In this Issue… Take it or Leave it: A Personal Postscript to Bill Davis’ DOXOL FIRE Story …by Jim Stiles Safe at Home: Learning to Love Baseball …by Tonya Audyn Stiles “(Still) ‘Enough Rope’”: (A Reporter’s Moab Memories. 1978-1984) #7…
Regular Zephyr contributor Bill Davis sent us an extraordinary detailed account of one of Moab’s worst disasters, the Doxol explosion and fire on July 31, 1981. Bill was the chief reporter for the Times-Independent and his story in this issue is the…
Either you learn to love baseball as a kid or else you don’t learn to love it. Right? It’s just too big. It’s like any other behemoth cultural institution—Catholicism, for example. I can speak to this as a Catholic. That…
Author’s note: One of the major “news values”—factors that generate media attention—is “impact”: How much of your audience is affected, and to what extent? A low-impact story, such as a flood of sewage into the basement of a single home,…
A year ago, I wrote about the development of the Little Valley area of St. George in southwest Utah. What I tried to do in that piece was use words, pictures and numbers to provide a specific example of what…
While sheer numbers of tourists can overwhelm the most patient of park rangers, even I would acknowledge that among those masses could be found some of the best people on the planet. I haven’t worn a badge and a smoky…
# # # # # I would like to say that my whole photography career began with shooting motel signs, but that would be a lie on a few counts. First, it’s not really a career. Not a paying one,…
Here we are at the end of March, and I am thinking about December. Well, not really December. I am thinking about town and how I sometimes go there to write. Town can be a location and an idea. In…
The most inaccessible, least known, and roughest portion of the Navajo Reservation is bounded by the Navajo, Colorado, San Juan, and Piute canyons. […] Buttes, mesas, and small domes predominate and are so tightly packed that the base of one…
The following excerpts are from the book: CANYON COUNTRY EXPLORATIONS & RIVER LORE: The Remarkable Resilient Life of Kenny Ross, by Gene M. Stevenson. The book was written about Kenny Ross, one of the forgotten personalities on the Colorado Plateau…
Our regular readers know that we began a new project at the Zephyr in the past year–called “Zephyr America.” We’ve been slowly wading through the massive Zephyr archives of historic photos and digitizing them to share with our readers. To…
I have always been a news junkie. I grew up with Huntley/Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. It was always a matter of debate in our family, and others as well, whether Cronkite was a Republican or a Democrat. The consensus over the…
Note: This article first appeared in the October/November 2011 Zephyr… Many years ago, during one of my first trips to the canyon country, I made the dusty drive to Grandview Point on the Island in the Sky. The road was…
Author’s Introduction, from 1997:A year or so ago Jim Stiles came by for a visit and in the course of the conversation we talked about Indian ruins and how they were being vandalized. We wondered if, at the present rate…
Here at the Zephyr, we’re pretty proud of the articles we publish each issue. We’ve said this before, but we think we’ve assembled the best collection of writers we’ve ever had, all of whom are writing at a level that…
HERB RINGER and his parents, Sadie and Joseph, traveled across the American West and into the Canadian Rockies on numerous trips, from the 40s through the 70s. Herb was devoted to rail history, and was particularly fond of the historic…
April 22, 1941 Dear Hugh: This report is going to be a bit brief because I am at present confined to bed with a severe cold, and am attempting to think and write clearly while lying almost flat on my…
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In this issue… Take it or Leave it: The Insta-Facebook West …by Jim Stiles The Love of Maps …by Tonya Audyn Stiles A Satisfied Mind …By Harvey Leake “(Still) ‘Enough Rope’”: (A Reporter’s Moab Memories. 1978-1984) #6 The Pot Plane…
NOTE: Though I have begun to lose my appetite for reporting “the news,” the last two months have been tumultuous, and it’s clear they will have a direct bearing on life in southeast Utah. Consequently, I had reluctantly planned to offer…
The oldest surviving map of the world—the Babylonian Imago Mundi—circumscribes a landmass between the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The world it describes is only as long as the Euphrates River. At its center lies the city of Babylon. To the…