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. 

On the streets of downtown Salt Lake City, psychosis has become part of the landscape.

People scream at invisible enemies. Some believe they are prophets. Others wander through traffic carrying conversations with voices nobody else can hear. To passersby, it can look theatrical, bizarre, and absurd. But behind many of those episodes is a darker reality few people want to confront directly: methamphetamine-induced psychosis, prolonged sleep deprivation, trauma, addiction, and the slow destruction of a person’s ability to distinguish reality from delusion.

On an ordinary October morning in 1985, downtown Salt Lake City was shattered by a blast that killed businessman and document collector Steve Christensen. Hours later, a second bomb tore through a quiet Holladay neighborhood, killing Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former business partner. The next day saw a third explosion. This one was in a car near Temple Square that nearly killed rare-documents dealer Mark Hofmann. 

Rumors swirled instantly, tying the attacks to money, religion, and shadowy early-Mormon documents Christensen had recently acquired. For days, Utah held its breath. What unfolded was stranger and darker than fiction. The bombs weren’t the work of religious extremists or enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but instead, the doings of Mark Hofmann himself. Hofmann was a nerdy, soft-spoken dealer who had secretly become one of the most skilled document forgers in American history. 

His creations were so convincing that they reshaped historical narratives, fooling scholars, collectors, and church leaders. When the lies began to close in, the bombs became his final, desperate attempt to keep his world from collapsing.

Hofmann had been fabricating Mormon and American historical documents for years. He was a prodigy of deception, sourcing period paper, mixing inks that cracked just right, and mimicking handwriting with obsessive precision. Most of all, he knew how to read people. Utah in the 1970s and ’80s was a collector’s paradise. As bookseller Ken Sanders told Salt Lake Magazine, it was “a consciousness shift,” a recognition that rare Utah history was a treasure worth pursuing. It was also, he notes, fertile ground for affinity fraud.

Nothing captured that vulnerability more than the Salamander Letter, a supposed 1830s correspondence which claimed Joseph Smith encountered a magical white salamander rather than an angel. The document shook Latter-day Saint circles. Church leaders, worried about its implications, quietly purchased it along with other materials Hofmann dangled before them. Many reasoned that if the church was willing to buy it, then it must be authentic and true, and Hofmann understood that psychology perfectly.