Did a Land Transfer Blessed by Environmentalists Give a Boost to TAR SANDS NATION? I seem to stumble into stories these days. I wasn’t looking for this one. But a couple weeks ago, I was perusing one of the local…
NOTE: In the early years of The Zephyr, Moab was transforming itself, though not everyone was sure just who the ‘transformers’ were. We set out to ask the citizens of Moab and Grand County what they saw coming. Here is…
Every March I’d drive west from the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, up to the massive Island in the Sky in Canyonlands National Park. Driving up there on Utah 313 I felt like a fly climbing a whale’s back. Standing…
I don’t live in Moab anymore. It’s been a decade since I packed my bags and slipped south (and then east) to smaller, quieter communities. Last week, after 37 years, I closed out my box at the post office. Box…
Elsewhere in this issue, we have talked about the soon-to-be-built “Colorado River Elevated Bikeway and Transit Hub,’ at a cost of $9 million to improve what one local politician called a “stale” tourist economy. But is this kind of extravagant…
GLEN CANYON, A HALF CENTURY AFTER THE DAM… In all the years and centuries and eons before it was flooded, only a relative handful of people saw the untamed, free and flowing Colorado River in Glen Canyon. When the gates…
It was deathly hot, 104 degrees, the day the four of us (Norah, Rose, Olivia and I) arrived at Delicate Arch trailhead to join other parties clustered at their vehicles, gathering cameras and stowing bottles of water, food, who knows,…
Many Moabites were not quick to embrace the Mountain Bike Phenomenon. Local businesses geared to tourism were the first to see the benefit and tolerated the invasion, if not fully embracing it. Old Moab was not so generous. These guys…
Winter is slowly leaving the High Atlas as I pass the milestone of having been a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Morocco for two years now. Two years; it’s hard to believe that it has been so long since I…
In 1940, the Roosevelt administration hired out-of-work writers and photographers from coast to coast to create “travel guides” for each of the 48 states. The Federal Writers’ Project sent documentarians to the far corners of America. One of the most…