Cisco, Utah is literally in the middle of nowhere. Off of I70, northeast of Moab and east of anything, it once was a bustling community. The decaying structures, and plenty of old vehicles and other rusting wreckage, are left deserted…
time and again I do not believe my father remained a fly fisherman long after I moved away from Moab. From the time he left Utah in the mid 1990’s, he seldom fished. Back in Texas, Dad went through a…
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…
As a young man, Howard E. Phelps lived in the shadows of his father Henry Enon Phelps, a Salt Lake merchant pre-dating the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI,) and grandfather, William W Phelps, an important figure in early Mormonism. Both…
Bluff Goes Big The most attention-grabbing fact of the incorporation is its size: 38 square miles, which is more than 60 times the size of Bluff’s present developed footprint. The scale of the new boundary is fairly hard to contextualize,…
PART I: A latter-day David and Goliath saga The home of the Pyramid Lake (Nev.) Paiutes is pristine and spectacular. The lake is quiet, commercially primitive, other-worldly. It constantly changes color from shades of blue or gray depending upon the…
Click HERE to Read BRAVE NEW WEST (THE COMIC STRIP) #1 Jim Stiles is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr. To comment, scroll to the bottom of the page. Don’t forget the Zephyr ads! All links are…
I began my Salt Lake City life the very week of my 16th birthday. My parents never really embraced homeownership and were anxious to leave our rural Midvale and the three bedroom home they had raised 4 children in. My…
2018 PROLOGUE: My worries about housing prices in Moab and my community’s future, back in 1994, seem almost quaint when placed in today’s context. But this was the beginning of the change, the transformation–the transmogrification— that put Moab on a…
Kymberly Mele recently published Disaster at Cane Creek, a book about the tragic 1963 potash mine explosion near Moab, Utah. A narrative nonfiction, the book details the dramatic events that took place at the new Texas Gulf Sulphur potash mine…