This issue features Moab and Arches and a ways upstream and down the Colorado River. Almost all of them are from the early 1990s thanks to Paul, but a few of the Arches images date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s via those Arches pot patrols.
These photographs are especially notable, because they show just how much the town and the river have changed over the last few decades. So strap yourself in and take a flight…Swanstrom is a damn good pilot…
I had been ranting for years about the impacts an Industrial Tourism economy could create. My pleas fell on deaf ears, especially with the mainstream environmental community. Organizations like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) embraced the change and even devoted an entire issue of its newsletter praising the amenities economy as a clean, non-polluting way to bring economic prosperity to areas that had previously depended on the extractive industries to survive. What they failed to consider was that while coal mining and oil and gas exploration and ranching could scrape bare the skin of the rural West, a massive monolithic tourism economy would eventually bare and destroy its very soul.
From Edward Abbey’s “The Journey Home”
“The town of Telluride was actually discovered back in 1957, by me, during a picnic expedition into the San Miguel Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I recognized it at once as something much too good for the general public. For thirteen years I kept the place a secret from all but my closest picnicking cronies. No use: I should have invested everything I had in Telluride real estate. In 1970 a foreigner from California named Joseph T. Zoline moved in with $5 million and began the Californica-tion of Telluride. Formerly an honest, decayed little mining town of about good souls, it is now a bustling whore of a ski resort with a population of 1,500 and many more to come. If all goes badly, as planned…
… Men weep, men pray and kneel, but money talks. Money walks and talks and gets things done.
— EA
Alan “Tug” Wilson isn’t exactly a household name to most Zephyr readers. But it should be. While he may not be instantly recognizable, many lovers of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks will recognize his father. Tug was blessed to be the only son of Bates Wilson. In 1949, Bates became the first official superintendent of “The Arches,” when it was still a national monument. Just a year after his arrival, Bates was introduced to the vast untouched landscape to the west of Moab— and north and south of the little town as well. The canyon Country of southeast Utah was still an almost untouched landscape, known only to the ranchers and cowboys of Scorup/Sommerville Ranch, and a handful of intrepid explorers. The land lay empty for centuries…
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.”
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.
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
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?
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.
Tom Tom’s VW Museum has never been easy to miss. It’s located at the intersection of Mill Creek Drive and Spanish Valley Drive, an intersection known to locals as Chicken Corners. It’s the Gateway to Spanish Valley, where in the last two decades, many of the other junk cars and washing machines and spare tires have vanished — replaced by half million dollar faux adobe second homes and condos.
But TK’s Museum still stands. At its zenith, Arnold managed to squeeze 250 vintage Volkswagens onto a two acre lot that he bought 50 years ago. It was his pride and joy. Others still curse the site and wish some mega-billionaire would fly in, buy the property and scour his collection from the face of the earth. But Tom…or Tom Tom…or TK …always took the criticism in stride and with good cheer. “They just don’t know how to have a good time… I’m having a good time.” He did to his last breath…
For the record, he was born Thomas Arnold, but we knew him by many names— Tom, Tom Tom, TK, or more generically—The Volkswagen Guy. For decades TK serviced VWs of all kinds, with varying degrees of success. As all of us who once owned VWs, the cars were almost born with the intent to drive us crazy, and consequently, we owners were surely cursed with varying degrees of masochism. But Tom loved them all. And he loved to collect the ones that he could not revive.