The Zephyr Backbone is what keeps us alive! Click Here to Join! *Note: The Cartoonist screwed up in Feb/March. In a subconscious attempt to escape the world’s news, he changed one of our Backbone Member’s names from “Michael” to “Richard”…
NOTE: This is the first in a series. What has changed in Moab & Vicinity in the last couple of decades? These are my own remembrances going back to the late 70s. What was here…what’s gone…what’s lost forever? And…what’s new?…
It was early afternoon and the grocery store was bustling. The cashier’s name was Candy. Candy had her long white hair smoothed back into a low ponytail. Thin and agile, she wore blue jeans and her regulation-red vest. She cast…
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Gloria Steinem San Juan County comprises a splendor of canyons, cliffs and castles of sandstone. Anyone who has made a random discovery of 1,000-year-old artifacts of human…
Cultural and political rifts widen as newly elected Navajo commissioners of San Juan County, Utah, govern by resolutions approved without advice or informed consent of those governed. Critics say the commissioners’ private attorneys writing those resolutions and offering legal advice…
One of the most interesting lessons of history is how ideas, skills, and character traits are passed on from person to person. This is a story of a twenty-three-year-old Swedish explorer and scientist, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, who brought some remarkable influence…
Under the sun without summer and in landscapes familiar to me, and still I wonder what the hell am I doing here. A couple of weeks ago, I went for a walk not far from the house I’m renting and…
“The problem with the conservation movement is that it has clear conscience.” — Wendell Berry. DISCLAIMER: This story makes no attempt to offer ‘solutions’, nor do I have any illusions, when considering the Future of Moab, Utah. I am simply…
Paul Vlachos is a New Yorker who understands The West. And he is a New Yorker who understands New York. Wherever Paul goes, he finds signs of life… I was going to write about “quiet.” It’s a subject close to…
I was raised on a dairy farm, and grew up with the strength that long hours, hard work and responsibility gives a farm kid. When I wasn’t doing chores, I wandered and explored the fields, woodlands and swamps. I didn’t…
The kid — male, age 16-25, stupid — was about nine feet up a sandstone fin, within sight of his campsite at the Devils Garden. He (I’ll call him Bobby) had been showing off for his girlfriend, eager to thrill…
In my limited understanding, in many Native American cultures, sense of place, and ones relation to the land they have been raised on, is considered down right spiritual. And while it is a subject I’m keen to learn more about,…
This is Hank Schmidt’s Monthly Report from June of 1940. He’d been the park custodian at Arches National Monument since the Fall of 1939. What a difference between 1940 and now… Click Here to Read HANK SCHMIDT’S MONTHLY REPORT: Arches…
HERB RINGER and his parents, Sadie and Joseph, traveled across the American West and into the Canadian Rockies on numerous trips, from 1941 to 1973. We are in the process of scanning hundreds of Herb’s Kodachrome transparencies that have never…
NOTE: In the early years of The Zephyr, Moab was transforming itself, though not everyone was sure just who the ‘transformers’ were. We set out to ask the citizens of Moab and Grand County what they saw coming. Here is…
The Zephyr Backbone is what keeps us alive! Click Here to Join! *Note: The Cartoonist screwed up in Feb/March. In a subconscious attempt to escape the world’s news, he changed one of our Backbone Member’s names from “Michael” to “Richard”…
This is what’s happened between blinks of the eye…. Shortly after The Zephyr’s first issue appeared on newsstands, in mid-March 1989, I was at the old Main Street Broiler, eating one of Debbie Rappe’s wonderful cheeseburgers and overheard a spirited…
You’re either a person who can sit still or a person who can’t. A person who loves what you can already see, or one who wonders what you might see around the bend. Probably the former type lives the more…
In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith suggests that the field of Economics has not sufficiently evolved to account for widespread material abundance, which is itself a recent condition anywhere in the world. Galbraith argues that the affluent society is…
