Notes from Westwater

Hardworking ants can carry impressive loads – ten to 50 times their own weight. Merry Palmer photo

The true story of ants

Clumsy and plump, Steven Pfenniger cried easily, which didn’t earn him any respect from the pack of kids running our neighborhood in Hutchinson, KS. His dad owned a shop just off Fourth Street and repaired TVs, but we didn’t know much more about him or his family — which was unusual in our...

Courage through adversity at Cooper’s Rock

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin Nine years ago, having heard about the mystical waterfalls in Havasupai near the Grand Canyon, we decided to backpack into the area. Because I’d been struggling with bronchitis, I sat up coughing the night before we hiked in, but...

Soldiers carry the colors during the Blanding Fourth of July celebration. Annually, the Blanding celebration offers the small-town American feel of yesteryear, a breath of fresh air in these modern times that can sometimes feel complicated. Ted Palmer photo

The Fourth of July, Blanding style

I first met Blanding on the Fourth of July many years ago when my family and I visited my brother Tom. After some rough experiences including war, Tom, a police officer, decided he wanted to raise his young family in a small religious town so he looked on a Utah map, prayed, and chose two...

Wild Burros

As I was walking between the Quonset hut and the old chicken coop, I heard my cousin scream. I peered around the door of the old coop where my cousin Linda cowered on the roost. Two Shetland ponies had chased her there and were not about to let her down. Linda and I were ten years old. “Merry, go...

Preparing for a miracle

Joshua means, “God is deliverance,” an unlikely name for the largest yucca plants in the world, but according to Katie Noonan, when settlers sent out by Brigham Young first saw the trees southwest of St. George, they thought they resembled Joshua from the Bible. Not all early explorers thought the...

The steep drop into Moqui Canyon

by Merry Palmer I held my breath as we started down the 600-foot, orange sand dune into Moqui Canyon. With our fellow adventurer, Ned Smith, following in his Razor, Ted drove our Pioneer 500 to the end of the dugway’s first slope. He stopped, put on the parking brakes, and he and Ned climbed out...

Exploring Montezuma Canyon

“I always wanted to see the pyramids,” Dad told me once over the phone. Maybe that’s why he always listened so intently when I described the Ancestral Puebloan ruins, pictographs, and petroglyphs found in San Juan County. He died on December 19, 2021, just a month short of his 95th birthday. He...

Blue Canyon and the Chocolate Drop

The left front tire bounced over a boulder, the right front tire left the ground, and my hubby called, “Lean your way!” We could see the red bottom of a deep, deep gully below us. To be honest, before we left Blanding, I’d been worrying about friends suffering from COVID, family situations, and...

The beginning of created things

Last week as I looked out the window at the stars, the story of the first English poem, “Song of Creation,” came to mind. According to Bede, an eighth-century historian, an illiterate man named Caedmon herded the cattle owned by a great monastery on Northumbria’s rolling hills in what is now...

Dubinky Country along Hwy 191 in Grand Cty

During the Prohibition, Albert “Dubinky” Anderson and his father Albert Anderson operated a moonshine still in Valley City, five miles south of Crescent Junction. After agents arrested the father for bootlegging, he moved his still to Little Valley where he was again fined and jailed. Perhaps...