A LEGACY WORTH PRESERVING
Choose your parable to describe Jim Stiles. I am partial to the little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in a dike to prevent inevitable flooding or Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Maybe the child who, when the emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, dares to say, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all.”
The founder, editor, writer, opinionator and most everything else at the Canyon Country Zephyr, Jim Stiles, was an acolyte of Edward Abbey.
For the better part of 30 years, until his death in March of 2024, Stiles kept alive as best he could Abbey’s style of journalistic truth-telling.
As pioneering activists and writers of the 1960s foretold, as Abbey passionately envisioned, as Stiles’s work foreshadowed — sometimes humorously, always unabashedly — the threat posed to flora and fauna on public lands and Anglo-Western and Indigenous cultures by the evolution and increasingly sophisticated marketing of real-estate and commercial development, outdoor recreation and unregulated tourism. He, Abbey and other writers, conspicuously Wendell Berry, used variations of “industrial tourism” to describe what they saw as an inevitable onslaught.
As a newspaper journalist who worked in Texas, Southern California, Nevada, Montana, Idaho and Utah and contributed a bit to the Zephyr, I am writing this as part of an appeal on behalf of his estate to the University of Utah’s Marriott Library to preserve Stiles’ legacy as part of its archives.
James Ogden Stiles, Jr. died at his home in Coldwater, Kansas, on March 11, 2024.
Jim was born on December 11, 1949 to Sue Montfort Stiles and James Ogden Stiles, Sr. of Louisville, Kentucky. He was raised in Louisville, graduated from the University of Louisville, and then moved to Southeast Utah in the early 1970s, after a friend of his father’s gave him a copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. He was hired as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park and fell in love with the history and landscape of the canyon country. He quickly became an integral member of the Moab community and a passionate voice for wilderness.
In 1989, Jim founded his newspaper The Canyon Country Zephyr, which covered both local news in Moab and also the broader environmental and societal questions of the time.
Jim moved to Kansas in 2011, where he continued to write and publish until his death. He leaves behind family, many friends, and countless readers, all of whom are shocked and saddened by his passing.
Once upon a time, many newspaper editors believed they were “watchdogs” of the common good, called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They took particular pride in tweaking the powerful and their sense of privilege.
It was mostly mythology. Yet sometimes a watchdog came along and just wouldn’t let go. Inevitably, many paid a personal and financial price.
A few years ago, Stiles celebrated 30 years of playing that watchdog role in southeastern Utah.
The print version of the Zephyr was one of the best “indies” in the western United States. It was for the most part a one-man show that had a long run. Missoula, Mont., filmmaker Doug Hawes-Davis attempted to capture a bit of its attitude in the 2008 film “Brave New West.” The movie was screened mainly at film festivals in 19 states, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, over 70 locations. It was shown in Ogden, Moab and twice over the Utah Education Network (UEN) but never found a mainstream audience in the state. Among public TV stations with audiences in the nation’s big urban media markets only San Francisco’s KQED broadcast it.
Toward the end of Stiles’ life, the Zephyr was published online, refreshed six times a year. But it never lost its quirkiness, cultural sensibility or wit. The “Planet Earth Edition” was always the place to find “all the news that causes fits.”
“It was a foolish notion, but what is the point of living without foolish notions? And for a while, Moabites did pursue their visions in ways today’s residents can only … well … dream,” Stiles told Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain West Journal, in a 2017 interview for an article headlined “The New West: One of the toughest local papers in the West perseveres against change.”
Stiles wrote and published point-of-view journalism and deeply felt personal essays that celebrated a rural way of life.
And more, much more:
- On environmental negligence: “On election night 2016, the decision to designate a large national monument in San Juan County went from being a questionable theoretical proposition to a clear act of environmental negligence. There was no plausible scenario at that point in which the new monument would be implemented with any enthusiasm. A more realistic expectation was for the catastrophe that has unfolded.”
