“The desert will take care of you. At first, it’s all big and beautiful, but you’re afraid of it. Then you begin to see its dangers, and you hate it. Then you learn how to overcome its dangers. And the…
The recent controversies swirling around Bears Ears National Monument are only the latest in a series of struggles resulting from attempts to increase federal government involvement with exceptional places in the Utah/Arizona borderlands region of the Colorado Plateau. Elmo R.…
“We started on the Trail at 1:30 P.M., leaving the hospitable roof of the Wetherills at Kayenta… with the same spirit of buoyant expectancy as in former years.” —Charles L. Bernheimer, June 4, 1924 From the 1890s to the 1930s,…
Zane Grey’s inspiration for much of the geography in his 1915 novel, The Rainbow Trail, was the real trail that he followed on his adventurous 1913 horseback excursion to the magnificent Rainbow Natural Bridge. He recounted the experience in his…
Sometimes the Barbarian seems to be the Civilized Man. Sometimes the Civilized Man seems to be the Barbarian. —Benson J. Lossing, 1870 In late October, 1907, my great grandfather, John Wetherill, was making his way up the San Juan…
“It is not by adaptation to environment, but by the creation of an artificial environment.” —John Wesley Powell, 1888 In defiance of the prevailing belief that modern insights and innovations are driving humanity down the path of enlightenment, social tensions…
…the highest form of success… comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate…
