Month: February 2024

From 2007: “Brave New West”(The Amenities Boom & Meltdown) w/ 2024 Updates —Jim Stiles (ZX#103)

by stiles • February 25, 2024 • 15 Comments

I had been ranting for years about the impacts an Industrial Tourism economy could create. My pleas fell on deaf ears, especially with the mainstream environmental community. Organizations like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) embraced the change and even devoted an entire issue of its newsletter praising the amenities economy as a clean, non-polluting way to bring economic prosperity to areas that had previously depended on the extractive industries to survive. What they failed to consider was that while coal mining and oil and gas exploration and ranching could scrape bare the skin of the rural West, a massive monolithic tourism economy would eventually bare and destroy its very soul.

The Legacy of Nasja Begay: Paiute Guide — By Harvey Leake (ZX#102 )

by stiles • February 18, 2024 • 12 Comments

From early times, a tiny community of Paiute Indians made their homes at the bottom of a remote canyon that transects the Arizona/Utah border. Early in 1909, two of them—a father and son—rode eastward on a rocky, fifty-mile-long trail toward Monument Valley in order to patronize a trading post at a place known as Oljato. The father’s name was Mupuutz, which means “Owl” in the Paiute language, although he was better known by the Navajo translation of his name, Nasja (Nd’dshjaa’), or the name the census takers used for him, Ruben Owl. His son was called Nasja Begay (Nd’dshjaa’ Biye’), i.e., Owl’s Son. Nasja was in his early seventies, and Nasja Begay was about eighteen.

The pioneer trading post at Oljato had been established a few years earlier by John and Louisa Wetherill, my great-grandparents, and Clyde Colville, their trading partner. They were quite fluent with the Navajo language and were learning some Paiute as well.

BEFORE TELLURIDE & ASPEN WENT CRAZY: 1950-1980/Photos by Herb Ringer (ZX# 101)

by stiles • February 11, 2024 • 19 Comments

From Edward Abbey’s “The Journey Home”
“The town of Telluride was actually discovered back in 1957, by me, during a picnic expedition into the San Miguel Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I recognized it at once as something much too good for the general public. For thirteen years I kept the place a secret from all but my closest picnicking cronies. No use: I should have invested everything I had in Telluride real estate. In 1970 a foreigner from California named Joseph T. Zoline moved in with $5 million and began the Californica-tion of Telluride. Formerly an honest, decayed little mining town of about good souls, it is now a bustling whore of a ski resort with a population of 1,500 and many more to come. If all goes badly, as planned…

… Men weep, men pray and kneel, but money talks. Money walks and talks and gets things done.
— EA

BITING BUGS & POISON IVY: “Why God?” — Jim Stiles (ZX#100)

by stiles • February 4, 2024 • 26 Comments

I was a newly initiated Boy Scout, officially a Tenderfoot, and had traveled with Troop 246 to a summer Boy Scout camp at Rough River, Kentucky. We had planned a canoe trip for the next day, but early that afternoon, we set up camp in an open field. As I sat in the tall grass chatting with my pals, I suddenly felt an uncomfortable itch emanating from the most sensitive part of the male anatomy. I said nothing at first, and was not about to share my problem with my buddies. Besides, I was a Boy Scout. It was still okay to be stoic, to admire stoicism, and endure discomfort bravely, and quietly, like Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart might do. I said nothing…