Access Utah

Lee Benson of the Deseret News recently wrote a nice profile of Jim Steenburgh, author of “Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth.” And with fresh powder on the ground, we thought this a great time to revisit our conversation from November 2014.

For a generation, some of the money we’ve spent at the gas station and the mall has gone to empower the authoritarians and the armed groups that have given us our worst foreign-born crises. How can we get ourselves out of business with hostile petrocrats and the violent extremists?

Moab resident Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community. But when her husband made a controversial climb of Delicate Arch, the media fallout and the toll on her marriage left her without a partner, a career, a source of income...or a purpose. Accompanied by her beloved dog, Fletch, she set off in search of a new identity and discovered skydiving.

The National Park Service turns 100 on August 25, 2016 and today we’re kicking off a series of programs focusing on America’s national parks.

“Cars, for Americans, more than anything else represent freedom.” So says Matt Hardigree, executive director of Jalopnik.com, who is featured in National Geographic Channel’s documentary film, “Driving America.” The film examines how car culture has changed the way we live, work, travel and socialize; and looks into the future, including potential game changers like Tesla’s electric cars.

My guest for the hour today is poet Rebecca Lindenberg. Clouds, mountains, flowering trees. Difficult things. Things lost by being photographed. Things that have lost their power. Things found in a rural grocery store. These are some of the lists, poems, prose poems, and lyric anecdotes compiled in “The Logan Notebooks,” a remix and a reimagining of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a collection of...

In her new book, “Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” historian Karen Jones uses the metaphor of the theater to argue that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual.

According to recent studies, 50% of us set New Year's resolutions and 78% of us fail to keep them. But there's something compelling in the idea of a new you in the new year. Should we set New Year's resolutions? How do we keep them past, say, February? We'll ask you what you do and what successes or failures you've had.

“The West was once seen as a beacon of opportunity, and it is still a place where many ways of life can flourish. But it is also a region that leaves some people isolated both culturally and geographically.” That’s David Kennedy, from his foreword to a collection of essays titled “Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West.”

Alex Thompson, writing in Politico Magazine, says “Political taboos, campaign dealbreakers and electoral glass ceilings are crumbling. Members of Congress are openly gay and bisexual, there’s a black man in the White House, and a woman may be next. Voters have accepted all sorts of behavioral warts and missteps in their political candidates, too. DUIs? A mistake of their youth. Draft dodgers? Ther...

Join us for the Access Utah Holiday Special 2015. We’ll hear music for the season performed by the Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen on guitar and Eric Nelson on clarinet). We’ll also hear readings for the season by the author of The Christmas Chronicles, playwright Tim Slover.

Periodically we join together as a UPR community to share what we're reading. On Wednesday's Access Utah we're doing it again, but with a twist: We want your list of the best books of 2015.

On Today’s Access Utah we continue our series on Mass Shootings in America by asking how the media should respond. Our guests include Tom Teves, whose son Alex was killed in the mass shooting in Aurora Colorado. Teves is a founder of No Notoriety a campaign that urges news outlets to limit how much they use a gunman’s name and photograph. Tom Teves says the hope is to curb shootings by denying man...

Writer Ceiridwen Terrill writes about how, at a particularly sad and frightening time in her life, a wolf dog was the kind of companion she was searching for. In her book, "Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs," she talks about an animal who's heart is divided between the woman she loves, and the desire to roam free. In the end, Terrill realized she must confront the reality of...

Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2015 isn't a word at all; it's an emoji, one of those little faces that you see all over on social media. And I'm hearing extreme glottal stops (as in "the new football coach at USC is Clay Helhhh-uhhn (Helton)" and "strength" pronounced as "shtrength." It's enough to drive a language purist to distraction.

In response to the San Bernardino shootings, President Obama said, "We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world."

Ron Carlson’s latest novel, “Return to Oakpine,” is a tender and nostalgic portrait of western American life. In it, Carlson tells the story of four middle-aged friends who once played in a band while growing up together in small-town Wyoming. One of them, Jimmy Brand, left for New York City and became an admired novelist. Thirty years later in 1999, he’s returned to die. Craig Ralston and Frank G...

Should Utah accept refugees from Syria? That’s the question we’ll address on Thursday’s Access Utah. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah's members of Congress want to stop Syrian refugees from entering the country until new security checks are implemented, a process that could take years. Senator Orrin Hatch says “It's irresponsible, particularly after [the Paris] attacks, to reduce this issu...

Our guest for the hour today is Utah author David G. Pace whose debut novel Dream House on Golan Drive is published by Signature Books. It is the year 1972, and Riley Hartley finds that he, his family, community, and his faith are entirely indistinguishable from each other. He is eleven. A young woman named Lucy claims God has revealed to her that she is to live with Riley’s family.

When NPR’s Robert Siegel suggested that the harpsichord is viewed as old and not enormously popular, Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani responded: “I think these things would only matter to Americans. As long as there's a place for sundials and gardening and beautiful things, there's a place for the harpsichord. I completely reject the idea that the harpsichord is old and I reject the...

Photographer Jonathan Diaz says “I have always been fascinated by the power and poignancy of a child’s imagination. Children are not afraid to dream big: they believe anything is possible. They are innocent. With this innocence comes dreams and honest aspirations that, from the view of an outsider, might seem impossible. However, through the eyes of a child, such dreams are absolutely obtainable.”...

The holiday season is a time for celebration and family togetherness. It’s supposed to bring us joy. But Christine Moll, chair and professor of counseling and human services at Canisius College and a mental health counselor, says that for many the holidays are a time of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and dysfunction. On Wednesday’s AU, as we head into the holiday season, we’ll ask you what you do to...

In "Frank: The Voice" (2010), James Kaplan told the story of Frank Sinatra's meteoric rise to fame, subsequent failures, and reinvention as a star of live performance and screen. Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century-infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure. Kaplan examined the complex psyche and turbulent life behind that incomparable voice,...

Alex Honnold exploded onto the climbing scene in 2008 after a free solo of Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park. Now one of the most famous adventurers in the world, he climbs without a rope, without a partner, and without any gear to attach himself to the wall.

Brenda Tracy, writing for Sports Illustrated says "At first I couldn't say the following words without getting a lump in my throat and tears welling in my eyes. Today these jarring words roll off my tongue. 'I was gang raped.' I start a lot of speaking engagements with that sentence. You think you get nervous talking in front of a crowd? Try sharing intimate details of the worst event in your life...