Via a commenter on High Country News' Facebook page, on its story about a Moab developer planning (and now putting on hold) a new development named after Ed Abbey characters from The Monkey Wrench Gang (
my take) ...
I heard the news about Stiles, long-time publisher of The Canyon Country Zephyr. His obit, on its website.
A few interesting thoughts, from that obit, and many more after that.
First, he was a true Cactus Ed groupie, if he moved to the Moab area after a friend of his dad gave him a copy of Desert Solitaire.
Second, why did he move to Coldwater, Kansas, of all places? Obit doesn't say. It does say he was born in Louisville, Kentucky. For the unknowing, Coldwater is a far more godforsaken place, at least to the Western White person's eyes, than Moab, and less scenic, too. It's about 100 miles west southwest of Wichita, Kansas, where the mixed-grass prairie changes to shortgrass. It's been eons, but I've been through there, Ashland, Protection, and all around on US 160, as well as US 54, US 400 (the old KS 96), etc. It's under 1,000 people; its whole county, which borders Oklahoma just east of the Panhandle, is under 2,000. It's a town of a bunch of old White farmers, average age over 55.
Third, this ties to the Zephyr. Good old Jim moved to Coldwater BACK IN 2011! In other words, per a Gannett, a Cherry Road, or some other "hollowing out" newspaper company, he was publishing the Zephyr remotely for THIRTEEN YEARS. What a fraud.
Indeed, it may be MORE than 13 years. I quote from this High Country News piece about Stiles in 2006:
We have been on a daylong memory-lane tour that’s a show-and-tell for Stiles’ first book, Brave New West: When Worlds Collide in Moab, Utah, which is under contract from the University of Arizona Press. The book ties together 30 years of experience and observation into what Stiles calls “a chronicle of Moab’s demise.” It is, truth be told, more a chronicle of his love affair with the town. ...
To Stiles, [Abbey's] trailer’s fate is just another example of all that has gone wrong in the Moab area since Abbey came and went. In fact, three decades after having a “this-is-the-place-I’m-going-to-call-home-the-rest-of-my-life” epiphany, Stiles has pulled up stakes and moved to another town.
But he hasn’t fled Canyon Country (he asked that I not reveal his new town) and he sure as hell isn’t backing down with The Zephyr. After 17 years of publishing, during which time he has tackled almost every imaginable issue in this poster-child region of the New West, he has found himself in a heated in-print brouhaha with the environmental movement. Specifically, he’s wrestling with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) — a group he once championed with enthusiasm. The resulting fracas has been downright ugly.
So, he had apparently left Moab by then, even if not yet moved to Coldwater, Kansas, and yet kept pontificating for 20 years? In other words, if he started it in 1989, and moved, in let's say, 2004 for some round numbers, that's publishing the Zephyr for 15 years while in Moab and 20 years while not.
(I am curious where he was at from 2006, or earlier, however much earlier, wherever in Canyon Country it was. Paradise? Tropic? Escalante? Or, if his bromance and boner for Mormons had already started then — Monticello? Blanding? Bluff? And why Coldwater? He was born in Louisville, Kentucky.)
Per one person in comments at his "official" obit, which will probably become about as hagiographized as Abbey's, I don't know what will happen to the Zephyr; obviously, if said person wrote a check, and made it out to Stiles personally, it gets returned. But, what if it was made out to the Zephyr?
Per another commenter there, and its online masthead on its homepage, who is running it now? Has it been a semi-ghost ship since the end of 2022? As that commenter noted, to the degree it had comment since 2022, it was a one-man band. And, much of that, per the commenter, in 2023 and early 2024, was recycled old material. (Apparently nobody's running it. Stiles' obit is the top item on the page, and the latest dated. RIP Zephyr.)
It's funny, even the world population clock below Stiles' mug is antiquated. As of the time I started working on this on May 18, it was still below 8 billion, whereas all reputable sites will tell you we've already passed that, by more than 150 million.
And, re the cult of Abbey? The Zephyr's Facebook page is now "fans of," and Stiles gave some insiders admin privileges before he died. It's clear a cult of Stiles will continue to mushroom, like mushrooms do, under a dark pile of shit.
As I said there, per the link up top about the development in Moab, it's too bad a Chuck Bowden isn't still alive to take the last measure of Stiles the way he did of Abbey.
That said, per the post making that announcement? This steaming pile of shit:
Prior to his passing, Jim Stiles gave admin privileges on this page to a number of his close associates, with the hope that we would keep the page alive and dynamic. His articles going back decades still have great relevance to current events, and in light of the disheartening conflicts over Western lands, his wisdom seems timeless. There is currently a push to create a new national monument that would gobble up beautiful and resource rich lands in western Colorado.
