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1998-2000
What you are about to read and enjoy is the product of a lot of work, struggle, fun, long hours, and varying degrees of craziness. Our vision of the magazine includes, but is not limited to, what you see in this first edition. The Four Corners remains one of the last places in this country where a diverse, high quality life can still be enjoyed, and we hope to explore, celebrate, and help preserve this incredible place. - Phil Lauro and Daniel Esper, From the Publishers, "Welcome to our first issue," Premier Edition, November/December 2008
"I think I see Monica Lewinsky astride an expensive, lipstick-red Klein bike - another hallucination - when I hear that dreaded "pop" followed by "hiss." My streak of good luck is still with me. I fix the flat in the breaking daylight and see all of the guys I passed pedal by. I'm in the Butte area so I know that I don't have far to go, but I incessantly worry about my piss-poor consecutive night laps. This will put the top podium slot completely out of reach for Team Beer Soaked Chamois. At least we have a lot of beer to drink, which is one hell of a consolation prize." - Kristin Carpenter, "24 Hours of Moab," (Premier Edition, November/December 1998
Names, events, quotes and overall content have been modified, changed or altered to enhance the story and protect the innocent. - DuVal, Festus, Ken Wright, Tanya Kramer, Al Lauro, Editor's note, "Snowdown: Groovin' with Daddy-O," January/February 1999
Recently, one bright, clear morning, I found myself headed for Hovenweep, a little-known National Monument not far from Mesa Verde about to experience some growing pains. Why? Just recently, the second of four major routes into Hovenweep was paved, and there are plans in the works to pave a third route, with the additional possibility that either of the Colorado routes may be designated a scenic byway. So it seemed now was the time to pay my last respects to a National Monument so small that it only requires the employment of two Park Rangers, so small that there is no entrance fee year-round and no camping fee in the winter, so small that most of the four-wheel-drive roads leading to the ancient ruins are not marked, so small that the biggest problems they have with vandalism are litter and ravens pecking the lids off the trash cans and strewing garbage all over the campgrounds. - Fran Metz, "The ?Improvement' of Hovenweep National Monument," January/February 1999
Gazing listlessly through the full crowd, I was dazed by the peculiar scene I was observing at the local hangout called "The Summit." It was as if the present had somehow dissolved into the past and reality had undergone a facelift. On stage, the group "Bit-o-Jane" was putting down a fat groove, and a plethora of pretty lasses wearing embroidered bohemian dresses and flowers tucked behind their ears danced in spinning circles. A blend of patchouli and sandalwood enveloped the dance floor. Languidly, I sauntered through the multitude of bearded bohemians, flower-powered nymphets and Krishnas. I felt as is my perception was altered by the mirage. - DuVal King, "Snowdown: Groovin' with Daddy-O," January/February 1999
And what does the Millennium look like here in Telluride? A microcosm of the above, more of the same. The "Developers" rule, encouraged by the last round of elections and their near-monopoly of local media. Their vision of the next 1,000 years? Well, of course it doesn't last quite that long. It's something like, "Upzone everything, drain the San Miguel, pack the Valley Floor and mesas with Summit County-type sprawl, jam the roads and pollute the air, and then pull up stakes and look for another place to wreck. - Rob Schultheis, Moron of the Mountains, "Y2 What? - The View from Telluride: 3rd Rate Millenium Coming Up," March/April 1999
Ten years ago, I was both fledgling writer and borderline radical enviro-meddler (as Abbey called us), and Edward Abbey was my hero. On the night he died and disappeared into the desert (his body spirited away by friends), March 14, 1989, a bunch of friends and I, all of us long-time Abbeyistas, had to do something to cope. So at a dark local bar we met, and under the dull green glow of a neon cactus, we got drunk. - Ken Wright, "Abbey Lives! Party On, Ed," March/April 1999 (Abbey Issue)
