Parked below the road in a narrow sandstone bluff near Highway 89 in southern Utah is a wall of crushed classic American cars that has stood for nearly sixty years. No, it is not art, nor is it vandalism. At one point, this was a real engineering solution – and it worked so well that no one bothered to remove it.
The technical name for this one-of-a-kind feat is riprap – a term used by engineers and geologists alike to describe any material placed along a bank or embankment to prevent erosion. Your typical riprap consists of rock, concrete, or similar hard materials. But in the 1960s, when engineers were cutting Highway 89 through Catstairs Canyon, junk cars filled with gravel were considered a practical option for stabilizing the embankment while also preventing loose sand from flowing away. A similar “Detroit Riprap” was implemented along Nebraska’s Loop River for erosion control.
The logic was not as strange as it seems. Junkyards in the 60s were filled with old vehicles that were not worth scrapping for metal, and cars were thought to be as resistant to erosion as stone – especially given their size and ability to stack tightly together. Highway engineers piled the valley full of crushed vehicles before covering it with soil and building a road over it. This accomplishment easily makes Catstairs Canyon one of the most unique relics of the Golden Age of American road expansion, which culminated with the Interstate Highway System.
What’s left of Catstair Canyon today
Although use of riprap stopped in the early 1970s, the cars never stopped using. Protected by the dry desert wind, the wall remains much the same today as it was when it was first built. The only difference now is that it has supported the weight of six decades of traffic – vehicles compressed into a solid mass of rusted steel, with a strange “Trucks Enter Here” sign as the cherry on top.
Visitors who take the short half-mile hike into the wash find themselves standing in front of a pile high enough to climb, facing the bumpers, headlights and body panels of popular American cars of the 1960s. There are actually two separate piles of cars in the valley. Both houses are accessible by a small dirt bridge just before the Rock Valley Road turnoff, right on a blind turn that requires some care when pulling up.
The walk requires only a little effort and should not take more than an hour. Cars have been around since before most of the people who visit there were born, and given how well embedded they are in the mountainous region, they may be better than even the country’s oldest roads.
