By the mid-1990s, Moab and Grand County citizens—especially voters—were worn out. So was I. Beginning in 1987, with Moab’s economy in tatters and its elected officials proposing a toxic waste incinerator at Cisco to boost property taxes, it was one…
FROM THE NYTIMES: Movements like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, for instance, might engage people, [Paul] Kingsnorth told me, but they have no chance of stopping climate change. “I just wish there was a way to be more honest about that,”…
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT…By Jim Stiles The Zephyr at 25…A Summary A Few Words About Ed Abbey The Book Cliffs ‘Zombie’ Highway…A Bad Idea Rises From the Dead. SOWING CLOVER…By Tonya Stiles What You Don’t Know About ‘Mr. Zephyr’…
Trying to sum up the past 25 years, you’d think the logical opening here would be, ‘I don’t know where to begin.’ The truth is, once you wade through this issue, you might ask yourself, ‘Does he know how to…
Well, it’s the 25 year anniversary of the Zephyr, and it’s been difficult for me to think of something to write this issue. I feel unqualified, as you might imagine, to write about the long history of the paper, since…
In the very first Zephyr, I wrote a long article about a road building proposal that would be debated for years. In late 1989, the lame duck Grand County Commissioners created a self-funded, autonomous special service road district, with the…
I’m not sure what else can be said about Edward Abbey after all these years. God knows I’ve said plenty and have often tried to speculate ‘What Cactus Ed would’ve done,” as we race through the second decade of the…
BEGINNINGS…1988-1996 Here’s how far we’ve come. 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 conversation at an…
This is the first issue of the Canyon Country Zephyr, a monthly publication of news, opinion, information, and entertainment for Grand County and southern Utah. According to Webster’s Dictionary, a “zephyr” is defined as “any warm, western breeze.” As it…
NOTE: This 1991 essay, if anything, shows how naive I was in the early days of The Zephyr. I was hopeful then that a peaceful resolution of the ‘wilderness issue’ could be found without the kind of extreme polarization that…