From the 1995 Zephyr archives… Maxine Newell was born in New Mexico in 1919 and moved to western Colorado a year later. She has lived in the Four Corners country ever since. In 1995, I sat down with Maxine and…
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT…Jim Stiles A personal note about Pete Parry–How he saved Canyonlands AND my Dogs The History (and LOVE!!!) that Lives in my Fridge SOWING CLOVER…Tonya Stiles The Last Picture Show? The Poetry of DAMON FALKE…
Pete Parry was superintendent of Canyonlands National Park from 1975 to 1987 and elsewhere in this issue is a story about Pete’s decade of service during one of Southeast Utah’s most turbulent and politically charged times—the Sagebrush Rebellion. Pete dealt…
PETE PARRY Pete quietly took on the D.O.E and the planned Canyonlands Nuclear Repository… AND WON. When I was in my early 20s, the National Park Service hired me as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park. I had virtually…
You’re damn right there’s an immigration problem in Arizona: far too many white people have been emigrating there. If you doubt that, here are the numbers: while the Hispanic population in Arizona increased by 856,000 between 1980 and 2006, the…
Edna Fridley was a good friend of the canyon country of southeast Utah for more than 30 years. Every year she returned to the slickrock from her home, back east, to wander and explore what was then one of the…
Among Ruins What is there to make of the house and porch Crumbling into ruins, of bindweed grown Up through slats of rotted timber, chipped and Dismantled by the long harvest of families Who could never stay here? The…
Could a water-vapor runaway greenhouse effect happen here on Earth? The physics says no, the orbit is too far from the sun, but the physics can’t model clouds either. Score: physics 0, James Hansen 0. Here we are, three years…
HOLE “N” THE ROCK 1952 HERB RINGER came West from his home in New Jersey in 1939. Camera in hand, Herb captured the American West, from the Canadian Border to the Rio Grande and from the Big Sur…
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Last summer Jim Stiles and Bob Greenspan and I met in Jackson, Wyoming. Bob and I favored crossing the street to a cafe for coffee, but Jim led us to a shady outside bench and we sat there quite a…
Paul Vlachos is a New Yorker who understands The West. And he is a New Yorker who understands New York. Wherever Paul goes, he finds signs of life… 1. Fort Stockton, Texas. Out back of a radiator shop in a…
NOTE: This short essay appeared in the second issue of The Zephyr, in May 1989. From the beginning, this publication always believed that ‘wilderness’ was more than a piece of legislation or a product to be marketed. Almost 25 years…
What do oil companies & environmentalists have in common? Sometimes their money comes from the same ‘donor.’ A few years ago, High Country News and Writers on the Range published an essay by Gary Wockner called, “Can Billionaire Philanthropy Save…
“As is everything in Vegas, the FleurBurger 5000 is over the top with a hefty price tag of $5,000.00…… It is a Kobe burger containing foie gras, a special truffle sauce, and is served on a brioche truffle bun…
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT…Jim Stiles Glen Canyon, 50 years after the Dam About the Grand Canyon Trust, ‘A Just & Healthy Future,’ & Doug Meyer’s Honest Response The Rise and Fall of Hair…A History SOWING CLOVER…Tonya Stiles The Trouble…
GLEN CANYON, A HALF CENTURY AFTER THE DAM… In all the years and centuries and eons before it was flooded, only a relative handful of people saw the untamed, free and flowing Colorado River in Glen Canyon. When the gates…
I’ve read quite a few articles over the years–and it seems like a slew lately–telling me what “women” are saying, thinking and wanting. All are about as predictable as you’d expect. Usually they refer to some small subset of women…
“Evidence of the power and effect of jokes can be seen in the fact that dictators and totalitarian regimes – and occasionally also thin-skinned politicians in democracies – fear them like the plague.” – Paul Watzlawick As is so often…
“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.” — Derrick Jensen, Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization Formed in the mid 1980s in order to dispel the…
When October Comes I know all the roads that lead into town, Even after these years away. The way I find them here In the shadows of my old hopes still, In the unexpected gifts of earlier days, In the…