Most active people track performance, pace, and recovery—but rarely look at the one organ driving it all. Understanding how your heart is actually functioning can reveal early warning signs long before symptoms appear.

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.

Driving out past the town of Delta on a gravel road for a couple of hours, we almost turned around. Following a rain storm, the road is wet and muddy but still decent. Jesse Fisher is worried we’ll get stuck, but we plow through giant puddles of water, and as the clouds lift, we reach the homestead community of Riverbed Ranch, consisting of 1250 acres of reclaimed desert.

Almost like an oasis, Riverbed Ranch is home to 40 families who decided to depart city life, municipal taxes, congestion, air, light and sound pollution, and live in a place among chickens, goats and cows on self-reliant homesteads. 

Describing Riverbed Ranch as “bucolic” would be inaccurate at this point. Sometimes there are purple flowers in the valley, but currently it is a desert — still beautiful, but most of the properties in the sprawling valley are still works-in-progress. But the scale of the valley and witnessing in person the first brand new town to break ground in Utah in 75 years is quite remarkable. 

A few of the 2.5 acre plots consist of a trailer and a fence. Some plots have nice little homes that appear very homemade; others have more complete homes with nice fencing, with nicely organized pens for different animals, orchards and organization. 

Some homes under construction even appear upscale and modern, where the inhabitants are indeed living as modern homesteaders, not seeking “luxury retreats” like so many other empty homes in Utah being built in hot tourist destinations such as Moab and Park City.

We start by speaking with Tom and Kathy Barnes, whose homestead is a model for order and function. Turkeys walk around in their pen, excited for feeding time. Beside the turkey pen is another pen for chickens; one for goats, and another for pigs. All of the pens are connected to a large barn. By the look of their operation, the Barnes appear to be seasoned professionals.

Indeed they are. Tom and Kathy raised their eight children “on a teacher’s salary,” homesteading in Payson, Utah on ten acres, reaching the point where the only store-bought items were toilet paper, shampoo, toothpaste and cashews. Most everything else, including fresh fruits, vegetables, milk and meat were raised themselves.

Tom had just finished feeding his three hungry pigs when he took a moment to talk to me.

“What are the advantages to living on a homestead?” I ask. 

“Listen,” he says. “You can hear a pig eating … Once in a while we will hear a fighter jet pass over but that’s it.” 

The Barnes are calm and content in their semi-retirement. They set up their homestead at Riverbed Ranch five years ago. They already knew homesteading and they realized even in retirement they could help the other inhabitants here, those with less experience, learn how to take on the demanding but satisfying lifestyle.

“It’s basically like an extended family,” says Tom. “We are all like-minded out here. We are all going to help one another when our neighbors need help.”

Tom says he and most of his neighbors are members of the LDS Church, and that most of the city’s LDS members are a part of a ward which makes up their “ward family.” “Out here,” he says, “everybody is our extended family. So we all know we are going to help one another and learn to get along … Like early pioneers in a small town. It’s very much the same thing.

A wild goose chase?

“We could live out here like it was 1849, but we have all of the conveniences of modern society, so why not take advantage of the best of both worlds?”

I wonder how adaptable these modern pioneers are. Raised on a homestead, would these folks ever want to join the modern world again? The Barnes kids are mostly choosing city life, but their kids and grandkids love visiting them, running around free-range. Tom adds, “One of our sons is starting his own homestead in Piute County.”

We drive around on the hard gravel roads and get a sense of how all of the residents here justify the hard-scrabble, off-grid life, which requires living off pumped well water, solar power for electricity, and propane for heat. 

We are aiming to get a sense of the  bigger reason why all of these people are out here, far away from freeways and Walmarts. Are they all latter-day preppers?

As summer approaches, many of us start looking for new ways to be active. Whether you’re emerging from a cozy winter of hibernation, or searching for a replacement for skiing and snowboarding, there are inexpensive and accessible ways to get outside, get active, and make the most of summer.