Loving the West to Death

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FAT TIRES IN EDEN 

For my money the drive west from Grand Junction, dropping down out of Colorado into Utah, is the most beautiful in the world. You descend into a strange red dreamworld of hoodoos and mesas and buttes, a landscape of twisted sandstone of such mystic power that even multiple SUV commercials can't desecrate it. As you drop off the highway and head south along Route 128, driving through canyons along the twisting Colorado River with barely another car in sight, it's hard to build up too much ire about how tourists are over-running the West. It becomes less hard 40 miles later when you finally pass the spanking new Sorrel River Ranch resort, a theme park-like cluster of buildings that inhabit a place where I remember unrolling my sleeping bag on a sandbar not too many years back. And it gets plain easy when you enter Moab itself.

Here is where the battle between the new and old West truly rages. RVs rumble down the streets and a hundred gaudy signs try to draw in the tourists, selling rafting and biking and jeep tours. Think Vegas for outdoorsmen. This is not Grand Junction, a city struggling to break free of boom and bust, but an outpost selling whatever adventurous wares it can. Here Power's amenities economy runs wild, with little regard for "appropriate scale."

Moab boomed with the discovery of uranium in the 1950s, briefly reaching a population of 9,000, or almost twice the number who live here today. When uranium prices dove with the shift away from nuclear energy and the end of the cold war, the town floundered. Unemployment skyrocketed, and people left in droves. But Moab reinvented itself fairly quickly, beginning with early mentions in mountain biking magazines. Then it hosted the area's first fat tire festival in 1986, and the chamber of commerce, realizing the town was on to something, began to advertise it as a recreational mecca.

Today Moab is a center for biking, off-road vehicles, rafting, rock climbing, skydiving, and anything else vaguely adventurous, while playing host to dozens of annual festivals that include the Jeep Jamboree and the Moab MUni Fest ("MUni" being short for mountain unicycling). More than 50 percent of the population work in some part of the service economy, and 80 percent of the town's budget comes from sales tax paid mostly by the 1.5 million visitors a year. Starter homes that sold for $18,000 in the mid-1980s go for $250,000 today, and the majority of the houses built over the last 15 years are either second homes or are owned by nonresidents who rent them to tourists. Meanwhile, Moab had a less-than-thriving per capita income in 2003 of $20,634.

The town is also haunted by a recently departed ghost. Just a week before I arrived, Jim Stiles, editor of the Canyon County Zephyr and professional contrarian, gave up his battle to save the soul of Moab and hightailed it for Australia, a land he must hope will approximate the wildness he once found in Utah. Stiles used the Zephyr for two decades as his bully pulpit, railing against rude Lycra-clad mountain bikers, greedy developers, the "commodification of nature," and the amenities economy itself. He saw the last of these not as "a clean and viable alternative to ranching, mining, and timber" but rather as a new kind of boomtown industry with "bleak and destructive consequences of its own."

I asked the first person I saw about Stiles's departure. The man was delivering coffee on his motor scooter and had lived in Moab since 1991. He said his name was Bob Owen, but everyone around town called him Get-a-Job-Bob. As the owner of the Fresh Moab Coffee Roastery, he was just the sort of person the amenities economy is made up of, coming here because he loved the place and then starting a business. "Stiles was really good at pointing out what was wrong with Moab," he said. "Not so good at ways to fix it. Jim did a bunch of good for this town, but a lot of times he couldn't get out of that old Ed Abbey rant mode."

The reference was to Moab's most famous former resident, the writer Edward Abbey, whose 1968 book, Desert Solitaire, both celebrated the glories of Arches National Park, located about 10 miles from where we stood, and railed against the incursions of what he called "industrial tourism." Arches, which saw about 25,000 annual visitors during Abbey's stint as a park ranger in 1956 and 1957, now has almost a million visitors each year.

In the 1970s, Stiles took the same job as a park ranger at Arches and, smitten with the book and the man, adopted the older writer's cranky but inspiring philosophy as his own. For the last couple of decades Stiles has presented a clearly drawn, if exaggerated, picture of the war between old westerners, who like cows and drilling and resent the federal government limiting access to public lands that they consider "theirs," and new westerners, who fight to preserve the land while driving "hundreds or thousands of miles in gas-consuming vehicles so that they can pedal their bicycles for ten." Though Stiles's insights about the West can be brilliantly incisive, this is a cartoon picture that I'm not entirely comfortable with at the moment, especially after my talk with Rob Bleiberg last night.

My first stop in Moab is one that would drive Stiles to rant. In his mythology, Rim Cyclery is analogous to the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. This is where Bill and Robin Groff opened Moab's first mountain bike shop in 1983, which led, just a few years later, to Moab being anointed the mountain biking capital of the world. The consequences, according to Stiles, were not just a huge influx of tourists and the crushing of fragile cryptobiotic soil, a living crust of lichen, mosses, and algae that protects the desert against erosion, but the snapping up of Moab's real estate and the ignition of a boom that would make land, and property taxes, all but unaffordable to many locals.

These days Moab is somewhat passé as a mountain biking destination, the cyclists having moved on to more remote and unspoiled venues. But as a nod to tradition I decided to rent a bike at Rim and pedal the Slickrock Trail. I was met at the bike shop by an old friend, Dave Smith, who had spent the last few days exploring the canyon lands in his beat-up red VW van with his dog, Baxter. Dave is a tall, thin 47-year-old with the shambling grace of the Dude in The Big Lebowski. Though it was a perfect October day, hot even, we saw only three other cars in the vast lot for the world's most famous mountain biking trail, somewhat putting the lie to alarms about overcrowding.

As we got ready to push off, a man on a motorcycle came riding off the trail. Tamping down my reflexive environmental outrage, I walked over to the guy and shook hands. Further complicating local stereotypes, it turned out he was also a mountain biker, and he told me he had lectured some of his fellow motorcyclists on the lack of courtesy they often show non-motorized riders. He had particular scorn for those off-road vehicle drivers who don't wear helmets and booze it up while trashing the trails, thereby giving the motorized a bad name. We agreed that Slickrock and the nearby trails make sense in the way a city makes sense, clustering population in one area while leaving outlying areas more sparsely populated. "There's plenty of room for everyone," he said. "We've already got 70 miles of route just south of here. No reason to complain."

When I last did this ride I was 11 years younger and 15 pounds lighter, and now I spent less time riding than pushing the bike and staring up at Dave as he ascended another rounded red rock far above me. Jim Stiles argues that mountain biking is somehow an inauthentic experience, due in part to the peacock clothes we wear and our lack of appreciation for our surroundings. But later, toasting with Dave over 3.2 beers in town at Eddie McStiffs, I would recall an afternoon of red rock and views of the green river twisting below, and it would feel plenty authentic.

Continued...