When Lin Ottingerwas a kid living with his aunt, he liked to play pranks on her. When Ottinger learned about the element gallium, which has such a low melting point that it will soften in the palm of your hand, he applied this property to facilitate a joke: He borrowed one of his aunt’s fancy silver spoons and made a cast of it, and then created a copy out of a gallium alloy that would melt at the temperature of hot coffee. His aunt and her guests were all surprised when she stirred her coffee and the spoon deformed.

Since he moved to Moab in the 1950s, Ottinger has taken part in many of the industries that have formed the town’s identity: he prospected for uranium, worked on sets for Western movies, started a backcountry tour business and a downtown rock shop, climbed with famous mountaineers and first ascensionists, and discovered a new species of dinosaur. He explored the varied crevices and expanses of canyon country with an indefatigable curiosity and sense of adventure, sharing his discoveries along the way.




Visions of America

 

Lin Ottinger’s Moab Rock Shop is still a beloved stop for tourists to visit and locals to return to. It’s densely cluttered with agates, geodes, petrified wood, dinosaur fossils and more. Now 95 years old, Ottinger himself doesn’t spend as much time in the shop or ranging the desert as he once did, but he still relishes his memories.

When I met with Ottinger in his home, he was dressed as himself: His T-shirt commemorated his Volkswagen bus desert tours, and he donned a ball cap printed with dinosaur skeletons and adorned with what looked like a raven’s feather.

He was generous with stories, while direct questions received short, cheeky replies. For example, when I asked him if he remembered any of the routes he climbed with legends Fred Beckey and Eric Bjornstad, he said, “Yeah – the rock that goes up.”

When I asked how he became so skilled at finding interesting objects like fossils and geodes, he said, “I look where they are.”

Maybe that’s a fair response to a silly question – after all, he’s spent a lifetime looking.

In Ottinger’s kitchen, crystals and minerals sparkled on the windowsill above the sink. A curio cabinet displayed antique watches, polished rocks, fern fossils and geodes. Old oil lamps and blue glass electrical insulators shone atop a china cabinet next to it. Rocks, bones and found objects perched on and around the woodstove. Photos of movie star acquaintances, family members and desert adventures hung on the walls, along with press clippings and gifts of artwork from grandchildren.

Many of the mementos are from his decades in Moab, but some hark back to his childhood, during which he moved around a lot and sometimes had to fend for himself.

As far back as he can remember, he found ways to work and make money, doing “whatever needed to be done,” he said – he quit school in the seventh grade. Rock hounding was one of his earliest interests; he found and sold arrowheads as a young child in Tennessee.

Ottinger recounted a story about running away from home when he was around 12 years old and joining a circus, doing odd jobs for a few months. He didn’t have anywhere warm to sleep at night, so he took to curling up with the elephant.

“I’d climb up on her back, and she’d put her trunk up and rub me,” Ottinger said.

One night he woke up to a blow – the elephant had wacked him with her trunk. Miffed, he started to leave the enclosure, but was paused by an apologetic touch from the elephant’s trunk – she hadn’t meant to hurt him, Ottinger interpreted the gesture to mean. He forgave her and cuddled up with her again.

Ottinger is known for his affinity for animals. He showed me a photo of himself as an adult in the Moab desert with a collared lizard perched on his chest. The beautiful green, yellow and blue lizards are not known for being tame. I asked how he got it to be so comfortable with him, and Ottinger said he just scratched it under the chin.



Richard Kimbrough

In Ottinger’s living room, he pointed out an old Victrola phonograph in the corner.

“Does it work?” I asked.

“It better,” Ottinger snapped. “I fixed it in about 1940.”

We had to move a replica of the skull of a prehistoric mammal to open the wooden lid. A record was set on the spindle. I wound it up, switched it on, and set the needle. Old-timey band music warbled out. Ottinger seemed pleased.

He’d found the Victrola in his aunt’s attic when he was 12 and asked her if he could play it; she told him no. He asked why not, and she said, “Because it doesn’t work.” Either Ottinger has injected his own personality into the character of his aunt, or terse replies are a family trait.

Ottinger asked permission to try to fix it and she said, “You can’t.”

“ ‘Can’t?’ I don’t know what that means,” Ottinger said.

He took the record player apart, cleaned it and oiled it with a specialty oil, and put it back together. When he showed her that it worked, she said he could have it. More than 80 years later, it still works.

When Ottinger joined the Army later in life, his knack for repairs landed him a job as a mechanic. He carried on his rock habit while in the military – he would polish stones and make them into jewelry that he sold to his fellow soldiers. Ottinger was stationed in Canada during the end of World War II, but the war ended before he was ever deployed.