The Abbey Altar is the hub around which the Abbey Party swings; without it, this would be just your average, everyday drunkfest in a garage. To get it ready, I reverently place on the altar: a quart of tequila, a handful of shot glasses, uncut limes, a hunting knife for the cutting of the latter, and a salt shaker; a handful of cigars, of the "good, cheap, working man's" variety, as Abbey favored; a collection of Abbey books; a fat candle; and behind the candle I tack to the post a laminated picture of the wolfish Abbey leaning on the butt of a shot gun next to a blasted-out t.v. When the first partygoers arrive the candle will be lit, the bottle of tequila cracked, and an honorary shot poured for Abbey that will remain on the altar for the night. It's always empty come dawn. - Ken Wright, "Party On, Ed," March/April 1999, the "Abbey Issue"
Did I really say that "an ice age would be nice"? Actually I'm in favor of expanding desertification. I'd like to see North American become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards, and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), who gather once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. - Edward Abbey, "A letter to the editor of High Country News," by Edward Abbey, March/April 1999, the "Abbey Issue"
I haven't been back to Boulder much in the past decade. My last visit terminated when I ran headlong from a benefit party for Dolphin-Rolfers, loonies who wanted to go to Maui and massage cetaceans in the surf till Man and Flipper learned to communicate. I jumped in the old Jeep and didn't stop till I was safely back over the Divide, sitting in Gunnison drinking coffee and eating a cheese chili burger and listening to two local yeoman in the next booth curse the Federal Gummint an' the goddam Yew En. Music to my ears, believe me. It's hazardous over there, ladies and gentlemen! - Rob Schultheis, "Om, om on the Range," May/June 1999
My baptism in the festivarian experience came attending Planet Bluegrass productions, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in June and the Rocky Grass and Folks Festival , in Lyons, Colorado, in August. I have been going to Telluride Bluegrass for only six of its 26 years, but already my mental scrap book is full of memories of home brew, flying hemp flags, double rainbows, rumball extravaganzas, Sunday Gospel Brunch, and late-night picking sessions. Half the fun at the festival now is reconnecting with the festival family I have acquired, folks from all over the country. - Wynn Harris, "Madame Airstream," May/June 1999
I never had to worry about what to wear during my old bicycling days. If the weather felt cool, I wore a jacket; if the sun was out, I wore my cutoffs; if there was thunder and lightning, I pedaled like hell and felt lucky to get home with just a muddy stripe up my back. I had no image to defend: I was simply a guy who went out for a ride. Real riding back then brought to mind the image of John Wayne: Boots, blue jeans, and cowboy hats, not Ultrasuedefleecechamois shorts with Hydrofil Lycra linings. - David Feela, "Shifting Gears," July 1999
There's a little war going on throughout the country, and it's about to heat up. On one side of this war we have Congress and the agencies that govern our national recreation areas, such as forest and parks. On the other side we have "users," people who hike, camp, fish, or those who simply want to be in a place that is quiet, scenic, refreshing and unlike daily life. This second group often consists of people who don't take anything tangible away from the national forests; they don't "use" anything, unless you consider using a drafty outhouse a major expression of greed, and, unlike timber companies and ranchers, they don't profit financially from their little excursions into the boonies. - Sam Negri, "Trail Fees: Pay to Play," July 1999
An informal survey of burly hikers, climbers, and mountain bikers indicated that most of them have absolutely no interest in a wild cave expedition. And who can blame them? Beside the overwhelming darkness and fear of getting lost, a caver has to face claustrophobic squeezes and crawls, high-exposure slickrock climbs, and the knowledge that a minor injury could become a major emergency in the remote reaches of a wild cave. Add to that clammy conditions, bats, albino spiders, and excruciatingly low-impact ethics (i.e. you carry your own piss out in a bottle), and you've got a sport that's more trouble than its worth to most people. - Todd Thompson, "Caving: The Secret Sport," August 1999
If you ask me, four wheel drive is for wimps - lily-livered flat-land freeway motorists who have no more business on a back road than I have at a debutante ball. These wimpmobiles might get you there, but they will not improve your character nor give you a full appreciation of our mountains. The truth is that you can go just about anywhere in a rusty, oil-burning, cracked-windshield, two-wheel-drive beater truck, providing that it has high ground clearance and a manual transmission. - Ed Quillen, "4X4 Lessons in Two Wheel Drive," August 1999
