56 search results for "mccourt"

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EXPLORING the NEEDLES in 1949: With Filmmakers Ray & Jinny Garner (ZX#90)

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NOTE: You’ll notice that the quality of these images is not the best, but their historical value is priceless. The original 16mm film was badly degraded by the time anyone thought to digitize it. Still, despite the grainy, slightly blurred images, and those vertical scratches, I could look at these pictures all day. When you reach the end of the still images, note that there is a link to the film itself. There’s no sound, so do your own narration. But these images are worth thousands of words, coming as they do, from another time…Enjoy the ride

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DALLAS, TEXAS: 11.22.1963…And the Dwindling Few Who Still Remember —Jim Stiles (ZX#89)

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The National Geographic story was called “The Last Full Measure,” and was written by its president and editor, Melvin Bell Grosvenor. He began…

“His life was such — the radiance he shed —that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it. Only the future can assign to John Fitzgerald Kennedy his true place in history, But this I know. When men now boys are old, in distant time beyond the year 2000, they will say, ‘I remember I remember when they brought him home, the murdered President, from Dallas…’

“Again and again the story will be told —just as I recall my Grandfather Grosvenor, at 92 telling me graphically of how, as a young student at Amherst College in Massachusetts , he traveled by horse and train to the bier of the martyred Lincoln.”

I still have that copy of the National Geographic. I keep it on a shelf of books and artifacts — touchstones from my life. Meaningful to me, but few others.

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CRESCENT JCT. MEMORIES: A Tribute to Dad…by Colleen Wimmer (ZX#88)

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Where the old highway meets the interstate, at the narrowest point between the roads and the railroad, sits a meager cafe, an Amoco station, and a little community—two houses, three trailers and a horse corral, to be exact.

Before the highway was built, long before the freeway was even invented, this little community was just a switching station. And when Dad came with his father and family in June of ’47 to build a business there, it was called Brendell. Old timers still call it Brendell, but Grandad named it Crescent, for the bend the railroad tracks take along the flatland. It doesn’t resemble much of a switching station anymore. An extra row of tracks and old loading ramps are all that remain. Now it’s a truckstop whose backyard is cluttered with old cars—relics from the fifties and sixties, piles of ties, empty bomb boxes from World War II, and an assortment of someday useful junk that has found its home there.

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MAY 1972: A CANYON COUNTRY ‘MOMENT IN TIME’ via the U.S. National Archives (ZX#87)

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According to the NARA site, “In 1972 David Hiser was one of several photographers chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to document locations in the United States as part of the DOCUMERICA Project. Over 460 of Hiser’s photos can now be found in the National Archives Catalog.” Hiser moved to Aspen, Colorado when he was 25 years old, and would enjoy a successful career as a photographer, including 66 contributions to National Geographic.

Here is a selection from those images that feature Moab, Utah and the Canyon Country of southeast Utah. I arrived in Moab just months after Hiser completed his photo work and have added my own commentary to his photos…JS

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‘SELLING’ WILDERNESS LIKE A USED BUICK— 1998: When Everything Changed — Jim Stiles (ZX#86)

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I had stumbled upon a website called “The Wilderness Mentoring Conference of 1998.” The gathering had been assembled by a group of self-named “mentors,” professional environmentalists active at the time in organizations that reached from Washington DC to Alaska. This relative handful of New Environmentalists were frustrated by the movement’s lack of progress in pushing and passing wilderness legislation across the country.

A prominently displayed quote by Michael Carroll, later of The Wilderness Society, established the tone and direction of all that would come later:

“Car companies and makers of sports drinks use wilderness to sell their products. We have to market wilderness as a product people want to have.”

