Post Modern Mails

By Bennett Owen

Credit: My-West.com ©

My family’s ranch is still pretty remote by today’s standards. By that I mean it is one of the few places left where it’s impossible to get a cell phone connection.  An Uncle recently discovered the only hot spot in the valley but depending on the season you’ll need either a four-wheel drive or a snowmobile to get there.

Credit: My-West.com ©

What the valley DOES have is a post office. Aunt Mary is Postmaster and the single employee at zip code ----- and the ‘stage’ is still a lifeline to the outside world. But wireless Internet has also reached rural America and that’s mighty stiff competition.

Credit: My-West.com ©

Snow and rain and heat and gloom of night are one thing. A party line is another.  But the Internet Cloud is a whole ‘nother kind of monster.

Credit: My-West.com ©

The USPS is deeply in debt, based largely on plummeting demand in the Email age. Statistics show that over half of all bills are paid Online…”the check’s in the mail” is increasingly becoming, “the binary transfer is on the ether.” 

Credit: My-West.com ©

The USPS plans to shutter as many as 37-hundred affiliates in an effort to regain solvency…85 of those are scattered throughout Montana and in some cases closure will leave patrons up to 60 miles away from the next post office.  As one customer in Dixon, Montana said, “a town without a post office becomes a ghost town.”  Not that we have anything against ghost towns, but…

Credit: My-West.com ©

…The My-West team is fighting back in our own small way. The next great My-West road trip gets underway on October first and anyone who sends us an address will receive a greeting card, sent from one of the post offices pictured here. Now that’s a special delivery.  Do it for fun! Do it for nostalgia! Do it for…Aunt Mary!

Credit: My-West.com ©

Credit: My-West.com ©

Credit: My-West.com ©

Credit: My-West.com ©

Credit: My-West.com ©

Credit: My-West.com ©

A Birthday Cake For Canyonlands

By Bennett Owen

Candlestick Tower, Canyonlands. Credit: Alaskan Dude

"We glide along through a strange, weird, grand region. 
The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock."

— Explorer John Wesley Powell, 1869.

On September 12, 1964, President Johnson officially declared Canyonlands a national park. Expanded over the years, it now comprises 527 square miles of southeastern Utah... an area slightly larger than Delaware.

In the parlance of geologists, “The park is characterized by sedimentary rock, which has been deformed by anticlines, synclines and monoclines.“  Yikes! It was the miners and cowboys of a bit more wistful nature that lent more imaginative nicknames to the outcroppings and chasms…

Mesa Arch –

Credit: Kloppster

Island In The Sky –

Credit: Rick McCharles

 Credit: Rick McCharles

Horseshoe Canyon –

Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

The Maze District –

Credit: deltaMike

Needles –

Credit: Rob Lee

Canyonlands isn’t on the A-list of national parks, probably because the most spectacular scenery is only accessible by four-wheel drive, horseback or foot.  And the remote backcountry can literally leave the unprepared adventurer “between a rock and a hard place.” A truth Aron Lee Ralston found out the hard way.  Outdoing anyone who ever left their heart in San Francisco, this is the guy who left his hand in Canyonlands…here’s his own account of a life and death decision and believe me, if you’re at all squeamish I’d suggest you just don’t watch…

Come Hail and High Water

Still on the road - lots of great posts starting tomorrow!