Outdoors

Spring heralds the arrival of hordes of visitors to San Juan

Spring has arrived in the Canyon Country, and its arrival also marks a significant increase in visitation. Because of a host of social distancing restrictions that have been implemented in Grand County due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual Moab Easter Jeep Safari is having a larger impact on...

International Dark Sky Park designation for Goosenecks State Park

The International Dark Sky Association (IDA) has awarded International Dark Sky Park designations to Goosenecks and Fremont Indian state parks. Both parks have exceptionally dark skies in beautiful and unique settings. These parks bring the total dark sky designations to ten within the Utah...

Turkey Feather Blankets: Bears Ears bedding a thousand years ago

I love seeing turkeys in ponderosa woods moving slowly uphill like priests absorbed in morning prayers. At twilight they are dark shapes seeking acorns and insects, always leaving their distinctive three-toed tracks. Ancestral Puebloans had a special relationship with turkeys too, because it was...

The 2021 Rally on the Rocks is a go after relocation to private property

The 2021 Rally on the Rocks event is re-locating entirely within San Juan County. In December county commissioners put a halt to the event in Grand County. The rally hoped to move across the county line to the old Spanish Valley Airport strip, but in January the San Juan County Commission voted...

Storms unable to break county out of drought

Several days of storms and an apparent change from the dry and warm weather pattern were not enough to break San Juan County out of the drought conditions that have gripped the area. In the end, January was another dryer-than-normal month in San Juan County. Despite nearly a foot of snow that...

“Monolith” in Lockhart Basin removed after three days of visitors

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) confirmed during a site visit that an unknown party or parties removed the illegally installed structure referred to as the “monolith” sometime on the evening of Friday, Novemer 27. The BLM did not remove the structure, which had been recently discovered on...

Photo by Kelly Mike Green, flames on the south mountain in La Sal puts smoke into the area

Lackey Fan fire burns 55 acres north of La Sal

The Lackey Fan fire located northwest of La Sal burned 55 acres and continues to put plenty of smoke into the air as of Thursday afternoon. The fire started Wednesday, September 2nd, around 2:00 pm. Multiple agencies were called to the wildfire on the South Mountain in the La Sals. Most believe...

The Cedar Mesa Perishables Project: Looking through museum drawers

by Andrew Gulliford In the 1890s cowboy archaeologists dug caves in remote sections of Utah’s Bears Ears. They created Basketmaker and Ancestral Puebloan artifact collections that have been hidden away for over a century in prestigious museums. Now a group of scholars and researchers is focusing...

A bear, a mammoth, and wading across the Dark River to the Light

On June 30, Ted, Oggie, and I hiked toward the rim of Arch Canyon with Bear Cave as our destination. As Oggie and I followed Ted past yucca, manzanita, pinyons, and junipers, the old story, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” came to mind. John Bunyan dreamed the story while imprisoned for ministering...

Fostering the pinyon’s tenacious hold on life

Despite a strong winter, some of the pinyons in Westwater have died with brown needles hanging on the branches or piled beneath. Those trees will become nurslings – sometimes to baby flickers whose parents have drilled holes into the dead wood – sometimes to other plants as the branches and trunks...