Moab » If this iconic southeastern Utah town is both enchanting and quirky, then its local radio station, KZMU FM, is a good mirror of the place.

Reminiscent of Northern Exposure -- the 1990s CBS TV series about an eccentric Alaska town and the radio station that measured its pulse -- Moab's off-beat persona comes out in music and banter at 106.7 FM.

Call it Southern Exposure -- powered by a slew of solar panels and 80-some-odd volunteers.

Station manager Jeff Flanders, a.k.a. "The Guy Next Door," actually lives next to the KZMU studios. His year-round uniform is baggy Hawaiian-style swim trunks and a T-shirt. He's been known to show up in nothing more than a bath towel when gremlins invade the station's 500-watt signal.

"It's a miracle this place even exists," he says. "You don't go into towns of 8,000 people and find public radio."

KZMU likes to bill itself as Utah's only all-volunteer air crew.

Other low-power community-based FM stations, like Salt Lake City's KRCL and Park City's KPCW, began with mostly volunteer staffs. But those ventures have increased their budgets and numbers of paid personnel over the past two to three decades.

KZMU, by contrast, went on air April 2, 1992, and still manages to operate on $100,000 a year. That does include five part-time, paid employees. But they don't get benefits.

Flanders is one. Another: Christy Williams, the program director, who, clad in a red beret and colorful wrap, looks like she just bopped in from Off-Broadway.

She calls herself a "communitarian," stays in touch with star charts, and, when prodded, might offer spiritual advice.

"Living in Moab affects you, and you become like the place," she says. "It would be a waste of what the intimate [radio] medium can do not to go all they way with volunteers."

The station's music director, Glenn "Barefoot" Peart, is the serious side of the team. He wears rings on his toes and is barefoot even with 3 inches of snow outside.

Peart spends his days sorting through mountains of CDs that arrive at the station, weeding out the bad stuff from the rest.

"I'm a music-listening machine," he says. "That's my job."

But it's the volunteers, like disc jockey Heather Sudbury, who determine what gets played and who give the station its down-home, warm-fuzzy ambience.

She takes the radio handle "Red Coyote" and, on her Thursday afternoon show, plays everything from Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros to African Blues by Tinariwen.

"I even have fans in Finland," she says brightly, referring to the station's on-line webcast.

Spontaneity is the name of the game at KZMU. On a recent afternoon, Mississippi bluesman Kent Burnside stopped by the studio on his way to Telluride, Colo., via Denver. The guitar player "smoked" through a 30-minute set on Rick Austin's rock and blues show.

Austin, a big Burnside fan, is known to strum his own guitar and jam with the CDs he plays on air. Like many in this little -- but cosmopolitan -- burg, he stumbled across Moab a decade ago and never left.

But it's on Fridays around 11:30 a.m. when strangeness hits its stride. Donny Kiffmeyer and his brother, Joe "Fast Eddy" Kiffmeyer, seize the mics to host "Trading Post."

The show, ostensibly set up so callers can buy and sell appliances, old trailers, furniture and the like soon devolves into something like the Smothers Brothers -- or is it the Marx Brothers? -- with zingers and noisemakers. Callers phone in jokes along with their sale items, and pandemonium reigns.

Williams concedes the station is a little too Bohemian for some Moab residents.

And it's true, at a local breakfast joint, you might hear commercial country/western music wafting over your eggs and bacon, rather than KZMU.

But out in the car, you can switch on 106.7 and catch "DJ Shay" Wright -- a self-described hillbilly from Georgia -- playing his own collection of 1930s- and '40s-era folk and blues from so-called jug bands.

"They're looking down from heaven and smiling," Shay says of the long-dead musicians, "because they're finally getting played on the radio."

csmart@sltrib.com