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 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…