I decided to try to hike at least an hour every day for an entire year. With me almost every step of the way during what turned out to be a successful 367-day quest that covered maybe 1,200 miles was my dog Casey, who was five at the beginning and six at the end. Two months after we started, Casey went instantly, inexplicably and totally blind.
Arches National Park is often called a frontcountry park, because many of its most celebrated natural features are within sight of the paved park road. The Arches highway winds its way from Moab Canyon and US 191 to its terminus…
HERB RINGER and his parents, Sadie and Joseph, traveled across the American West and into the Canadian Rockies on numerous trips, from 1941 to 1973. We are in the process of scanning hundreds of Herb’s Kodachrome transparencies that have never…
In the Spring of 1964 I traveled into Arches National Monument with my family. We entered the park over the Willow Flats Road, seven or eight miles of rough, one lane, sand and dirt in the family station wagon and…
EDITOR’S NOTE: If Renny Russell had a nickel for every time someone told him how “On the Loose” changed his life, I suspect Renny would still be living quietly and unobtrusively, off the grid, somewhere in the remote mountains of…
The world of light and space that Edward Abbey found at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s and early 1960s and that he wrote about in Desert Solitaire survives in Great Basin National Park in far eastern Nevada. The…
In the blink of an eye, summer has left us. The maples are turning red below South Peak, the aspens are on the cusp. The mornings are cold and crisp. The most poignant and melancholy and lovely time of the…
I made my 28th trip to the top of a nearby mountain last month. But who’s counting? I hadn’t missed a year since 1985, and then my own procrastinations and an early snow storm stymied my efforts to make the…
When I was a seasonal ranger, I lived at the Devils Garden Campground at Arches National Park for a full decade. Some people thought I’d never leave; even I wondered if I’d ever get out of there alive. I worried…
Can there be any doubt that we live in an age quantified, represented and defined by the cell phone? I came to this conclusion a few years back when visiting San Francisco at the Thanksgiving Holiday. I had given two…