“Our object is to labor for the benefit of the whole …” –Brigham Young, 1873 A throng of cars floats down Interstate 15 on an end-of-summer morning, the rising sun wreathed in the orange gauze of distant wildfire smoke. In Lehi, a suburb sandwiched between Salt Lake City and Provo, a massive steel-and-glass shape juts […]
Utah
Posted inWotr
How to find a 13,000 year-old mammoth
It takes a long time to find a curved-tusk mammoth, especially if it’s been obscured beneath tamarisk, oak brush and tenacious Russian olive bushes. I’d heard stories about mammoths once roaming the land that’s now San Juan County in southeastern Utah, but a beast from the Pleistocene is hard to locate on rock cliffs and […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters: Silt and the Slow Demise of Glen Canyon Dam
Updated 5/17/11 The Lower San Juan River courses through a rather forsaken landscape of clay hills and redrock plateaus in southeast Utah. At the end of a long, dusty road, there is a boat ramp at the water’s edge where, at any warm time of year, vans and roof-racked Subarus bake in the sun while […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Jeff Rice on documenting the West in sound
Hear the sounds Jeff Rice collects around the West and learn about why he does it. You can catch High Country Views approximately every other week. Available via our RSS feed, and for download now through iTunes.
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Utah’s Sagebrush Rebellion capital mellows as animal-lovers and enviros move in
Kanab, UtahOn a crisp June morning in the heart of Sagebrush Rebel country, a steady stream of rental cars, minivans and SUVs flows north from Kanab on Highway 89, heading toward the serene, red-rock walls of Angel Canyon. As the highway curves, the landscape flickers through sun and shadows, the sandstone glowing like embers in […]
Posted inWotr
Some people just don’t get it
I gave up driving years ago on a peaceful Sunday morning in downtown Ogden, Utah, when I was T-boned by a truck driven by a drunk driver who abandoned the scene. Our Volkswagen was totaled. My 9-year-old son was in the hospital for a week with a punctured spleen. My left femur was broken and […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
A battle for the land – and soul – of the West
Denver native Stephen Trimble fell in love with the West from the back seat of the family car. On summer field trips with his mother and geologist father, Trimble developed a fine eye for red-rock country and the light that filled unspoiled valleys and vistas. He’s since produced gorgeous photography books and insightful natural and […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Tackling Utah’s trash
NAME Issa Hamud AGE 48 HOME LIFE Married, eight kids. DRIVES 2004 Ford F-150. HOBBY Four-wheeling with friends. NEXT PROJECT Hamud hopes to build an Environmental Education Center on the site of the current landfill once it closes. It will feature a glass wall exposing a cross section of the landfill to its 30-foot depths, […]
Posted inArticles
Public lands precedent?
Recently, the Utah Bureau of Land Management cancelled an oil and gas lease sale, citing the need to further study the impact of drilling on wildlife habitat. Conservationists think the cancellation – the first in over 25 years – sets a national precedent for protecting wildlife habitat from energy leasing. But the BLM disagrees and […]
Posted inArticles
The road more traveled
Trevor Leach remembers riding horses on Bald Knoll Road as a child in the 1920s. During the ’60s, Arlene Goulding and her kids used the route for hunting trips. The testimony of these Kane County residents helped the Bureau of Land Management piece together the history of Bald Knoll Road, which laces across public lands […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t book my adventure, please
Not long ago, I Googled my old hometown, Moab, along with the word “adventure,” and found over 500,000 links. Apparently there are adventures enough to be found in Moab to keep tourists entertained and spending their money until the next millennium. Just to mention a handful, I found the Moab Adventure Center, Moab Adventure Xstream, […]
Posted inWotr
Going wild in the city
A skunk, red-tailed hawk, rabbits, squirrels, robins — all have dined in my city yard, within sight of Wyoming’s Capitol dome. But when we moved to this corner of a busy one-way street in Cheyenne, Wyo., 15 years ago, the yard was a mess. The parkways, those supposedly green spaces between the street and sidewalk, […]
Posted inMay 28, 2007: Problems In Paradise
Two weeks in the West
Just about every dinky diner in the Northwest’s logging country used to have a supplemental menu. Beside the grease-spattered board offering up fried eggs and bacon was another touting items such as spotted owl stew. It was a joke, of course, a jab at the endangered bird that many loggers blamed for the demise of […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
You ain’t from around here, are you?
Jim Stiles, the itinerant publisher of Moab’s venerable Canyon Country Zephyr, knows that the rural West is in danger. He also knows who’s to blame: city folk. That’s the gist, anyway, of Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed. Stiles is obviously a man of character and passion. You want to agree […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Bay bags his way to the top
NAME: Brian Bay AGE: 23 VOCATION: Front-end grocery store manager and full-time student WORLD CHAMPION: of grocery bagging HOBBIES: Coin collecting. Goes to work with a pocketful of change and trades it out for interesting coins. FAVORITE MOVIES TO QUOTE FROM: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Princess Bride, Three Amigos and Dumb and Dumber One […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Driven to fight
A retired BLM special agent finds herself battling the very agency she once worked for
Posted inArticles
Utah county tries to rein in off-roaders
“There was a time I could go out and ride a motorcycle cross-country,” says Ray Peterson, director of the Emery County Public Lands Council. “And the next day I could go back out and there wouldn’t be another track except mine.” That’s no longer the case: Off-road vehicle use in Utah has exploded during the […]
Posted inWotr
Death of a New Westerner
Late on a Friday night last October, word came to me that my best friend, Bill Benge, had died suddenly of a massive heart attack in Moab, Utah. He was only 60. We had both come from large cities to Moab as young men, more than 30 years ago, and had chosen, for our own […]