our dogs has been our escape for the past twelve years. (If you don’t like dogs, take your kids, your bikes, your jeep, your UTV or ATV and have a blast. Just don’t bring your cats.

Sandwiched between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, Moab has attracted international attention for its rare accessible beauty. We met a Parisian lady at the Hoodoo Hotel sitting in a hot tub under the stars. “I just love it here,” She told us. She jets from Paris to Moab to relax. 

When I spend time here, my asthma is at bay. We go on long walks, take in scenic vistas; the massive starlit night; no freeway noise, and less anxiety.

Last season, I had the pleasure of experiencing River rafting the Green and the Colorado Rivers with two of Moab’s most trusted river rafting companies: Navtec and Sheri Griffith. We took our kids down the Green River. Disneyland’s long lines for Splash Mountain have nothing on The Gates of Lodore’s whitewater rapids.

Like everyone who comes to Moab, I am a nature and quiet lover. Permeating our cities are noise, pollution, road rage and anxious vibes. Moab is a great escape. After covering Moab for more than 15 years, I’ve become aware how city-dwellers’ proclivities and priorities – with all of the best intentions – can destroy small, quaint places economically for working class families. 

In our last issue we profiled people who have made their lives in Helper, Utah. We pointed out how Helper and Carbon County only function due to the coal mining industry and hard-working class residents. Without capitalism, with its sometimes dirty, polluting and soul-sucking work, there would be no working class and family economic viability.

Perhaps it goes without saying that towns can’t function as tourist destinations without the risk taking of small entrepreneurs and family-operated businesses. So why am I saying it? Because there are fewer places than ever in Utah where families can afford to live. Moab is quickly becoming one of those unaffordable places. Homes here average $500K and there are an excess of properties in Moab costing more than $1 million.

The story of Moab’s off-road world isn’t just about machines. It’s about the people who have shaped this place — people like Dan Mick, who has spent a lifetime climbing impossible angles and helping others experience the wonder of the slickrock and the trails.

In the late 1950s, Edward Abbey took a job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, just outside Moab. What he found there, and what he watched happen to it, would shape the rest of his life. Roads were being cut into the canyon country. Cars were replacing foot traffic. The National Park Service, in the name of accessibility, was engineering a kind of industrialization of the wilderness he’d come to love. Abbey wrote about it in Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, and the anger in that book wasn’t abstract. It came from watching something specific be changed by people who either didn’t understand what they had or didn’t care.

Grand County has long been the most reliably left-leaning county in the state, a fact that puts it in sharp contrast to nearly everything around it. To understand how that happened, and where things stand now, I spoke with longtime residents and politicians who’ve watched it from the inside, people who’ve served in local government and lived through the shifts firsthand.

Robert Greenberg.

Bob Greenberg came from New York in 1976, took a job at the community mental health center, and never left. He went on to chair the Grand County Democratic Party and serve on the county council. When he arrived, he said, “the Democratic Party was said to be able to meet in a phone booth” — and even then, its members were a contradictory bunch. Yellow Dog Democrats from the oil patch were fiscally conservative but surprisingly open socially, allowing different demographics to feel safe moving to the county. 

“The town fathers were desperate to have new people come to town,” Greenberg recalls. “They just didn’t want the people who actually showed up. They wanted some other people.”

What followed was a demographic shift nobody planned. The people who filled the gap left by the bust were river guides, federal agency workers, artists, and eventually waves of outdoor recreationists discovering that southeastern Utah was among the most spectacular landscapes on earth. Tourism ended up being the only economic development avenue that actually worked. Manufacturing never had the labor force or market access, sewing factories came and went. The people the tourist economy attracted tended to be younger, more outdoor-oriented, and more liberal.

Kevin Walker.

Kevin Walker, a former Grand County commissioner who moved here in 1990 for the landscape, puts the county’s diversity in context. “Moab [is] a pretty diverse place since, I think, at least the 1950s with the uranium mining boom,” he says. “So it’s not a typical Southern Utah town.” 

Part of what makes Grand County distinct is self-reinforcing. Federal agencies like the Park Service, the Forest Service, the BLM, have large presences here and pull in a different demographic than surrounding counties. People looking to live in Southern Utah with certain values gravitate toward the place where those values already have a foothold. Over time, that critical mass has made Grand County what it is politically, while neighboring counties went in very different directions.

The defining conflict in Grand County has always been over land.

In the 1970s and 80s, it was extraction versus preservation in the starkest terms. County commissioners floated toxic waste incinerators. A plan emerged to site a high-level nuclear waste repository at the entrance to Canyonlands National Park. 

“It really, really galvanized environmentalists everywhere, but particularly in Grand County,” Greenberg says. Activists put up signs at the park entrance, watched them get chainsawed down, and came back with steel reinforcement. That stubborn, physical, unglamorous persistence became part of the local political character.