Utah – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

Cellpic Sunday — Arches and Dead Horses

August 17, 2025August 17, 2025Fandango8 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday, in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He encourages us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his post.

As I don’t have any recent cellpic photos that I’d classify as interesting, unusual, exotic, or erotic, I engaged the Wayback Machine to August 16, 2013.

On one of our cross country drives, one of the sites my wife and I wanted to check out was Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah. Arches National Park has the largest density of natural sandstone arches in the world. It is spectacular. Here are four photos taken in the early afternoon at Arches. The last one is called “The Three Sisters.” I wonder why.

At the hotel we stayed at in Moab, one of the other guests suggested we check out Dead Horse Point State Park, which is not far from Arches National Park. So we did.

Dead Horse Point State Park, is essentially a 2,000-foot mesa overlooking the Colorado River. So after visiting Arches, we headed over to Dead Horse and these next four photos are from Dead Horse Point State Park at around 6:30 pm.

By the way, Arches National got its name due to the many sandstone arches at the park. Duh! But aren’t you curious about how Dead Horse Point State Park got its name? Of course you are.

It’s a sad story, actually. According to legend, the park is so named because the point was used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming the mesa top. Cowboys rounded up these horses, herded them across the narrow neck of land and onto the point. The neck, which is only 30-yards-wide, was then fenced off with branches and brush. This created a natural corral surrounded by precipitous cliffs straight down on all sides, affording no escape. Cowboys then chose the horses they wanted and let the others go free. One time, for some unknown reason, horses were left corralled on the waterless point where they died of thirst within view of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below.

Sorry to end this on such a sad note, but hey, life ain’t always butterflies and waterfalls, you know what I mean?

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Desert Scenes

March 10, 2024March 10, 2024Fandango9 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He invites us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his.

During one of our many cross-country drives, my wife and I stopped at the town of Moab in eastern Utah. Moab is the largest city and the county seat of Grand County in eastern Utah and is known for its dramatic scenery. While there, we visited two local national parks, Arches and Canyonlands, both of which were beautiful.

We also stopped at a place called Dead Horse Point State Park, which gets its name from the primary use of the point in the early 1800s as a corral for the herds of wild mustangs that Western explorers came upon during their explorations out west.

Below are two photos I took at Dead Horse Point State Park. Both were taken in late August 2013 at around 6:30 pm. I’m not sure what caused it, but in the second photo there is a curved line that cuts across the center of the photo. Im not sure if that’s what they call “noise” that some iPhone photos (I took this with my iPhone 5) are known for, or maybe it is an artifact of the sun as it was heading for the horizon.

Needless to say, the area around Moab is stunningly beautiful.

Trump Supporters Are a “Protected Class”

March 17, 2019March 17, 2019Fandango26 Comments

7837E4EB-491B-4F78-B540-7855D75EC2B4 The Utah legislature introduced and passed a bill that would protect against discrimination based upon ancestry, race, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.

And that makes perfect sense, since blacks, LGBTQ people, and the disabled, the usual protected classes, are all what they are because they were either born that way or, in the case of disabilities, became that way through no fault of their own. That’s why it should be against the law to discriminate against them: they can’t help what race they are, what their sexual orientation is, or that they are disabled.

But here’s the kicker. The Utah legislature was able to pass that hate crime bill only after Republicans added right-wing conservatives as a protected class under the law. I kid you not.

Here’s a question to ponder. Are racists, homophobes, white nationalists, right-wing conservatives, and Trump supporters, like those other protected classes, born that way? Of course not. They consciously choose to be hateful and intolerant. So how can one justify including Trump supporters as a protected class? Are they truly “victims” of hate crimes and discrimination in the same way blacks and gays are?

As I pointed out in an earlier post, Trump has bragged that he has “the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump….” Yes, it certainly sounds like Trump supporters and right-wing conservatives don’t need any extra protection under the law.

Wait, I take that back. Being a right-wing conservative who is a Trump supporter is a clear sign of a mental and emotional handicap.