RETRO ZEPHYR…30…20…10 Years Ago

30 YEARS AGO…FIRST BIG SIGNS OF CHANGE

And the first Zephyr Christmas 1989 in Moab

January of ’90…

20 Years Ago: Christmas from 1999

11 Years ago…Wait, what?

(It’s worth it for the) PERFECT MOMENTS:

CHARLES MILLER…HUNTLEY, ILLINOIS

“May, 1955. The Perfect Moment. After visiting whatever was relatively accessible in the Arches National Monument via the haphazard roads of the era, I stayed overnight in Moab and next day used the rather recently developed road onto what I later learned was called Island in the Sky. This road, courtesy of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a branch took me ultimately to Dead Horse Point long before this spot became the touristy state park of today. The road simply ended, no parking lot, no facilities, no descriptive placards, just nature in all its glory and magnificence.

“I may have been the only person on the mesa, for I met no other vehicles on the roads and had the Point all to myself. The view, as we tend to say, was indescribable, in some ways more impressive than those to be seen in the Grand Canyon, probably because the geology was more immediate and free of restraining railings or other human artifacts. I couldn’t help but sit on the edge for some time, master of that view and in complete awe, seeing the results of natural forces and time which led to those splendid colors and interesting, vast, enormous rock formations.

“I’ve been back several times, but that Perfect Moment can never be recovered.”

LANCE CHRISTIE…MOAB, UTAH

“I’ve never experienced anything I recognize as a PARTICULAR ‘perfect moment.’ Philosophically, I experience all moments as perfect, even if they’re perfectly awful according to my subjective evaluation. In transcendental states, I and everybody else who reports on what happens during them say we experience the universe as ‘perfect’ with everything connected to everything else in an unfolding divine ‘plan.’ At least that is the way it feels subjectively. As Siegel and West demonstrated at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, the hallucinatory experience and the transcendental experience are universal among members of homo sap because of the way our brains are wired. In the ‘individuated’ (Jung), ‘self-actualized’ (Maslow), or ‘enlightened’ (Buddha) individual, the individual is said to experience reality on both the mundane and transcendental levels at the same time – having a sort of binocular consciousness in which the transcendant perfection in every moment is experienced even as one takes care of mundane business like keeping the cat box clean, the dishes washed, and the garbage taken out.”

TEN YEARS AGO…

What Price Principle? The Grand Canyon Trust Loses Its Vision … By Doug Meyer

“To make a long story short, in the very same year, at the direction of their board (which even then included David Bonderman), GCT closed its St. George office and withdrew from public advocacy over the pipeline. An internal smack down like that isn’t easily forgotten, and it marks the point when Hedden could feel both boxed in by GCT’s core constituency, and muzzled by its mega-capital board. The Grand Canyon Trust telling itself to keep quiet on 180 miles of water pipeline below the spectacular red mesas of southern Utah was such a contradiction of their vision that it’s a wonder the group survived. The glaring inconsistency should have at least forced Hedden, as GCT’s newly appointed executive director, to bring an ultimatum before his membership: either change the vision statement, or reorganize without funding from the system devouring the landscape. But there was no ultimatum, no change in the stated vision, and no reorganization. What happened?” Click Here to Read More…

I BARBEQUE BECAUSE I CAN’T FIND MY STOVE
Remember Bill Benge’s favorite recipes…