Activist says adventurers are ruining Moab

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MOAB - Ask Jim Stiles to name the worst thing that has happened to his beloved Moab in the past 30 years and he growls.

"Everything's a [expletive] adventure."

To the 58-year-old Stiles, publisher of the alternative newspaper The Canyon Country Zephyr, adventure seekers are the West's new scourge. Recreation has the potential to be as destructive as oil and gas drilling, mining and cattle ranching, says Stiles, who lately has been jabbing at environmental groups for failing to monitor the industry's effects on rural places.

"I really think a place like Moab had value as a weird, diverse little community," he said. "To me, the biggest difference in the last 10 years is there are so many people who want to get away from the city but they want the same stuff."

Stuff like big, expensive homes that will be used only two weeks out of the year but will drive up housing prices for locals. Stuff like hotel rooms and maid service, nice restaurants, grocery stores, and geegaws for their bikes and jeeps, creating demand for jobs that don't pay enough for locals to survive.

And they want "adventure" outfitters to take them to places that mean more to Stiles than a locale to be added to a personal recreation résumé like so many notches on a belt.

For nearly two decades, Stiles has been one of the most persistent, loud and influential voices warning of the dangers of overgrazing, drilling and paving wilderness. The newest threat, he warns, is turning the West's remaining wild spaces into a redrock theme park for adventure tourists.

"The disorganized, spontaneous search for beauty is the only justifiable and honest way of seeking it," Stiles preaches in his new book, Brave New West, subtitled "Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed."

"The search for solitude, beauty, and all things remote and mysterious must be random. To be more organized is to risk commodifying beauty itself."

Voicing dissent

Stiles' war of words on recreationists and environmental groups he has worked with over the years has been building at least since 2005.

That summer, he published a piece in the Zephyr headlined "The Greening of Wilderne$$ in Utah." He criticized the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, among other groups, for supporting the notion that wilderness can be a source of "economic well-being and community development."

The discussion took a nasty turn in April 2006, when Stiles again targeted SUWA in an opinion piece in The Tribune for ignoring such "new West" issues as sprawl in rural areas even though SUWA's bank account had grown fat. Stiles' criticism was noteworthy because for years, he and SUWA has worked on such issues as wilderness designation and a voter-spurned hazardous waste incinerator in Moab. And SUWA and other groups regularly contributed articles to the Zephyr.

That prompted a testy written response from SUWA executive director Scott Groene, who termed Stiles an "eccentric who lives in his own curious little world," and "our own little Barney Fife."

Liz Thomas, who works for SUWA in Moab, is sympathetic to Stiles' concerns. But trying to keep a lid on the number of people legally going into the backcountry is "a bigger issue than what SUWA's mission is" - protecting what wilderness still remains.

Other people agree Stiles seems unwilling to deal with change. Indeed, every cover of the Zephyr proclaims: "Clinging hopelessly to the past since 1989," the year Stiles launched his bi-monthly tabloid, now with a circulation of 15,000.

"I know where Jim's coming from," says Dave Sakrison, Moab's mayor for the past six years and owner of Dave's Corner Market, where locals go to drink coffee and jaw. "I wish we were all leaving with Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver but we're not. Things change and Jim's literally stuck."

As with other small towns throughout the West, growth poses challenges for Moab, especially when it comes to housing. In 1987, the total taxable value of real property in Moab was just under $100 million. By 2005, that number had more than quintupled. But escalating housing prices are a problem throughout Utah, says Sakrison, who describes Stiles as a "kind, thoughtful, compassionate individual" and counts him as a friend.

"We're going through what every community in the state is going through. Work-force housing is becoming an issue," he says. "It's not unique."

And more people are venturing into the backcountry, some with the help of tour companies that carry their gear, cook their food and help them rappel into hidden canyons in places like Arches National Park, just north of Moab, which now sees more than 833,000 visitors a year.

Sherri Griffith, who recently sold the multi-state river running company that bears her name, was among the early tourism boosters in Moab. She argues that people who don't experience nature won't care about saving it.

"If you don't take people out in nature they won't connect to it," says Griffith, who calls Stiles a "Monday morning quarterback." She has been caricatured more than once by the publisher, who does the line drawings in the Zephyr which, she points out, accepts advertising from companies that cater to tourists.

"You have to be ahead of the curve," she says of growth. "Let's just do it right and let's bring in other services that we need."

Stiles, she adds, is the ultimate NIMBY, the guy who doesn't serve on the boards and organizations trying to deal with the issues, but who is more than willing to sit in judgment.

"Tell me how that's a good thing," she says of Stiles' "clinging to the past" motto. "If you're not moving forward, you're going backward."

