Access Utah

"Nine Mile Canyon's role in the Old West--a story of fur trappers and miners, ranchers and homesteaders, cattle barons and barkeeps, outlaws and bounty hunters Nine Mile Canyon is famous the world over for its prehistoric art images and remnants of ancient Fremont farmers. But it also teems with Old West history that is salted with iconic figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Last Chance Byway lays out this newly told story of human endeavor and folly in a place historians have long ignored. The history of Nine Mile Canyon is not so much a story of those who lived and died there as it is of those whose came with dreams and left broke and disillusioned, although there were exceptions. Sam Gilson, the irascible U.S. marshal and famed polygamist hunter, became wealthy speculating in a hydrocarbon substance bearing his name, Gilsonite, a form of asphalt. The famed African American Buffalo Soldiers constructed a freight road through the canyon that for a time turned the Nine Mile Road into one of the busiest highways in Utah. Others who left their mark include famed outlaw hunter Joe Bush, infamous bounty hunter Jack Watson, the larger-than-life cattle baron Preston Nutter, and Robert Leroy Parker (known to most as Butch Cassidy)"

Two leaders in the Cache County Republican Party have resigned from the party over presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump. In a letter to members of the Cache County Republican Party Executive Committee, Andy Rasmussen and Jonathan Choate say, "The decision by the Executive Committee to take no public action disavowing our presidential nominee has left us in a difficult position...Donald Trump is directly antithetical to nearly every traditional Republican value...His unapologetic racism, xenophobia, and misogyny disqualify him from consideration as a precinct chair, let alone the presidency.”

When Bloomberg Businessweek told him it was going to give him the whole magazine to write a single article about computer programming, Paul Ford, a soft-spoken programmer and writer, sat on his couch with a pillow over his head and just let out a long “aaaaaaahhhhh,” like he had just stuck his finger on the ‘A’ key. Ford’s piece started out as a 2,000-, then 4,000-word piece. It grew much longer from there, demanding the efforts of a team of editors, graphic artists and web developers to make it what it is now: An interactive primer that not only teaches how computers process code, but commits code as part of its narrative. This turned into “What Is Code?”

The acclaimed author of “Refuge” and “When Women Were Birds” and many others is one of the most thought provoking and articulate people you’ll meet and an hour with her is unfailingly interesting.

At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the LDS Church-owned department store in the Utah town where she'd grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents' house with her four-year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she had been born, and she was having an affair with her son's surgeon, a married man with three children of his own. It was at this fraught moment that she decided to become a writer.

With this episode we inaugurate a new series on AU: Our Favorite Books:

The monthly DOCUTAH@TheELECTRIC series presents a film of particular interest to the four state Southwestern community and the Native American reservations in the area. It tells the story of the haunting consequences of the invention of the atomic bomb and the man who led the development teams. "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer & The Atomic Bomb," will be presented Friday evening, June 24th in St. George Utah.

There exists a category of American cities in which the line between suburban and urban is almost impossible to locate. These suburban cities arose in the last half of twentieth-century America, based largely on the success of the single-family home, shopping centers, and the automobile. The low-density, auto-centric development of suburban cities, which are largely in the arid West, presents challenges for urban sustainability as it is traditionally measured. Yet, some of these cities—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Dallas, Tucson, San Bernardino, and San Diego—continue to be among the fastest growing places in the United States.

In his new book, Apocalyptic Anxiety: Religion, Science, and America’s Obsession with the End of the World” (University Press of Colorado), Anthony Aveni explores why Americans take millennial claims seriously, where and how end-of-the-world predictions emerge, how they develop within a broader historical framework, and what we can learn from doomsday predictions of the past.

It's an Access Utah tradition. Every year we gather with members of the band Evening in Brazil in UPR's studio C to enjoy some great Bossa Nova and Samba.