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Betty Perry, the 70-year-old woman who was bloodied in a scuffle with an Orem, Utah police officer and then handcuffed and imprisoned, plead not guilty to “having a bad lawn and resisting arrest,” according to a September 18th story by the Associated Press. Said her high profile California lawyer, Gloria Allred, “I ask the citizens of Orem: How many of you would like to have your great-grandmother taken from her home with bruises and blood and placed in handcuffs for failing to water her lawn?” [more]

Film Review

Jeremy and Randy Stulberg spent two years documenting the lifestyles of the poor and infamous “homeless” residents of a New Mexico mesa. I found the result riveting. I led the same sort of life while I was working at a truck stop in northern Arizona. I parked my 14 foot trailer in various locations in the national forest behind the store and pointed my solar panel at the sun to charge the bank of deep-cycle batteries that ran my computer, radio, black-and-white television and mobile phone. I filled up a five gallon propane tank and a water tank once a month and washed my laundry in the machines by the trucker’s lounge. [more]

reduced to embers

I spent Sunday evening on the roof of my in-laws’ house, watching the Salt Creek Fire creep down the hills to the north towards their town of Fountain Green.

The fire started on Thursday. My wife Sarah and I were in Ephraim, about a half-hour from our home in Mount Pleasant, when we noticed a column of smoke rising from Nephi Canyon, not far from Fountain Green. The power went out in the restaurant where we were eating. That’s when the blaze burned up the lines on the north side of the canyon and blacked out nearly all of Sanpete County. The electricity stayed gone for hours, until it could be routed up from the south.

The fire incinerated a campground, burned up to the rim of the canyon and over the hills above Fountain Green and threatened to sweep into town that first evening. I drove out to a ranch which belonged to the Johnson family and watched the flames eat up the rangeland above their home. Fire trucks and cop cars raced up and down closed Highway 132 through the canyon, and spotter planes circled overhead. [more]

pitch black plains

The Milford Flat Fire was the largest in Utah’s history. Last Wednesday afternoon, after my wife Sarah came home from work to take care of our baby, I filled up my in-laws’ Suburban and took a drive south from Fountain Green to get a firsthand view of it, or at least the damage it left in its wake.

First stop: Kanosh, the staging area. The park was filled with firefighters’ tents. I checked in at the information yurt and met incident management information officer Vince Mazzier. He told me that the fire had burned over 330,000 acres and was 30% contained. The current hot spots were in the extreme north and south, and the south end, near Beaver, was “burning into itself” as it ran up into the mountains. There were over 400 firefighters involved. There were cumulus clouds over the site. I asked Mazzier how the weather would affect the operation. He didn’t expect much rain but believed that the “outflow from the thunder cell,” could make the situation worse. I further enquired where I could get some pictures of the fire without getting fried. “How ‘bout up here?” I asked him, pointing west of Highway I-15 on the big map of central Utah hanging on the wall, “Look at all those dirt roads heading out in the desert.” [more]

Milford Flat fire

Part of the haze you may observe over your city today will no doubt have originated from the Milford Flat fire in central Utah. The lightning-caused fire traveled 40 miles in its first 24 hours and currently covers about 283,000 acres, making it Utah’s largest on record.

Officials were not prepared when the fire raced up to and then crossed highway I-15. Two motorcyclists, Roy and Mary Ann Redmon, were killed after they pulled over in the dense smoke that clouded the highway. They were struck from behind by a Subaru Outback and thrown into traffic, and then hit by a truck. [more]

amateurs putting out fires

“Wildfires Ignite a Blazing Debate,” read the headline on Christopher Smart and Glen Warchol’s wrap up of the Neola fire in northern Utah in the Salt Lake Tribune. The fire consumed over forty-thousand acres and left three dead; Roger Roberson, Tracy Houston and his father George Houston. It is now about fifty percent contained and has been turned north into Ashley National Forest, where it will feed off trees already killed by a beetle infestation. According to the authors, the fire “rekindled the debate” about when a wildfire should be contained or left to burn.

But the Neola fire also raises other concerns. First off, there was a chance the fire could have been extinguished right at its inception. A local by the name of Jeremiah Warren had a bulldozer ready to stomp the blaze to death when it was less than a quarter acre in size but was prohibited from doing so by a Ute Tribal member who believed the fire would burn itself out. Even if Warren hadn’t encountered that misguided individual, however, forestry rules preclude amateurs from taking any steps to put out fires. [more]

Weekend Essay

You may have heard it. You may have thought, “what if I moved to Vegas? It’s booming. There are plenty of jobs. What might my life be like in Sin City?”

My wife, Sarah, and I just spent three years in Henderson, which is south of Vegas and bleeds into it, so you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. We both worked in Vegas, and when her teaching contract was up, we bought a house in Mount Pleasant, Utah for a fraction of what it would cost in the Vegas Valley.
[more]

opinion

California is a behemoth among states. If it seceded from the United States, as Libertarian blogger Ron Getty advocates, its gross national product of $1.62 trillion dollars would make it the seventh largest economy in the world. California has approximately 16 million more people than Australia. How can the Rocky Mountain States not be affected by everything California does? [more]

a healthy disrespect for authority

Part I: Control
Our instincts evolved in tribes which have grown into corporations, armies and cities devoid of communities. Once upon a time, the rewards for our hard work and loyalty went to our families and to friends who might become part of our families, and now they go to strangers. In return, we get the illusion of security in the form of wages and benefits. What we really need is control.

[more]

a conversation

Edward Abbey’s polemic Desert Solitaire had such a powerful effect on Jim Stiles that he moved to Moab to be closer to the redrock weirdness of southern Utah which has since come to be known as “Abbey’s Country” and took up a job as a seasonal park ranger in Arches National Park, just as Edward Abbey had. And then he quit that position—too much emphasis on providing access and not enough on leaving “the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein…unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,” as the Park Service’s organic act would have it—and started his own alternative newspaper, the Canyon Country Zephyr. The first issue came out on March 14th, 1989, the day Edward Abbey died. [more]

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