- Beautifully crafted essays: “You can learn that you never needed to leave home, because home will follow you on dreadful plastic straw-ed legs wherever you travel. Or you can choose the crummy old decaying roads, where the concrete breaks off in chunks and falls into the grass. The roads that go out of everybody’s way. You can open the sticky doors to old pawn shops, laundromats. You can sleep warily in motel rooms with unvacuumed carpets. Eat from ungentrified taco stands. You can feel the fear that comes from walking into a world that isn’t your own. A world that doesn’t care about you, or accommodate for you. And, in doing so, you can give the universe a chance to do its work. Whether that work will land you among the choirs of angels or face-down in the gutter–well, nothing is promised.”
- On media malpractice related to national and regional coverage of all things Bears Ears National Monument: “Does the network and the producer, and the reporter, in this case CNN’s Van Jones, have an obligation to know and understand all the facts related to the story, even the ones that fail to fit their preconceived agenda? Do they have a duty as honest journalists to challenge comments by the selected participants when they don’t accurately reflect the truth? Can a journalist omit information that provides the very ‘balance’ that is being sought?”
- Historical nuggets: “From the 1890s to the 1930s, my great-grandfather, John Wetherill, outfitted and guided many parties on pack trips into the wilds of the Colorado Plateau, far beyond any traces of modern civilization. … Their destinations were often well-known archaeological or geological wonders of the region, such as ancient Native American cliff dwellings or the incomparable Rainbow Natural Bridge, but some explorers chose to venture into terra incognita in search of theretofore unknown treasures.”
- Photography of immense cultural significance, ramblings and musing of good friends: “He (Herb Ringer) blessed me with the kind of friendship that rarely exists across generations, like a very special love between father and son. And, in fact, because Herb never had children, he once asked me if I could ‘fill in’ as the son he never had. I always told him it was an honor. He also bestowed upon me the role of ‘keeper’ of his memories, magnificently told via the extraordinary collection of words and images he assembled in a lifetime.”
- Raw-edged illustrations.
- Alternatives to destructive tourism: “Taos (N.M.) Pueblo, the Navajo Nation and other tribes also have recognized the downside of tourism and commercial development: overloaded infrastructure, damage to nature and threats to their culture and heritage. Each tribe, given their unique circumstances, found the wherewithal to fend off a bit of the onslaught … by limiting or even banning tourism and related commercial activities, regulating the supply of accommodations and preventing infrastructure development.”
One of several slogans Stiles embraced for the Zephyr was “Hopelessly clinging to the past.” It could also be “Sound-bite journalism not practiced here.”
Stiles published Abbey’s last original story in the Zephyr’s premier edition. Abbey died as those first Zephyrs were birthed by ink-stained wretches in Cortez, Colo.
Stiles reflected on that day a few years ago: “A couple days before I carried the layout boards to Cortez, I’d heard a rumor that Abbey was ill. The same rumor had hovered over us for years, in fact, but Abbey had always kept his health issues private. In January, I called the Abbeys and learned he’d had ‘an episode’ but was on the mend.
“So at 5 a.m. on March 14, 1989, I packed the layouts and my checkbook into my 1963 Volvo and drove the 120 miles to Cortez News. It took about five hours to produce Volume 1 Number 1. I worried about typos and scrambled layouts, knowing that once it rolled off the presses there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to fix them. By noon, The 2,000 Zephyrs were printed, boxed and loaded into my Volvo. The trunk and back seat and passenger seat were stacked to the ceiling. I barely had room to sit.
“I got back to Moab after 2 p.m. and had just unloaded the first box when a friend of mine, Jean Akin, pulled up to the curb. ‘Did you hear about Ed Abbey?’ she asked. I shook my head. Jean said, ‘Edward Abbey died this morning.’ … I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely paralyzed. …
“In late May, a larger public memorial service was organized by Ken Sleight, Ken Sanders, Terry Tempest Williams and me. My job was to find a site for the event. I inquired about a location at Arches but when I was hit with permit applications and fees and a requirement to provide Porta Potties, I decided Abbey would prefer a different venue. I finally picked a site on the mesa above Arches but outside the park.
