are just too many people,” Sleight said. “They are going to have to limit them.”

Would limits work? Can they be enforced by a National Park Service that had 25,000 staff members to supervise 275 million visitors at 367 sites last year?

“If we don’t, we lose it completely,” said Noel Poe, superintendent at Arches.

Because Arches has no concessionaires or significant conflicts with wildlife, the park was chosen as the pilot site for a new program aimed at identifying what people want from their parks.

Poe hopes the program will help the park defend doing what it must to preserve the delicate desert terrain.

“We’ve already got a Great Sand Dunes and we don’t need another one,” Poe said.

Jayne Belnap, a park service biologist detached to serve on the newly formed National Biological Survey, said, “It’s heartbreaking. Do you stay and fight or move somewhere else?”

She warns a visitor she will give him a limp if he steps on the cryptobiotic crust that holds the soil together. Trampling around popular arches in the park could lead to desertification, a condition Americans are used to reading about when it occurs in Third World countries on the edge of the Sahara.

Belnap studied grass and shrubs at Arches and Canyonlands last year and found many areas already irreparably damaged.

Terri Martin of the National Park Conservation Assn.’s Salt Lake City office said if current growth rates continue, visitation will double in four years. It increased from 30,000 annually a decade ago to more than 325,000 over just nine months this year.

As park officials struggle to manage the explosive growth, Moab residents are wondering if limits would work there. Nearly everyone agrees that no one needs to promote the town anymore.

But a recent survey by Utah State University found that residents would like to see Grand County grow--in a controlled manner--from its present 6,600 people to 15,000.

Newcomers bent on limiting growth seized control of the county government a year ago. A referendum was passed replacing the existing three-person county commission with a seven-person county council.

But the growth continues, bringing with it more opportunities to capitalize. One entrepreneur wants to build a tramway to the rim of the towering red cliffs above town so that bikers can carry their bikes up, and perhaps have a gourmet meal at the rim-top restaurant before cycling down.

Paul Menard, one of the new county council members, said there already is tension between the residents and the mountain bikers who inundate the town in spring and fall, making it the mountain-bike capital of the world.

The police blotter recently carried this comment: “A Colorado man reported the theft of his bicycle. It was valued at $3,600. My van won’t be worth that much when it’s paid off.”