If we want to keep the funky egalitarian informality of the Butte, even as we become "world class" and increasingly ski, golf & spa-caste conscious, Telluride will have to create more locals' neighborhoods. Will have to allow more than just elite and worker classes niches in the region. Will have to help subsidize a vanishing middle class . . . And that means everybody in the community will have to pitch in and make it happen. - Art Goodtimes, "Along the San Juan Skyway," October 1999
In my experience, slot canyons attract two types of explorers: The thrill-seeker and the introvert. Or maybe it's more complicated than that. Maybe slot canyons offer two promises that appeal to two sides of us: The promise of excitement and the promise to be gently amazed. - Ben Long, "In the Groove," November 1999
I am as seduced as the next person by gear. But I try to remember that my old pack carries stuff just as well as a new one, and that no matter which boots I'm wearing it's my legs that will get me up a trail, and that no amount of electronic gadgetry can explain the glory of the mountain sky. - Hal Clifford, "Outdoor Industry: Oxymoron Extraordinaire," December 1999
Twenty-five years ago, I drove a small Thikol snowcat onto some velvety looking powder just off the cat road, tipped it up on one track, and disfigured the sheet metal passenger cabin on a few lodgepole pine that I could not avoid. This was a time of life when I paid attention to soft shoulders only if there were arms attached to them. Fortunately, there were no passengers in the snowcat, only trash from the restaurant on Breckenridge's Peak Nine. - Kevin Devine, "Cat Skiing: The Way Skiing Should Be," December 1999
At every show I've attended, Hopis formally greet the Jamaican musicians on-stage, explaining they want to give something from one culture to another, to make a fair swap. As the Jamaicans, some sporting copious dreadlocks, look over their banks of state-of-the-art electronic amplifiers, tribal drummers chant in ancient, acoustic rhythms. In accompaniment, Hopi dancers in full regalia pad softly, almost reverently, around the hard wooden floor of the Hopi Community Center. - Steve Cohn, "Reggae on the Reservation," January 2000
I owned a woodstove once. Well, actually the stove owned me. It consumed every stick I fed into it, then stared longingly out toward the trees. We were young when deciding to change our little three-room house over to wood heat, green as the trees we foolishly hauled in from the country. It didn't take long to learn that where there's smoke there's not necessarily fire. - David Feela, "The Last Log," February 2000
There's something wrong, I submit, with a sport whose most highly paid professionals are in worse shape than I am. If I want to watch paunchy white men in bad clothes making fools out of themselves, I can just drop by the local Board of Realtors meeting, thank you very much. The Japanese pay up to a thousand dollars an hour to play it. Enuff sed. Clinton plays it. Aging rock stars and ex-athletes hang around racist enclaves like Palm Springs, play it, whacking balls with obscene survivors of the doomed past like Bob Hope and Jackie Mason. - Rob Schultheis, "Golf: Don't Trust a Sport With Such Little Balls," March/April 2000
Spending May weekends roaming the Dolores River's boat ramps to talk with private boaters might not seem like the wildest form of recreation, but it's the culmination of six months rumination by Durango, Cortez, Mancos, and Dolores boaters. In the last year, proposals have surfaced for new dams above McPhee Reservoir to capture even more of the Dolores Basin's snowmelt. - Mark Pearson, "Dams on the Dolores," May 2000
Environmental writer Wallace Stegner once wrote that the great theme of Western literature is the interplay between people and the land. The moral here, according to Ellen Meloy, is that if you don't learn about nature, you won't know what lives and breath in it. If you are going to call nature your home, you certainly must earn you home and you must know its history. Simply admiring the landscape is not enough. - Amy Maestas, "Ellen Meloy Carvers Her Own Literary Trails in Southeastern Utah." March/April 2000
The Canyon Country Zephyr, Moab's home-town, muckraking, rabble-rousing rag, got its start, appropriately enough, in the heat of political passion. In 1988, despite popular opposition, Moab's city council voted in favor of a proposal to build a toxic-waste incinerator in Cisco, Utah, upstream of Moab on the Colorado River. The city government's action only worked to bring together what had been until then separate groups in Moab. "Moab is 20 - or 40 - subcultures," says Zephyr founder Jim Stiles. "At those meetings you could see cowboys sitting next to guys in dread locks." - Ken Wright, "The Canyon Country Zephyr: Passion and Spirit in the Desert," May 2000
