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 The trouble with theocracies is that they generally lead to crusades. And the trouble with crusades is that if you’re not of the right sect or denomination, you’ll end up crucified. Theocracies lead nowhere, bring great suffering on peoples, stifle creative thought, and have women covered or in the kitchen. They do…
by Mark Harvey I’m not sure what Americans were like in the 18th and 19th century, but they have to have been a lot tougher, less whining, less self-important and paradoxically more exceptional without thinking they were exceptional than Americans of today. Even Americans born well into the 20th century had a stoic quality and…
by Mark Harvey On the morning of July 22, 2016, an illegal campfire in Garrapata State Park near Carmel, California got out of control. Within a day, the fire grew to 2,000 acres. Within two days the fire grew to 10,000 acres. A month later the fire was at 90,000 acres and still largely uncontained.…
by Mark Harvey I’m not a schoolteacher so I don’t know the exact routine that teachers have every morning before they leave their house, but I’m certain it shouldn’t involve checking the magazine of a 9mm Glock and perhaps even chambering a round before their commute to school. I have known several teachers and in…
by Mark Harvey Out of the blue, between the sea and the sky, Landward blown on bright, untiring wings; Out of the South I fly –Maurice Thompson One of my sisters who is a wildlife biologist often leaves the cinema with an entirely different take on the virtues of any particular movie if it’s set on…
by Mark Harvey When I am dead, then bury me In my beloved Ukraine, My tomb upon a grave mound high Amid the spreading plain —Taras Shevchenko If you didn’t know who Vladimir Putin was and you ran into him in, say, Dayton, Ohio, you might take him to be the owner of a small…
by Mark Harvey “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this–who will count the votes and how.” –Joseph Stalin In the game of chess, there are dramatic moves such as when a knight puts the king in check while at the same time attacking…
by Mark Harvey Suspended lion face Spilling at the centre Of an unfurnished sky How still you stand –Phillip Larkin In the very early and still dark hours on August 12, 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe from the coast of eastern Florida. A Delta rocket lit up the sky with fire as the…
by Mark Harvey Sometimes our American ideas about social problems and how to fix them are downright medieval, ineffective, and harmful. And even when our methods are ineffective and harmful, we are likely to stick to them if there is some moralistic taint to the issue. We are the children of Puritans, those refugees who…
by Mark Harvey Growing up in western Colorado, my baseball team traveled around the state playing against the tiny towns of Rifle, Grand Valley, Rangely, Delta, and Meeker. We had a good team and when I was playing, our coach was an ex-Houston Astros pitcher who brought real science and sophistication to our practices. Having…
by Mark Harvey Someone described the US Federal Government as a huge insurance company that has its own army. There’s real truth to that description. The vast majority of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those entitlement programs take up about 65% of the federal budget, while the military takes up…
by Mark Harvey It’s hard to know what the old west was really like as we’ve been so inundated with Hollywood films depicting the west as an eternal gunfight between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians, and the unshaven versus the upstanding townsfolk. Westerns have had an outsized impact on our understanding of…
by Mark Harvey Here’s a weird thought: if it weren’t for 18th-century vaccines, America might have lost the revolutionary war to the British. That would have meant that all the anti-vaxxers today touting their freedom not to get a vaccine might have inherited quite a different destiny of eating scones and clotted cream under the…
by Mark Harvey In the spring of 2018, Earl Cooper noticed that the wild horses roaming on the desert where he lived were suffering terribly from the ongoing drought in eastern Utah. The springs where they watered were drying up and there was very little grass with the lack of moisture. On his forays into…
by Mark Harvey Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes…
by Mark Harvey Mormons and Indians of the old west don’t have a nice history. In 1865, just as the Civil War ended, Ute Indians and Mormons began their own version of a seven-year war near Manti, Utah, over land, grass, cattle, and survival. It was called The Black Hawk War, named after a particularly…
by Mark Harvey Three years ago while filling my truck with gas in western New Mexico on a cold fall evening, a young woman, barefoot and wearing nothing but a sundress, came up to me and asked if she could get a ride into the town of Gallup. Her bare feet and summer clothing in…