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OZ: Where Cowboys Wear Shorts, Sip Tea, and Yell “OI!!!” —Jim Stiles (ZX#85)

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The toughest, most decent ‘cowboy’ I ever met hasn’t been ‘lanky’ since he was eighteen. He barely reaches 5 foot six inches, and could not, in anyone’s wildest dreams, be regarded as laconic. In fact, it was because of his gift for gab that 25 years later, hestill comes closer than anyone to being like a brother to me. Though he is 10,000 miles away, in the southwest corner of Australia, we are kindred spirits. In fact, he just called this morning and we had, according to Aussie custom, another great “chin wag.” Nobody wags better. (And he doesn’t say, ‘Giddy up.” he shouts “Oi!!!”)

His name is John Wringe and we met at a roadhouse 200 miles north of Perth, while both of us were traveling  south, by bus — me to catch a train, the Indian Pacific, back to Sydney and the long flight home. John had been visiting his son-in-law and was now returning to his home, 150 miles south of Western Australia’s (WA) capital…

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UNSETTLED AMERICA: The Divisive Environmentalism of the Recreation-Industrial Complex …by Stacy Young (ZX#84)

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“So what,” you may ask. What’s the harm if the rich want to underwrite green causes? I think there are (at least) two broad types of problems.

First and perhaps most obvious is the risk that the influence of big money will bend the agenda of environmentalism to accommodate donors’ business interests, or at least will make it impossible to be sure that this does not happen. Giridharadas, who is a gifted aphorist, has said that, for many MarketWorlders, making a difference is the wingman of making a killing. This problem especially applies to the many big money environmental donors who acquire their fortunes from unambiguously dirty businesses.

Even putting aside direct conflict-of-interest problems, it’s hard to fully swallow the argument that spending lavishly on environmental causes actually offsets the accumulation of enormous wealth through ethically or environmentally questionable means.

A related and similarly dubious rationale frequently offered by green NGOs for courting the patronage of the 1% boils down to a belief that it takes a good guy with a fat wallet to stop a bad guy with a fat wallet.

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LOUISA WADE WETHERILL: “The Slim Woman” of Kayenta — Harvey Leake (ZX#83)

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“The person who seems to be influencing the life of Navajos most is Mrs. John Wetherill of the Kayenta trading post, Arizona. This cultured woman wields more power among them than any chief, or ‘head man’. She is a white woman adopted into the tribe and is a real leader among them, holding her position as a recognition by the Indians of her sympathetic interest in their life. A queen could hardly be more loved by her subjects. She is at once the judge, physician, interpreter, adviser and best friend of her devoted wards.”

Joseph F. Anderson, Archaeology student of University of Utah Professor Byron Cummings

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HERB RINGER: “He’d rather be in Colorado”…1946-1971 #1 (ZX# 82)

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Herb would return to Colorado scores of times over the next half century. He photographed and documented every town or ghost town he came across. He would, over the years, draw a detailed series of maps, to scale, of the mining towns that were, even in the fifties fading into history and dust. In addition to his photographs and these amazing maps (…and I plan to publish at least a good sampling of them soon), he would often spend his winters just thinking of Colorado. As he and his parents were weathered the Reno winter, he wrote his own histories of many Colorado towns and mining districts, often depending on his own extraordinary memory. His facts were rarely wrong.

But visually, there is nothing Herb Ringer accomplished that was more impressive, or insightful, than his remarkable Kodachrome transparencies. Below is just Volume 1 of a series of Colorado towns and its people, that he was wise enough to photograph, and I was lucky enough to inherit…

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Flashback #2…From BRAVE NEW WEST: 2007– The ‘Greening’ of Moab..& Wilderne$$ Itself (ZX#80) — Jim Stiles

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I drift back to my days as a kid and my journeys into The Woods and realize I can still find that same mystical connection to the land when I’m picking through the ruins of an old mining cabin in the Yellow Cat, north of Arches, and I look up through the darkness to the exposed rotting rafters and find myself eyeball to eyeball with a Great Horned Owl, who never blinks, and out-stares me, and backs me out the door with his fierce glare. Isn’t that a wilderness experience?

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