Tag: Jim Stiles

AN ‘ANCIENT’ MOAB ALBUM: 1989? (Faces & Places #1) —Jim Stiles (ZX#93)

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One morning in December 1989, I went downtown to check out the Christmas decorations. After a fairly chaotic tourist season, which had started last March and wound down in mid-October. now Main Street was dead. Many businesses had put up signs that read “Closed For The Winter.” There wasn’t enough tourist traffic during the winter months to sustain the number of new businesses that had opened in the last couple of years.

I saw fellow Moab resident Lucy Wallingford appreciating the relative quiet and especially how empty Main Street was. To emphasize the point, I asked Lucy if she would lie down in the middle of the turning lane. Lucy quickly assumed a location at the pointy end of the arrow. (I should note that this was a staged photograph. Lucy was not lying there before I arrived.)

This is perfect, I thought. “The Way Life Should Be.”

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HERB RINGER— 25 Years After He Left Us: December 11, 1998 —Jim Stiles (ZX#92)

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On December 11, 1998, twenty-five years ago today, my friend Herb Ringer passed away in Fallon, Nevada. He was 85 years old. His health had been failing for a few years. In 1994, Herb was forced to give up driving — the greatest joy of his life — when he was diagnosed with a rapidly deteriorating case of macular degeneration. I had met up with him that summer at a high mountain lake above Crested Butte, Colorado. Earlier that week, an optometrist in Salida had diagnosed his condition and warned Herb that he needed to head home to Fallon immediately. Herb took the news stoically, maybe better than I did, and he left for Fallon the next day.

…this story is personal; it’s more about our friendship than his special artistic talents, though both are forever intertwined. I’d like to tell you more about Herb Ringer, the good-hearted, decent man and loyal friend that he became to me. We were connected in a way that I have rarely experienced. Herb once said, “You’re the son I never had.” The feeling was mutual.

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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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‘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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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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ALBERT CHRISTENSEN’S TRIUMPH & HEARTBREAK–THE 1941 ‘UNITY MONUMENT’ by Jim Stiles (ZX#78)

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Beginning in the late 1930s and for the next 12 years, Christensen would create his remarkable 5000 square foot home—his ‘Hole ‘n’ the Rock—from the surrounding Entrada Sandstone. And for many years, from 1945 to 1955, part of the man made cavern was a diner. It had a reputation for being a bit on the wild side. Though Hole N’ the Rock was in San Juan County, it was almost 40 miles from Monticello, the nearest community in the county. Moab was much closer, but Grand County lacked jurisdiction. The diner and the store and its reputation flourished and the Christensens eked out a modest living.

Still, Albert’s most impassioned work, and the project that was to first create such excitement and interest, and then later cause such profound disappointment and heartbreak, was his ‘Unity Monument.’

It was to be Albert Christensen’s grandiose effort to honor President Franklin Roosevelt and his opponent, Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential election. He planned a massive bas relief tribute in a sandstone amphitheater near his rock home, but the federal government claimed he’d built his scale model on public land…What the government did next would devastate Albert, his family, and many of Moab’s citizens.

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ROCK INSCRIPTIONS: WHEN DOES VANDALISM BECOME HISTORIC? –Jim Stiles (ZX#74)

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But when does a carved name on a rock stop being vandalism and take on a historic value of its own? Where do we draw the line? A century? Fifty years? I struggled with that question a lot when I was a ranger, though over the years, I came to believe that every one of these carvings is too special to be removed.

The above inscription has special meaning for me, because I found it during a backcountry patrol in 1977. It would be fairer to say I “re-found” it, many years after other humans, most likely Basque sheepherders had added their own names and comments (whether the ‘B.S.’ next to Julien’s name was an expression of doubt re: the inscription’s authenticity, of it just happened to be the man’s initials, the Julien inscription had surely been seen. but perhaps decades earlier.

I stumbled upon it purely by accident, toward the far north end of the Devils Garden. I saw the Basque inscriptions first and noticed that it was a perfect campsite. It was at the base of a small natural amphitheater—the sandstone tower and fins blocked the weather coming from the north or east. A fifty foot stabilized dune to the west of the site protected campers from the western winds. It was only after I stood directly in front of these larger inscriptions that I noticed Julien’s name. I had heard it before and thought it was worth writing up a report on my find. I had no idea it would create so much interest…

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SHOULD ARCHES’ ‘WOLFE RANCH’ BE RE-RENAMED ‘TURNBOW CABIN?’ —Jim Stiles (ZX#69)

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Once, while driving cattle up Salt Wash, Toots and Marv came to a place where the horse would have to jump. “Dad didn’t want me on the horse when it jumped, so he scooped me off and sat me on a ledge. All of a sudden he grabbed me back. Well, there was a big rattlesnake right there between my feet…it had 14 rattles on it.”

In the evenings, Marv demonstrated the art of making flour sack biscuits. “He never used a pan. He’d roll up the sleeves of his long-handled underwear which he wore year-round. He’d scrub his hands and he’d get this sack and roll the top down and make a hole in the flour and smooth it out just like a bowl. Then he’d put in some baking powder, some salt and some shortening and mix it all around. Then he’d start adding water, a little drop at a time, and just keep working it with his hand. When he got enough he’d pinch it off and when he was through, you couldn’t find one lump left in that flour sack.”

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MOAB’S OTHER WILD RIDE — CHARLIE STEEN’S 1950s URANIUM BOOM — by Maxine Newell (ZX# 67)

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Uranium fever became a national affliction when Steen announced his strike. Go-for-broke prospectors poured into the little town of Moab by the thousands, lured by the $100 million bait. The town was besieged by a boom which was to surpass the gold rushes of the previous century.

Hopeful investors, loan sharks, and promoters followed the prospectors in. New businesses set up wherever they could find room, on the Main Street drag, in private garages or in tents. One realty firm operated from a tiny log cabin which was the revered historical home of an early-day pioneer. Moab’s new slogan, “Uranium Capitol of the World,” was splashed on store fronts, stationery and souvenirs. The town sported a Uranium Building and a Uranium Days Celebration. The term “uraniumaires” was coined to identify the new mining magnates. Someone finally got around to dubbing Charles A Steen the “Uranium King of the World,” and the title stuck.

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ROAMING GLEN CANYON & THE FOUR CORNERS w/ RUBEN & BETH NIELSEN (ZX#66)

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While the Nielsens regarded Glen Canyon as the true heart of the Colorado Plateau, they also knew their “own little piece of Heaven,” was surrounded by some of the most stunning, almost surreal landscape that surrounded them for hundreds of miles. And at the time, canyon country of Southeast Utah was one of he most remote, seldom visited parts of the continental United States. It was truly the proverbial “blank spot on the map.”

Decades later, as Industrial Strength Tourism became the area’s driving industry and as environmentalists and the powerful recreation lobby pushed hard to eliminate other economic options, Tourism and the “Amenities Economy” became king. What oil and gas exploitation and uranium mining and overgrazing couldn’t accomplish, Industrial Tourism, in almost every small economically struggling community in the West beat them all —The Rural West is rapidly is experiencing the Disneyfication of half the country

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