“In the early hours before the service, I couldn’t sleep and so I drove up Moab Canyon at three in the morning to watch the night sky. All through the night, a slow but steady stream of car lights climbed the old road. Mourners came from all over the West, from all over the country. By the time the service began, a thousand people had come to say goodbye to Edward Abbey.
“Ken Sleight was there. Doug Peacock. Dave Foreman. Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps Abbey’s best friend, John DePuy, was too moved to speak. Later in the afternoon, I took Foreman to my favorite spot at Arches — Abbey’s Arch, the rock span Ed had found in 1956 and that I had re-discovered 20 years later. Less than a week after our hike, Foreman and other Earth Firsters! were arrested in a government sting operation.”
Stiles’ worldview had begun to shift in the decade or so after Abbey’s death. His 2007 manifesto of sorts, “Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed,” marked a divorce from Salt Lake City- and Moab-based environmentalists.
Current members of Utah’s environmental community and their allies were not particularly receptive to the kind of criticism that a decade ago or two or three before was commonplace — especially coming from the likes of Stiles, who refused to give up the ghost of Abbey: namely, that a reliance on corporate largesse threatens the raison d’être of the movement. As a result, Stiles was vilified in print and became a pariah in Moab.
Here’s an example taken from a profile of Stiles published in 2006 by High Country News (which is no longer online):
“This all reached an argumentative crescendo earlier this year when Stiles submitted a column to the High Country News opinion syndicate, Writers on the Range, chastising SUWA for, of all things, having such a large war chest. According to tax documents Stiles hunted down, in 2004 SUWA had almost $5 million in ‘net assets and fund balances.’ He argued that, rather than letting its money sit in the bank, SUWA ought to disperse some of it to other, less-funded environmental groups that are tackling New West issues.
“In a response published in the Salt Lake Tribune, (Scott) Groene (executive director of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance) called Stiles the desert country’s ‘own Barney Fife. He’s worth having around, even if we have to clean up after him now and again.’ Groene said SUWA’s ‘rainy day fund’ was similar to those of comparable environmental groups, and said, ‘True enough, for almost the first time in its 23-year history, SUWA can pay its bills.’ ”
A personal note (which I’ve included as anecdotes in several essays): More than a few years ago I had a fly-fishing buddy in Montana, a member of the Blackfeet Nation adjacent to Glacier National Park. He told me a story he said spiritual leaders and elders had been passing along for a long time. Kernels of enduring wisdom. Stiles’ 30-year foray into journalism echoed that sensibility.
The story involves a vision of a train rumbling unstoppable through pristine wildlands, destroying everything and everyone in its path. It could be felt and even heard through vibration of the tracks even though it was miles away. The train’s headlights could barely be seen. As it got closer and closer, it became more and more ominous.
Passengers aboard the train were oblivious. They paid a high price for tickets and intended to enjoy the ride. The sentiment could’ve come from Old Testament prophet Isaiah: “The Egyptians in their banquets exhibited a skeleton to the guests to remind them of the brevity of human life saying as they did so, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ ”
I believe the elders use the allegory to describe cultural displacement, if not genocide. The train and its well-to-do passengers were an invasive species with the power to destroy an ancient way of life and the natural ecosystem it depended on. They came to drill for fossil fuel, dig for treasure and cut down trees. Make money. Have fun. Natives be damned.
The train left havoc as it chugged through Grand County, and now it’s building steam toward San Juan County. Some of its passengers wear masks of environmental righteousness, promising economic prosperity and religious sanctity, but they’re just as destructive in their own way to Old West culture — to health and well-being, community sustainability, clean air and water, an ability to earn a decent living and democratic processes — as the drillers, diggers and cutters.
The story Stiles told over and over for three decades usually fell on deaf ears.
