UTAHIf you’re like us, you’ve occasionally fallen behind in paying your credit card or utility bills. And maybe you’ve had to face the consequences, perhaps nasty letters from a collection agency or a robo-caller with a vague accent demanding that you make an “arrangement.” But the folks at Uintah Elementary School in Salt Lake City […]
Utah
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
The great electric road trip
Blanding, a remote city of 3,504 in one of Utah’s poorest counties, received the state’s first Tesla Supercharger station in January. City Manager Jeremy Redd says it’s an ideal spot to power up an $80,000 electric car: “We’re halfway between Arches and Monument Valley,” and within an hour of Hovenweep and Natural Bridges national monuments. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Obama’s most effective environmental action?
Utah and other states like the new EPA regulations on vehicle emissions.
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
Redrock storyscapes
Escalante. Monticello. Manti-La Sal. Sheiks Flat. Kigalia. Tavaputs. Moroni Slopes. Spoken like mantras, these place names conjure the Utah canyon country’s bastard heritage – Spanish, Navajo, Ute, Anglo and Mormon. Today, they entice dreamers with their visionary topographies. But in earlier days it was the absence of names that drew people eager to fill in […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
The Latest: Court strikes down BLM plan in Utah
BackstoryDuring the George W. Bush administration’s final months, the Bureau of Land Management released six massive resource management plans for 11 million acres in southern Utah. The plans, which opened large areas to energy development and designated 17,000 miles of off-road vehicle trails, were released on a short timetable that allowed little opportunity for public […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Heart-Shaped River: Craig Childs finds his center in Canyonlands
“Not all maps are made of paper. The best ones are spooled in memory.”
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Craig Childs narrates a Canyonlands adventure
Images from a month-long trip with friends in 1999.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Learning to bend: Settling Utah’s road wars
Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon CountryJedediah S. Rogers242 pages, hardcover: $39.95.University of Utah Press, 2013. Some fear that we will saddle our children with trillions of dollars in federal debt. That would be too bad, but it would be a minor inconvenience compared to what our forefathers cursed us with: the 1866 federal […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Mourning before departure
The Days Are GodsLiz Stephens206 pages, softcover: $18.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2013. A wistful, at times mournful spirit permeates the 41 brief essays that make up Liz Stephens’ first book, The Days Are Gods. The Oklahoma-born Stephens is a “card-carrying Choctaw tribal member” and recently earned a Ph.D. in creative nonfiction. Her multifaceted memoir is […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
What’s in the water in Woods Cross?
A Salt Lake City suburb weighs environmental risk as it grapples with drinking water contamination.
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
New route to end Utah’s wilderness stalemate
Can one of the West’s most anti-federal lands lawmakers broker a mega-wilderness deal in the Beehive state?
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Stakeholders
Ashley KorenblatMoab mountain-bike outfitter and public-lands consultant “Folks in the rural West see kids in Grand Junction driving trucks for Halliburton making $80,000 a year. They see these jobs as good jobs, but they aren’t going to last. (Utah Republican Rep. Jason) Chaffetz has said, ‘We wouldn’t want to do anything now that would prevent […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
How the Mormon GOP runs Utah with a collectivist touch
“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 […]
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 […]