Mark Harvey is a rancher, writer, and photographer. He grew up in western Colorado and graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in International Studies. After college he spent several years leading month-long mountaineering expeditions for the National Outdoor leadership School in Wyoming, Mexico, and Chile. He is the author of the National Outdoor Leadership School’s Wilderness Guide. Mark is board president of Aspen Journalism and EcoFlight. He lives in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Email: markharv [at] mac.com
by Mark Harvey To tear something down is infinitely easier than building something of benefit or beauty. Constructing an elegant house that will last through the ages, can take years. From a dream, to design, to approvals, to construction means gobs of money, skilled designers, and dedicated builders. When you see that handsome house perched…
by Mark Harvey Most of the “better sort” were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism… —Carl Lotus Becker It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself,…
by Mark Harvey Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. —Langston Hughes The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears…
by Mark Harvey “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” –HL Mencken I’ve always loved Winston Churchill’s comment about his political rival Clement Attlee: “He’s a modest man, a lot for which to be modest.” Churchill himself was not a modest man, and…
by Mark Harvey Most people don’t want to hear your sob stories, even if they pretend to be caring listeners. Even a good friend listening to your personal version of Orpheus and Eurydice—and making all the right noises—is probably focused on whether to put snow tires on their car Thursday or Friday. Some of us…
by Mark Harvey On September 1, 2004, a middle-aged Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya boarded a plane in Moscow on her way to Ossetia to cover a hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. During the flight, she drank a cup of tea that almost killed her. After she drank the tea, she became disoriented,…
by Mark Harvey Scarcity of water brings out the evil propensities in men quicker than anything else. —Greeley Tribune, July 1, 1874 The summer of 1874 was a particularly dry year in Colorado, and the drought led to a water war between the fledgling towns of Fort Collins and Greeley. In the previous years, Greeley…
by Mark Harvey When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game…
by Mark Harvey “…they came out of little holes in the ground, and did eat up the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them, and ready to deafen the hearers…” —William Bradford, Massachusetts, 1633 If you missed the totality last month when the moon fully obscured…
by Mark Harvey Vitamins and self-help are part of the same optimistic American psychology that makes some of us believe we can actually learn the guitar in a month and de-clutter homes that resemble 19th-century general stores. I’m not sure I’ve ever helped my poor old self with any of the books and recordings out…
by Mark Harvey Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book… —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953 The other day I stopped in at one of those coworking spaces to see if it…
by Mark Harvey Mark Twain’s two rules for investing: 1) Don’t invest when you can’t afford to. 2) Don’t invest when you can. Hemorrhaging money and high burn rates on startups is not something new in American culture. We’ve been doing it for a couple hundred years. Take the pony express, for example. That celebrated…
by Mark Harvey In fiction, there is one story that never gets old: the good man or good woman who is imprisoned or abused, but through strength of character and the force of justice retakes their rightful place in the world. It can be the story of a woman violated by a man or degraded…
by Mark Harvey Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate. –Ruben Dario, Nicaraguan Poet Between my junior and senior years of college, I spent part of a summer in Costa Rica studying Spanish…
by Mark Harvey “It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.” ―Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina Watching the recent elections in Argentina makes an arm-chair economist like me face-palm myself. The country that was once one the richest in the world, the country that has an…
by Mark Harvey A week before he died, I drove my good friend and ranch foreman, Rey Rodriguez, to Denver to catch a bus to Chihuahua, Mexico. He was taking a two-week vacation to visit his family there. On the three-hour drive to Denver, we practiced answering questions for the test given to immigrants applying…
by Mark Harvey One of the artifacts of modern American culture is the digital clutter that crowds our minds and crowds our days. I’m old enough to have grown up in the era before even answering machines and the glorification of fast information. It’s an era that’s hard to remember because like most Americans, I’ve…
by Mark Harvey Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. —Immanuel Kant I have a couple of friends in my county who might be considered high-powered on the local level. One is a district judge and the other is a county commissioner. I’ve invited the judge to a few local…
by Mark Harvey I would go home to eat, but I could not make myself eat much; and my father and mother thought that I was sick yet; but I was not. I was only homesick for the place where I had been. –Black Elk According to Lakota Indians, in early June of 1876, the…
by Mark Harvey I’ve mostly escaped the selfie photo culture, not out of some virtuous modesty, but because I generally look like a confused mouth-breathing moron in photos. So selfies are more of an indictment for me than something I want to post on Instagram. If I photographed like a Benicio del Toro or George…