The wide open spaces of the Great American West were not meant to be clogged and congested with millions of vehicular tourists and the tormented locals who tailgate them. But increasingly this is what the West has become. Once quiet, lonely and forgotten communities of the rural western states now boast more cappuccino shops per capita than Seattle. From Jackson and Bozeman, from Telluride and Moab, from Santa Fe and Sedona, bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic often clogs the streets, specialty shops dominate the business districts, and in some of the New West towns, the likes of McDonalds and Taco Bells and Dennys have driven many of the old locally owned diners into bankruptcy. - Jim Stiles, "The Trouble with Tourists," June 2000
While Euro-Americans have no name of the canyon I so briefly explored, the Utes, Uncompahgre dwellers for over a thousand years, almost certainly do - a name rooted in the canyon's very being, a name which would convey the two step cliffs, the sandy bottom, the spray of turquoise rock, the tumble of boulders at the head, the diving nighthawks. To know that name - which may well be lost now to the drift of time - would be a blessing indeed. - John Nizalowski, "Special Canyon," September 2000
Three years ago the Federal Government did something remarkable in the service of its citizens, something it had never done before: it closed down. In the same year, Canyonlands National Park recorded a mere 493,000 visitors, earning it a spot in Sunset Magazine as one of the "The Loneliest National Parks" that deserve our attention. The editors, though, did not understand that because of the bureaucrats' deciding whose lights should be shut off from their scaling back of the federal services, all parks would be empty. The bureaucrats had identified the National Park Service as "nonessential," essentially saying that we, as a nation, had better find something else to do with our time than enjoy our national parks. - David Feela, "Essentials," October 2000
Hunting is literally in our blood, says David Petersen, since as Homo sapiens we've been hunters for a million, or millions, of years. The mere 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution turned animals into profane products rather than sacred prey has not been nearly enough time to evolve that spirit out of our DNA. Given this fact, the primal hunting-and-gathering people's honoring reverence for the animals that are our food is not only retrievable through hunting, it is the conscience-guide for whether or not that hunting is "true." It's in the genes. - Ken Wright, "Heartsblood Stalks the Honest Hunter," November 2000
Beauty is what western Colorado does. Living here is like living in Handel's "Messiah." My friends and I have jobs and relationships and even children, but watching the sun set over the West Elks has become our real profession, the way pushing the pleasure bar has become the profession of certain lab rats. We're religious freaks, zombies, slaves. Like most religious freaks, I had no idea I was living in an illusion. I thought that all the empty space outside my living room window was just for the looking at; the landscapes are just scenery, rather than places you actually occupy, places from which you need to somehow make a living. - Lisa Jones, "I Was an Aspen Maid," December 2000
Until you actually pedal and sleep in the same cabin, you just can't know. You sure don't want to spend a week outdoors with jerks, know-it-alls, or other irritants. But if you go with cool people you should have a cool time. Sure James sang Notorious B.I.G. lyrics a little too often and T.R. had a disconcerting habit of shouting "RASTAFARI!" during peaceful moments, but mostly we meshed as well as the bike chains did with our gears. If bikers ride at roughly the same level, if they eat similar food, and if no one in the group is a prima donna who won't do the dishes, a group of friends will dig the San Juan Hut System. - Rob Story, "Hut to Hut," August 2000
Some folks, women as well as men, have called it fanaticism, this passion of mine for the hunt. Others, echoing my father, have suggested that hunting is "unladylike." I just call it love. And like any real and lasting love, it isn't always easy. When I first moved to Colorado, my challenge was to make new friends who shared my passions for horses, hunting, fishing, and the outdoors in general. As it turned out, finding people with those common Western interests was easy - the hard part was being taken seriously as a woman. - Erica Fresquez, "My Heroes Have Always Been Hunters," October 1999
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