Michael E. O'Reilly

When you live in Salt Lake City and you want to drink on Sunday, or gamble anytime, your best option is to board one of several party busses that take you across a hundred miles of wind-swept, sage-covered desert, to the town of Wendover, Nevada. Or you can do like the students in one of my southwest literature classes did, and make the trip in a biodiesel-powered school bus with flowers painted all over it. Our mission however, was that of education, not libation. As I wrote about in a previous post , the destination was the  decommissioned Air Force base now known as Wendover Airfield. Driving across the barren west desert  As you head west along the southern shores of the Great Salt Lake, the lake gradually disappears and becomes nothing but a flat expanse of salt stretching as far as the eye can see. You still think you’re next to the lake, but the water you’re seeing is nothing more than a mirage hovering over the hot, white surface. It’s even hard to believe that all th...

History and purpose of Lake Powell As a person who cares deeply about the preservation of natural spaces and ecosystems, I have mixed feelings about the very existence of Lake Powell, America’s second-largest man-made lake. Electricity is the main purpose of creating dams, and the huge lakes behind them. While dams often created ecological  "situations," downstream, they have become essential for powering basically every large city in the West. The lake gets its name from Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who, in 1869 explored the Green and Colorado rivers along with eight other people. Almost a century later, the Glen Canyon dam was completed, and the Lake Powell  began filling up in 1963. It took seventeen years to fill the giant bathtub of bright red rock, and today it’s over 500 feet deep in some spots. The water levels fluctuate pretty  dramatically depending on spring snowmelt, and the water/electricity requirements that determine how much water must be ...

Even if you’re a geologist you might not recognize some of the names of the rock and mineral formations found in Utah’s Timpanogos cave. That’s because the greenish-yellow helictites that cover the cave’s interior surfaces are not found anywhere else in the world. If it weren’t for the limestone ceilings and  walls, you might think you had stepped into a modern art gallery full of kaleidoscopic, handblown glass pieces. But this natural wonder shines with more beauty than anything forged by human hands. The 6-10  inch helictites are wormlike structures formed by hydrostatic pressure that pushes and pulls water through small capillaries in the rock, defying gravity while incorporating calcite, aragonite, nickel, and other minerals. There are even 340 million year-old fossils that tell the story of ancient marine life forms such as Horn Corals, Crinoids, and Brachiopods. Not like my caves back home Prior to visiting Timpanogos, my only cave experience occurred near the northern ...

It took me a few years of living in the Southwest before I finally visited Utah’s Bryce and Zion National Parks. In fact, I wasn’t that motivated because I had been to Canyonlands, near Moab, The Grand Canyon, and California’s Yosemite Valley, and I figured, how could those three places be topped? Well, let’s just say that I’m glad I put in the extra miles on the old Toyota, pointing it south a few summers ago with my wife, before we had our first kid. The coolest places are out-of-the-way All of the National Parks found in the western US are “out of the way,” in the sense that none is really close to anything, except for maybe Yosemite Park, which is a short drive from San Jose. Zion and Bryce are possibly out-of-the-wayest of them all, because how often do you find yourself in either southern Utah, northern Arizona, or southeast Nevada? It just barely ever happens, I don’t care who you are, jackrabbits not withstanding . . . In July of 1909, Zion was established as Utah’s first Nat...

The vast landscape of the American Southwest offers the most beautiful vistas anywhere in the nation, and many of these views have become iconic images recognized even by people who have never been west of the Mississippi. Geological wonders such as The Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and the formations of Yosemite park have all found their way into American consciousness through western movies, and the iconic imagery of photographers like Ansel Adams. Yet if I could recommend only one destination for a southwest visitor, it would be Moab, Utah.  Experience the magic of Moab As your drive into Moab you instantly realize you’ve come to a place of mystical wildness, and a place that epitomizes the geological diversity found throughout the Four Corners area, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah join together. Nowhere else can you find such a clear record of ancient history--human, animal and mineral -- frozen in time. In a single day, you can explore thousand-year-old ruins of ...

Me sa Verde National Park is a place that means a lot to me. A couple of years after moving to Durango, Colorado in 1993, my Mom and I made the drive to Mesa Verde. What we saw gave us a clear window to the past that was more powerful than any dinosaur fossil or petrified fores t. It sent chills up my spine, and instantly made me fall in love with the Southwest. Mesa  Verde is the site of numerous ancient cliff dwellings once occupied by a group called Puebloans -- ancestors to about two dozen modern Native American tribes. The Puebloans, often referred to by archeologists as “Anasazi,” have puzzled anthropologists ever since these sites were discovered by white men during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ancient dwellings in the Southwest Other similar Puebloan dwellings have been found and preserved in the states comprising the “Four Corners,” including Aztec Ruins, Chaco Canyon and Bandelier National Monument, in northern New Mexico, Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, and Uta...

Someone in my  University of Utah  Southwest Lit class had a bio-diesel school bus, and one day he drove our class out to the abandoned Wendover Air Forcebase. So one day we loaded our class into the bus and, after filling up with some used french fry grease we headed west on I-80 toward the town of Wendover, which straddles the Nevada/Utah state line.  The most common reason folks from Salt Lake City make the drive to Wendover (unless they’re passing through to Reno or Lake Tahoe) is because it’s the closest place where gambling is legal. Occasionally someone will make a run at the land speed record on the nearby Bonneville salt flats, but that’s not generally a spectator event, though I don’t know why . . .       The base opened in 1943 after three years of construction, shortly following the Army Air Corps’ acquisition of almost two million acres in Utah’s west desert. The purpose of the remote base was to conduct bombing training exercises, and abo...

This interview was conducted around 2009, at Ken Sanders Rare Books , in Salt Lake City. MO: Take me through the early days of EarthFirst! The first event was on March 24, 1981 was the cracking of the Glen Canyon dam, which is now infamous. I know about this because about 2 weeks earlier Ed Abbey called me out of the blue. I had learned over the years of our relationship I never called Ed on the phone because Ed hated the damn things. He loved to correspond with people, particularly with his ubiquitous post cards. He loathed telephones. Unless he had something to say, it was like having this “zen” phone conversation. So unless you had something to say, you never called him, ‘cause he didn’t want to talk. So I never, ever called him, almost never. So he calls me up, ‘Ken, this is Ed. Going to be some kind of Spring rites down at Glen canyon dam, at the Lone Rock campground. If you want to talk about that silly calendar of yours come on down.’ And that’s all he said, ‘some kind of Spring...