Later he worked as a logger in the Northwest before an encounter at a rock and gem show in Boise piqued his interest in Moab. He saw an impressive piece of uranium ore at the show, and the vendor told him where it came from – that’s what first led him to the town that became his home.

He got his first Moab job with a mining company through a typically Ottinger combination of serendipity and skill. He was camped with his family along what is now Kane Creek Boulevard near a gravel pit; one day he overheard two mine workers arguing over who had forgotten the keys to a bulldozer parked at the pit. Ottinger resolved the issue by hotwiring the bulldozer so they could get it onto their trailer; later they returned and offered him a job.

Ottinger’s appreciation for Volkswagen buses began during a prospecting jaunt. A would-be uranium miner who'd heard that Ottinger was the best man to find likely claims hired him and picked him up to go prospecting – in a Volkswagen bus. They passed Jeeps stuck in the mud and just drove around them. That’s when he decided that he needed a Volkswagen.

Once while driving his VW in the backcountry, he passed the movie star Clint Eastwood, who was stuck in a Jeep on his way to a set.

“Where you going?” Ottinger asked the stranded Eastwood.

“Up there,” Eastwood answered.

“So am I,” Ottinger said. “Why don’t you get in?”

After that, Eastwood was also sold on VWs and had Ottinger taxi him around. Ottinger worked on movie sets, too – like prospectors, movie producers knew him as someone who could navigate in the desert and solve problems.

Ottinger stuck with VW buses when he started his taxi and tour service, bringing clients out to Moab’s stunning scenery: Deadhorse Point, Gemini Bridges, the White Rim. He brought picnics and would find unique lunch spots, helping his clients clamber up or down to a nook or ledge. Sometimes he would send tourists with instructions on a scramble through a rock labyrinth – then wait at the exit to pop out and startle them.

Ottinger liked to take his buses to extreme places – like across Musselman Arch along the White Rim. Before venturing on wheels over the thin span of sandstone, he walked out and started picking up hefty rocks and small boulders, tossing them one by one, estimating and adding up their weights until he figured he’d removed a load equal to the weight of the bus. Then he drove the clients confidently out onto the arch.

A ranger flagged them down in alarm, saying it was dangerous.

“It can’t take the weight,” the ranger said.

“Oh yes, it can!” Ottinger retorted.

(The distributed weight of the rocks and the concentrated weight of the bus surely put different pressures on the arch – but it held.)

 By his own and others’ accounts, Ottinger didn’t shy from confrontation with rangers as land designations and regulations multiplied over the years.

“I can drive it if I want to,” Ottinger remembered telling the scoldy ranger, adding, “I can chase you off it!”

Throughout his gigs with film productions, prospectors and driving tour and taxi buses, Ottinger continued exploring the desert and collecting rocks, fossils and other interesting things he found. He kept his rock shop stocked and gave slideshow presentations in the evenings.

Some of his discoveries made a splash, like bones from previously unknown dinosaur species, one of which was named “Iguanodon ottingeri” in his honor. He and his son, Sonny, also found a pair of human skeletons that had been fossilized into malachite. The location of the bones – essentially, buried deep in the earth and exposed by mining activities – was puzzling and sparked a lot of speculation.

But Ottinger seemed just as interested in other finds that he showed me – chunks of fossilized bone, recognizable, he explained, by the preserved pattern of the cell structure; a 100-year-old toy cast-iron Model-T he’d found mostly buried in sand in a remote area; a naturally faceted salt crystal he’d found near the potash mine outside of Moab. He also showed pictures of jewelry he’s made: polished stones set in silver, ivory pieces etched with delicate patterns.

When I asked him how he learned his skills, like repairing mechanical things and creating jewelry, he said, “I guess I’m smart. I didn’t learn it – I just did it.”

Ottinger kept working at the rock shop up until he was 93, though he turned the management over to Sonny in 2005. Sonny continues to run the shop now, along with his lifelong best friend – both of them grew up working there. Sonny’s son and grandson both work at the rock shop too.

Ottinger still has eight of those original VW buses in a warehouse, and a few have been restored. Every spring a small but devoted community of VW enthusiasts celebrates the vehicles by taking them on a throwback desert tour around Moab; there was a special gathering this fall to celebrate Ottinger’s 95th birthday. He joined the VW caravan in one of the original tour buses and visited beloved spots like Gemini Bridges. Nearly a century of exploring has not lessened the joy of it for Ottinger.