Moving Dad’s observatory

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Alpenglow Observatory  in Salt Lake

In 1984 my father erected a full blown observatory in his backyard on the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City. He was in his early fifties then and my sister, who was only 14, helped him erect it. He named it the Alpenglow Observatory, created a website to catalog his deep sky photos, and worked on constantly improving it. I think of the project as his magnum opus. This month he asked me if I would like to move his masterpiece to Torrey. Continue reading →

New West microcosm series

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I have started a blog series called “microcosm” over on my Agenda New West site. Agenda New West is about contrasting the Old West with the New, showcasing what the West was, how it got to where it is today, and what it is becoming. Most of all I want to envision what the West could be along the lines of Wallace Stegner’s notion of “a society to match the scenery.” Continue reading →

Review: All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

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All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ALL THE WRONG PLACES is a hero’s journey and the story of the emergence of one of the best of the West’s new writers.

I had the pleasure of meeting Phil Connors at an Association for the Study of Literature and Environment writer’s conference where he was a speaker. Dave Foreman was there too and the three of us had lunch along with my wife and publisher at Torrey House Press, Kirsten Allen. Kirsten ended up sitting with three men who had lost their brothers by their brother’s own hand. It was a moving experience for me, one I still feel and am grateful for. Continue reading →

Red Rock Testimony

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Red Rock Testimony

Today in the New York Times, Timothy Egan posed the question, “Can Poets Save the Parks?” Nice concept! Terry Tempest Williams gets a plug for her new series on Parks callend “The Hour of Land” and Torrey House Press’s own Red Rock Testimony also gets mentioned and quoted from. Good job Kirsten Johanna Allen and Steve Trimble and all the contributors.

As luck would have it at this moment, Torrey House Press is laying low as the publisher AND we have a brand new website.  We did not mention Red Rock Testimony on the old site and the new site perhaps has yet to be crawled by the search engines. The new site does have a lovely banner piece talking about the Red Rock Testimonies project and mission.

Egan is right, there is nothing like a book to promote conservation. All the great conservation movements were preceded and inspired by literature. Will a Bears Ears National Monument be granted by President Obama? Will Torrey House Press play a part? Will poets again, indeed, save the land?

Fireworks galaxy (NGC 6946)

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Fireworks galaxy, NGC 6946, in the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus. Torrey, 6/4/2016 (revised color)

It is new moon early June and the nights are dark but short. Summer solstice is only two weeks off and it does not get dark enough for observing until 10:40 PM. It will start getting light again in just five and half hours. Dark enough for observing is known as astronomical twilight and technically starts when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon or almost two hours after sunset. Before astronomical twilight comes nautical twilight, defined by the old mariners as when the horizon at sea is still barely discernible. Continue reading →

Have chairs will travel

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Except I left the chairs home. We have some great Zero Gravity camp chairs and I left them in the garage on our trip to the west desert and Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge yesterday. Kirsten and I want to take the chairs to some of the iconic view sheds in the West and hang for awhile. We have never gone outside less often than now that we are running a land oriented publishing house. We want to remedy that. Utah sits at a triangular apex of the best scenery there is, the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin. Next time we will take the chairs.

Yesterday was in the Great Basin. I have heard a number of times that only two percent of charitable giving goes to conservation. Yet here we live in a state that can easily be described as 98 percent scenic landscape. The disconnect from urban to open scene is sudden. Just south of Point of the Mountain on I-15 while still in the midst of the Wasatch Front urban corridor, turn west, go through a slight pass into Cedar Valley and the population density drops 90 percent. Ten more miles west of that and the population density is zero. Continue reading →

Where is best place for a gravel pit?

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NIMBY, better yet, nowhere

(originally published in Agenda New West)

Red Rock gateway or “Gravel Pit Point?”

At the Bicknell Bottoms in Wayne County, southbound Utah Highway 24 turns west and passes through the Red Gate of the red rock Velvet Cliffs on the north and a toe of Boulder Mountain on the south. Here it enters the gorgeous Fremont River valley and the gateway communities to Capitol Reef National Park. I was at a gathering of friends and neighbors to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of the good man who built my home in the valley in Torrey. John came down from the city in the late 90’s to build my home, fell in love with the surroundings, and never left. Continue reading →

Black Eye Galaxy (M64)

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Black Eye Galaxy (M64)

I am able to get close enough to the heavens to take photos of deep sky objects from my driveway on the Colorado Plateau because I am standing on the shoulders of giants. This subtle jewel of a galaxy first picked up it’s nick name in February 1787 when William Herschel wrote in his observing notes, “A very remarkable object, mE. [much elongated], about 12′ long, 4′ or 5′ broad, contains one lucid spot like a star with a small black arch under it, so that it gives one the idea of what is called a black eye, arising from fighting.” Continue reading →

The Whale and the Hockey Stick

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“Star gazing is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination,” says my favorite astronomer, Chet Raymo. And maybe another 50 percent knowledge. The more you know, the more you can see. On a clear dark night in Salt Lake City, or Chicago, or Boston you can maybe see 50 stars, probably more like 25. The sky is washed out by light pollution and it is the sky most of us see if ever we look up. But we evolved under the stars of pollution free skies and on a clear dark night high on the Colorado Plateau there are still thousands of stars visible. Here the light of the Milky Way can be enough to cast a shadow. All the same, the stars we can see are a tiny fraction of the 100 billion in the galaxy. On nights like these the scene above seems to reach down to shake my sleeping natural soul awake and beg my mind to look up and see, to stand and see with imagination.

Whale and Hockey Stick galaxies, Torrey 3-9-2016

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