The most inaccessible, least known, and roughest portion of the Navajo Reservation is bounded by the Navajo, Colorado, San Juan, and Piute canyons. […] Buttes, mesas, and small domes predominate and are so tightly packed that the base of one…
If there is one issue that most of the polarized citizens of San Juan County, Utah can agree upon, it’s that very few of them want their communities to wind up like Moab, Utah. The fear of “Being the Next…
I have been publishing The Zephyr for 29 years; this isn’t one of those landmark anniversaries, like the fast-approaching Big 30, but everything seems so volatile lately, so uncertain, and more than anything—so nasty–that I thought maybe I’d do a…
In the early evening hours of January 19, 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy sat alone in the study of his soon-to-be vacated home in Georgetown, Virginia. In his lap, a loose-leaf notebook encased the Inaugural Address of the 35th President…
EDITOR’S NOTE: As this story suggests, we all thought Gene Schafer would live forever, or as he liked to say, “Long enough to piss on all of your graves.” He was like nobody else—outspoken and blunt beyond description, caring and…
In 1923, the increasing presence of Euro-American settlers in territory formerly occupied by Ute and Paiute Indians led to what was probably the last armed conflict between whites and Indians in the United States. And the man for whom the…
I’ve always loved the Bears Ears. When I first discovered the canyon country, back in the 70s, I was driving north from the Grand Canyon on old US 160. As I passed though Monument Valley, near the Utah/Arizona border,…
CHARLIE STEEN’S youngest son ‘sets the record straight’ about the Life & Times of Moab’s Most Famous Prospector My father, Charlie Steen, has always maintained that the truth about his discovery of the Mi Vida mine and its consequences is…
Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18 The ancient pueblo ruins at the Lowry archeological site are about nine miles due west of Pleasant View, Colorado, and they go back to 1060 C.E. They lie on…
“THANKS OBAMA?” For more than a decade, I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with the lack of honesty in politics and have observed a vast chasm between the professed ideologies of BOTH liberals and conservatives and the Reality of their actions. If…