In Navajo Nation, Bad Roads Can Mean Life or Death

For the first 45 minutes of William Mustache’s afternoon route, his school bus travels comfortably down the highway that runs the length of San Juan County, Utah. It starts at the high school in Blanding, which, with 3,400 residents, is the biggest town in a county nearly the size of New Jersey. Mustache, a Navajo man wearing a black track jacket and a bright yellow ball cap, waits for students to climb aboard before he pulls the bus out behind several others and follows them to the highway. The miles tick by quickly as Mustache’s new Bluebird bus passes the uranium mill just outside town, the cattle grazing among juniper bushes on federal land, and the multicolored bands of distant mesas. The road tips downward at steep grades as it descends into a vast expanse of sage-stubbled desert. Then come the bluffs. Sharp turns around towering stone structures mark a change, not just in geology, but in sovereignty.

http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-navajo-utah-roads-infrastructure.html