A JUNE 2021 INTRODUCTION: In June 1990, thirty-one years ago this month, I penned a Page Two essay for my fledgling newspaper, The Canyon Country Zephyr, called “New West Blues.” The Zephyr had only existed for a bit more than…
A year ago, I wrote about the development of the Little Valley area of St. George in southwest Utah. What I tried to do in that piece was use words, pictures and numbers to provide a specific example of what…
Note: This article first appeared in the October/November 2011 Zephyr… Many years ago, during one of my first trips to the canyon country, I made the dusty drive to Grandview Point on the Island in the Sky. The road was…
One of my favorite poet/songwriters, Utah Phillips, once wrote: “I’ll sing about an emptiness the East has never known, Where coyotes don’t pay taxes and a man can live alone. And you’ve got to walk forever just to find a…
Everyone was expecting another typical Moab Spring. A year earlier it had looked like this… and then… For weeks, Moab looked like this. A post-apocalyptic ghost town. Moab local Kerry Lange took these two shots from a spot on Main…
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.”…
When President Obama created “Bears Ears National Monument,” it was an accepted fact that with the designation would come massive development studies, master plans, draft management plans, and ultimately, the approval of multi-million dollar visitor centers, improved roads, and other…
My buddy Joseph Day, from Second Mesa, Arizona and a longtime Zephyr supporter, likes to torture me from time to time. Last night, Tonya and I were having a quiet evening when an email popped up from Joe. “Have you…
I first visited Moab in the brutally cold January of 1973. I returned the following summer, then again and again. And in the fall of 1975 I moved there to stay. It was an early seminal moment…Moab, I proclaimed, would…
“The problem with the conservation movement is that it has clear conscience.” — Wendell Berry. DISCLAIMER: This story makes no attempt to offer ‘solutions’, nor do I have any illusions, when considering the Future of Moab, Utah. I am simply…