“What would be a normal planet would have a lot fewer people and lots more animals, and what we have now is an irregular, abnormal, and dangerous condition.” – Gary Snyder, 2010 In a way this story is painful…
Gail and I found the hamlet of Ruth, Nevada, on U.S. 50, 82 miles west of the Utah border. This tiny village is dwarfed by the massive outer shoulders of the Robinson open pit copper mine, just as mining towns…
“As far as technological culture is concerned, we lag miles behind America. But all that is frightfully costly and already carries the germ of the end in itself.” – Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung, 1909 On Valentine’s Day, 1884, when he…
“I tossed my empty out the window and popped the top from another can of Schlitz. Littering the public highway? Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are…
Why Jim Stiles Isn’t Normal: a Story That MUST be Told By Scott Thompson You should know that I’m a relative newcomer to The Canyon Country Zephyr. For me it started when Jim Stiles published several of my letters beginning…
“It is common among my people to hear someone say they are the land and the land is them…While human interactions are important, they are not held above the interactions that take place in the natural environment.” – Lisa Grayshield,…
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…
It is not that Pueblo Indians hate modern America…It is just that our unchecked growth, lack of social cohesion, and flamboyant use of resources worries them as being unsustainable. They expect to outlast us. – David E. Stuart, Archaeologist…
Experiencing the Great Basin Desert in Nevada seems to involve an inner war of perceptions. Here’s how it went for me. Just after Gail and I turned our rental car due south on Alternate U.S. Highway 93 from the fortress…
From Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation you can make out the ghostly outline of Nuvatukya’ovi, or the San Francisco Peaks, 75 miles to the southwest across the tan expanse of Great Basin desert. The center heights in these mountains…