We just called it the gully.

It's more than just a little unlikely that anyone not from Utah has heard of the city of Sandy, but pardon me as I take you there for a little bit of nostalgia. Sandy is actually one of the largest cities in Utah, encompassing most of the Southeast end of the Salt Lake Valley. At the feet of the Rocky Mountains it enjoys the picturesque majesty of their towering peaks, and it was in this town and with this view that I grew up and lived for what is still a majority of my life.

Growing up, urban sprawl had not yet grown up the sides of the southern point of the mountains nor filled up the fields (mostly of sage brush) that separated Sandy from the Oquirrh Mountain range on the west where the Kennecott copper mine (the world's largest excavation and copper mine) has slowly grown into a hole in the face of the earth visible from space.

While Sandy had once been a sugar beet farming community, the last sugar beet farm had long disappeared before I was born in 1978, but Sandy still had some of its rural trappings, the most important of which for me were the large fields of undeveloped land where enterprising youths could create dirt-bike trails, and in the winters, with the greatest snow on earth covering the ground, abundant sledding hills.

Among our favorite slices of wilderness left in our otherwise suburban existence was the gully. To this day I don't know if it has any other name. Created by a usually small stream that flows down from little cottonwood canyon, the gully is a steep-sided gouge through the middle of Sandy that to this day remains one of the few pieces of, mostly, natural wilderness in a valley where urban sprawl has flowed even over the tops of the smaller mountains.