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 […]
Utah
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 […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Two weeks in the West
As more people play in the snow, skirmishes heat up.
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Notes from a place of risk and hope
Writer Kevin Holdsworth copped Wyoming’s tourist slogan “Big Wonderful” to describe a place of both risk and hope, a beautiful, battered landscape rich in myth and fact. He presents it through the complementary perspectives of a mountain climber, family man and friend, describing both Utah, the state of his birth, and Wyoming, the home of […]
Posted inOctober 30, 2006: Peace Breaks Out In New Mexico's Forests
Heard around the West
UTAH AND IDAHO Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Forest Service employees from Utah, that’s who. Two staffers from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Ogden were working in Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness Sept. 23, when they spotted wolves chasing a bull elk across a meadow. They weren’t frightened by the sight of the running […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people push the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, now […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
Saints speak out against nuclear waste
Although Mormons call Utah their promised land, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has rarely taken a stand in defense of its environment. Recently, however, the highest echelon of the church threw a protective arm around the state by opposing a nuclear waste storage site near Salt Lake City. In a three-sentence statement […]
Posted inMay 29, 2006: 'Clinging Hopelessly to the Past'
‘Clinging hopelessly to the past’
The cantankerous gospel of Jim Stiles and The Canyon Country Zephyr
Posted inApril 17, 2006: The War on Wildfire
Enviros wary of ‘Nevada-style’ wilderness bill
Utah proposal includes public-lands sale, utility corridors
Posted inApril 3, 2006: Land of Disenchantment
Pipeline and dam dreams
A new dam for Utah’s urban Wasatch Front and a pipeline for the fast-growing city of St. George got a boost in February, when the state Legislature approved a bill directing about $8 million a year to “preconstruction” work on the projects. The money, from state sales and use tax, will fund environmental studies and […]