I can’t write about my time in Moab without providing a little backstory on why I loved the place so much, and how happy, no, giddy, I was to move there. I grew up in Santa Barbara, California, during the…
BILL DAVIS & ‘ENOUGH ROPE” A MOAB REPORTER RETURNS AFTER 35 YEARS. In the late 70s. Moab was experiencing a mini-boom of sorts. The Atlas mill was still running full-tilt. The price of oil had skyrocketed, thanks to the Iranian…
Few readers of The Monkey Wrench Gang know that Bonnie Abbzug was based on a real woman–a real dancer from the Bronx. She and Ed were a couple when Ed began writing the book and they remained friends until his…
Environmentalists so often seem self-righteous, privileged, and arrogant because they so readily consent to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay, or live. Thus…
NOTE: I finished this article several weeks ago, before the current COVID-19 disaster gave new urgency and recognition to the term “essential personnel.” It’s clear to everyone now how great a role is played by grocery workers, truckers, gas station…
Today, the rural west veers between two economic extremes: The industrial resource extraction and commodity economy, and the industrial tourism economy. The traditional occupations of the west, ranching, farming, logging, and mining, are locked in a deadly embrace with global…
“The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today, And that gent today You gave a cent today Once had several chateaux.” I sometimes think of happier times. What is “happy,”…
This article first appeared in the Utah Historical Quarterly, and is reprinted with the permission of the author. Click Here to Read Part 1… [Bates] Wilson had originally conceived a Canyonlands in which access would be substantially by jeep and…
The fire was now burning brightly. We sat down around Grandfather as the firelight played over his face and white hair. We could hear the wind blowing outside, but everything was peaceful inside the hogan and we were all contented.…
My grandfather, Hayden, was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”…
I woke up today and made a cup of tea. It’s a little after 4:30 AM when I do this. It’s dark outside, but I look anyway. In another couple of months the sun will be shining through my kitchen…
NOTE: In the last issue of the Zephyr, Jen Jackson Quintano illuminated some of the mystery around Moab’s “King of the World,” Aharon Andrikian, a drifting artist who found his way to the area in the mid-30s and left his…
Over the past three decades, The Canyon Country Zephyr has published some of the best writing, photography and history of the American West … And politics, from time to time. Now we’re taking a break from politics, as we all…
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In this issue… Take it or Leave it: Robert Redford, Art Ekker, and Our Complicated Love of Cowboys …by Jim Stiles CANDID CAMERA: Facial Recognition and the Last Fight for Privacy… by Tonya Stiles FROM GENOCIDE SURVIVOR TO KING OF…
I have had a soft spot for cowboys and the cinematic Western since I was old enough to walk and say, “giddy-up.” It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never became proficient on a horse.…
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” – Robert Oppenheimer In any given week, any given month…
It’s a story that won’t stop haunting me. A mystery in need of answers. I try to let it go, and then it creeps back in—as all the best stories do. Because the best stories are a kind of haunting.…
NOTE: This is the second in an ‘as needed’ series of photo essays on the changing face of Southeast Utah, as its communities pursue an “Industrial Tourism” economy. In the last issue, Tonya and I ventured into Moab for the…
He will keep the vision as long as he lives. It is simply a signature of God, the universe drawn with light, wholly gratuitous and unexpected…. The boy is here, here in the world, in the embrace of eternity. —N.…
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. – Mike Tyson In modern America, local zoning has become a primary mechanism through which a wide range of hopes and fears for social and economic conditions are hashed…