Finding his mission

Brave New West (University of Arizona Press, $19.95) is in some ways an epitaph for a way of life Stiles embraced when he arrived in Moab in 1975. That was before it was "discovered" by mountain bikers and guide book authors who have trumpeted the beauty of the redrock backcountry and earn their living helping people find places Stiles wishes could remain hidden.

Stiles, then 25, already had made the pilgrimage to Moab several times while still living in his hometown of Louisville, Ky.

"I felt like I was on a mission, like I'd received some admonition from on high to protect this sacred place," Stiles writes about his decision to move to southeastern Utah. "It seems silly now, but there was dedication and commitment in the words, as if going there was an honored assignment."

By then, Stiles had read Desert Solitaire and was a self-described "groupie" of its author, Edward Abbey, whose novel Monkey Wrench Gang centered on a ragtag bunch of eco-terrorists whose ultimate fantasy was the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam.

Stiles' love of nature took root at the age of 4, when his family moved to a suburb of Louisville that bordered some woods. His childhood was idyllic: A stay-at-home mom who let him roam the outdoors, a little brother who shared his adventures, Little League baseball and Boy Scouts, and Sunday School at the Methodist Church.

"He was always kind of a little character," says his mother Sue Stiles, who still lives in Louisville with Jim's father, also named Jim. "He listened to a different drummer."

"One time he talked us into letting him take another boy and go down to the Ohio River. He was only 13," she says. "We were dumber than dirt."

The boys didn't tell their parents they would have to traverse the Fort Knox army base, with its tank gunnery range. But at 5 p.m. on the appointed day of his return, there came Jim and his friend around the bend.

"That's a real typical example of Jim," says Sue Stiles. "He was determined. He wasn't a pussycat by any means."

Nor was he a scholar, although he loved history and literature, and in the fourth grade published a school newspaper. In college, he tried pre-med and pre-law but settled on economics "so he could get out at noon every day and wouldn't have to take any labs."

In the summers, he went west, working odd jobs and scraping by on a couple hundred dollars, adventures he details in his book.

After graduation and a brief stint as a para-social worker in Louisville, Stiles read Solitaire and never looked back. In Moab, he landed a job at Arches National Park's volunteer center - earning $3 a day plus a rat-infested trailer to live in - but more importantly, he learned that Abbey lived in Moab. He vowed to meet the man who already had profoundly influenced his life.

No plans to quit

That historic moment is also recorded in Stiles' book, but comes down to this: The groupie was scared to death. He had drawn a picture of Glen Canyon Dam blown to bits and hoped to give it to his hero. "I had decided I would not say much," Stiles says.

Abbey graciously accepted the drawing, which would later grace the cover of his book The Journey Home. Then, says Stiles, his voice a deep and booming imitation, Abbey said: "That's good. We need more radicals working in the park service."

Stiles' ferocity about protecting the land harkens back to that halcyon period, when he could tramp about the desert without seeing another person and when Abbey and others were preaching the gospel of solitude. They lived by a code of sorts: You didn't divulge the location of special places and you didn't overuse them, to preserve their special nature. Abbey became a good friend, convincing his publisher to let Stiles illustrate one of his books and writing him "the sweetest letter" when Stiles went through a difficult divorce.

Abbey died on March 14, 1989, the same day Stiles went to press with his first issue of the Zephyr. That night, Stiles and his friend Ken Sleight, the inspiration for "Seldom Seen Smith" in The Monkey Wrench Gang, "sat around all night and drank whiskey and cried."

Readers who only know Stiles' tough-talking Zephyr persona have never seen his sentimental side. In the living room of his small house in Monticello, where he moved three years ago with his cats Stupid and Fuzzy because he could no longer tolerate what's happening in Moab, is a small white box. Inside are the cremains of Herb Ringer. Stiles met Ringer when he was working at Arches and they bonded as kindred spirits. Ringer toured the West extensively during the 1940s and left a collection of photographs that Stiles publishes often in the Zephyr. Whenever he goes someplace Ringer loved, Stiles sprinkles a little Ringer.

Stiles keeps a note written by his best friend, Bill Benge, before Benge's death last October. It directed Stiles to something good in Benge's fridge, a dish Stiles still has in his freezer. He does most of his reading in Benge's Eames chair, a cherished memento.

Stiles is 18 years into publishing the Zephyr and has no immediate plans to do anything else, although recently he has produced the winter issues in advance so he can escape to Australia for a couple months. There's always something to rail against, whether it's the permit given to a private outfit to go canyoneering deep into Arches or the "rich weasels" he claims are buying their way onto the boards of environmental groups. But he doesn't sound optimistic about the mission that brought him here so long ago.

The Zephyr has been a "gathering place of kindred spirits and in some sad way a document on the way the West is changing," he says.

"There's nothing I can do that's going to stop what's happening in Moab."