Stiles' research uncovered many disturbing details about the genesis of the Bears Ears National Monument which was imposed on San Juan County, Utah--against the will of the local people--by the Obama administration in January of 2017. To a large degree the Bears Ears movement was inspired and funded by Swiss billionaire, Hansjorg Wyss.
It appears that Wyss' is involved with the "Monuments for All" coalition, now pushing the creation of the "Dolores National Monument" which is also vehemently opposed by those who live and work within its proposed boundaries.
Below is but one of Stiles' numerous articles detailing the involvement of the Swiss billionaire's meddling in western lands issues. If you visit the Zephyr website and type "Hansjorg Wyss" into the search field, you will find many relevant articles.
Which got this response:
Good fucking doorknob. So, the "friends of Stiles" are conspiracy theory wingnuts who support extractive industries (uranium) and (like Stiles himself to fair degree) don't give a rat's ass about actual American Indians? Got it.
Beyond that? I've seen enough on Twitter to know that Hansjorg Wyss is kind of the new George Soros to wingnuts.
Nuff said for now, til we get to some old blog posts by me.
Oh, per that page? This 2020 article about romancing the way of the cowboy? Big ag cowboying today ain't no romance, but, on the Colorado Plateau, it is an extractive industry as well.
OK, now to my old blogging about him.
First, in 2008, at the start of the Great Recession, he was talking about "what America needs." TL/DR? A return to Eisenhower's America. Left unsaid? That America had good White people behind the white picket fences and everybody else was supposed to know their place. Coldwater, Kansas was about right as his final stopping place. That said, not all of it was bad. On the third hand, that Cowboy Bob piece also reflected his Eisenhower America mindset. And, yea, Jim, it IS "welfare ranching" with below-market BLM lease rates compared to what private land charges in the same area. Ditto to your Mormon blowhard friends. More on that immediately below.
Second, a decade later, in 2018, I called him at least half a blowhard. I left open the possibility of full blowhard. I'll split the difference now and call him three-quarters blowhard, specifically because he was already 100 percent full of shit back then about Bears' Ears, as well as being half full of shit about the recreational economy. Per Bears' Ears, and his comments then on its name? He was at a minimum hiding in a Whites-only enclave, and at a maximum, albeit with a different target, as much a racist as Abbey, per my response above to his groupies. (That includes, per the end of that piece, his becoming a Mormon propagandist. That, in turn, explains the flunkies/groupies/fanbois/cultists above.)
Third, in part in response that that, I blogged myself about the creation of Bears' Ears and the Trumpian reversal. As far as Friends of Cedar Mesa selling private tours? Maybe Stiles' Mormon friends were afraid that would interrupt their illegal pothunting, assuming some of them still do it. In his Cowboy Bob piece, he claims the feds are the biggest pot destroyers while claiming the Mormons were just innocents from a century earlier.
From the Cowboy Bob piece:
More than a century ago, when Mormon pioneers first settled parts of southeast Utah, they found these artifacts, thousands of them, abandoned hundreds of years ago, by ancient Native Americans. They found pots and projectile points and burden baskets, metates and manos, and the still intact remnants of their homes. The Mormons, exiles themselves, gathered the artifacts up and they took them home. They were beautiful, no one else seemed to want them, and it seemed to them logical to get them out of the weather. Most thought they were doing something good. Universities even hired the locals to lead archaeologists to the better sites.
Bullshit, refudiated by David Roberts and friends of his like Winston Hurst, who probably didn't color the pages of the Zephyr. (A search has Roberts only showing up once, in a sidebar reference to his Everett Reuss book. Hurst is even more briefly mentioned in one piece.)
Frankly, that was when I lost most remaining respect for him. I guess he forgot to get the new Mormon temple in Coldwater built before he died.
Further confirming my take on this? In my googling about Stiles, I saw an r/Moab subreddit with discussion of this. I posted a link to the 2006 HCN piece and said I considered him a fraud. The next morning, I discovered the moderator, a guy named ReaganCheese (with St. Ronald of Reagan icon, not your standard Reddit kit, showing the groupie this guy is), not only made some Dum Fuq response, but also gave me a flair called "Jim Stiles cucked me." Unfortunately, I hit the block on him before I posted my final edits to my response to him. And, unfortunately, since I blocked him, I don't see a way of reporting him, which I should have done first. I eventually figured out a way to do that, that may have gone to Reddit rather than him as moderator of the Moab site, and that's enough time wasted.
Of additional interest? Despite me telling Jeff St. Clair about it, no Stiles obit at Counterpunch. Nor has St. Clair managed to work in a satirical piece by me about Abbey, Stiles and Bates Wilson — despite saying it was in the hopper. And, St. Clair dropped an occasional piece for HCN in pre-2006 days, as did Stiles.
