LIFE IS GOOD
For residents of the vast deserts of the Great Basin, praying that rain and snow will stop is akin to heresy.
Desert dwellers spend their lives praying for every drop they get. Yet as the trillions of gallons of water captured in this winter’s record breaking snow sits...
GIANTS OF SAN JUAN
Minnie was born in Roanoke, VA in 1901. She married at age 17 to James Bugg. They were married for 21 years and she bore him six children. She never worked outside the home.
Shortly after being married, she met a pair of Mormon missionaries. “Their teachings seemed...
GIANTS OF SAN JUAN
Noel, Fendoll and George Sitton arrived on the Colorado Plateau in the early part of the 20th Century. They came hoping to escape the poverty of their Missouri boyhoods and had high hopes of making it big in the wild west with free land (homesteads), strong backs and...
GIANTS OF SAN JUAN
Jane Walton was the beloved wife of Charles E. Walton, who was one of the four founding fathers of Monticello. Her life and tragic death are legendary in San Juan today. She was the first person buried in the Monticello Cemetery.
She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland...
Leslie Young was a colorful cowboy who lived in Monticello for 36 years and was well known and admired by his peers. He arrived as an eight-year-old boy who had just lost his father (Alma) in a terrible accident.
The Alma Young family was living in Farmington, NM where Alma was in the...
GIANTS OF SAN JUAN
The following story is a powerful metaphor on the life and character of one of Blanding’s outstanding cowboy pioneers.
“One spring evening Norman invited me to accompany him to where he kept his animals south of Blanding. He loved his horses, mules, cows, pigs, sheep...
In May of 1880, Nephi Bailey, his young wife and three children arrived in Bluff just months after the Hole-in-the Rock pioneers had settled there. They had left a comfortable life in Cedar City and heeded the call to help settle the San Juan Mission.
It took the family a month to make...
LIFE IS GOOD
Most agree that in the world of athletics the events which takes the most time, and requires the most pain are those of the long distance runner.
To be a state, national, or Olympic champion takes incredible dedication and years of sometimes excruciating preparation.
At...
GIANTS OF SAN JUAN
There are many great men and women who settled Bluff and stayed when the going got tough.
Many of those same people were also the first settlers of Blanding and left an indelible mark on San Juan’s largest community which continues 100 years later.
One of those...
OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Buckley:In the spring of 2005 on a trip over the mountain to Blanding, I was amazed to see a huge chunk of the south slope of Indian Creek swept clean. It was as if a gargantuan vacuum cleaner had simply sucked every single one of the huge old-growth spruce trees...
