Sometimes the Barbarian seems to be the Civilized Man. Sometimes the Civilized Man seems to be the Barbarian. —Benson J. Lossing, 1870 In late October, 1907, my great grandfather, John Wetherill, was making his way up the San Juan…
NOTE: I wrote this article in December 2008. We were trying to warn Moab and Grand County residents of future SITLA developments, even then. Particularly note references to the Lion’s Back Resort, as far back as 2006. At the time,…
NOTE: Maxine Newell was a life long resident of the Colorado Plateau. She was born in Dove Creek, Colorado and lived in Monticello and then Moab until her death in 2015. Maxine and I worked together at Arches NP in…
THE PROCLAMATION: On December 28, 2016, President Obama, by proclamation, designated 1.35 million acres of federally owned land in southeast Utah as “Bears Ears National Monument.” The President stated that he had taken this action, “to protect some of our…
THANKS to Tom McCourt & the Tibbetts Family. For years, I have been watching Moab move farther and farther away from its roots, to the point where it seems few people even know the history of the place anymore. Some…
INTRODUCTION: When President Obama visited Hiroshima last May and laid a wreath at the Peace Memorial there, my mind flashed back to an evening more than 25 years ago, during a pack trip into Dark Canyon with Ken Sleight. It…
Jerome Arkansas Mom, her mother and father, two sisters and six brothers, and the other Fresno Fairground horse stable inmates left Fresno on October 20, 1942. My uncle Ken, then 16, recalls the very long train that carried them from…
THANKS to Tom McCourt & the Tibbetts Family. For years, I have been watching Moab move farther and farther away from its roots, to the point where it seems few people even know the history of the place anymore. Some…
Editor’s Note: This article, originally published in 1995, was written in response to a U.S. District Court ruling on Pelt v. Utah, which stated that the members of the Navajo Nation could not sue the state of Utah for mismanaging…
At twenty-one years of age, in 1950, I went through a hellish year, as national and international events seemed to pull me into areas in which I had little control. Distractions were many. Continuous war talk left my mind immobilized,…