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,…
The local high school kids called it PCP: Plane Crash Pot. The source of the PCP was, logically enough, a plane crash. The craft went down late the night of Tuesday, Feb. 15, 1983, about five miles south of Canyonlands…
I was sitting at my desk which faced away from the street, directly behind the massive wall of glass that used to make up the façade of the newspaper office (a position that frequently gave me an itchy spot between…
My first controversy on the paper was one I didn’t seek and didn’t want, especially so early in my tenure; I had only been reporting for a couple of months. The issue involved the Friendship Cruise between Green River and…
My first few days in town, toward the end of April, 1978, I wasn’t in town. Well, not sleeping there at any rate. Rentals were hard to come by (I gather it’s infinitely worse nowadays), so each evening I would…
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…
THANKS to Tom McCourt & the Tibbetts Family. For years, I have been watching Moab move farther and farther away from its roots, to the point where it seems few people even know the history of the place anymore. Some…
It is a very quiet morning here in Moab, Utah. Outside a gentle rain is falling, the first we have seen in a few weeks. All month the weather in our part of the world has been mild, with…