In This Issue

Institutions have institutions. At the Utah State Historical Society, perhaps the best known and most widely used institution is the Utah Historical Quarterly—first published in 1928 and now concluding its seventieth volume with this issue. For the last twenty-nine years, Dr. Stanford J. Layton has edited and managed the Quarterly. In the hearts of readers, authors, and the Utah State Historical Society staff, Stan has become an institution His name will always be associated with the emergence of the Quarterly as one of the nation's premier state history journals and its embrace of all peoples and areas of the state. During his tenure as editor, nearly six hundred articles and over sixteen hundred book reviews and notices have appeared in the more than 12,000 pages he edited and published. This legacy of history is an unparalleled treasure for Utah and her people and is a monument to a truly distinguished career. Such contributions, however, will not end with Stan's retirement from the Utah State Historical Society He moves from here to a full-time teaching position in the Department of History at Weber State University where a new generation of students will enjoy his wit, humor, and love of history, while being challenged to meet his impeccable standards for scholarship and excellence.

This issue's first article takes us back a hundred and fifty years to England in the early 1850s when new converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought the quickest and cheapest way to immigrate to the new Zion in the mountains of far off Utah. For the poorer converts, (and most were in this category) the answer seemed to be the £10 plan introduced in 1853 then changed to the £13 plan a year later. The questions of how the plan worked, what the immigration experience was like for the more than one thousand participants, and why the plan was abandoned after two years, are answered in this insightful article

The next two articles return to the theme of winter activities in Utah, which was the subject of the Fall 2001 issue that reached readers on the eve of the 2002 Winter Olympics. In the delightful article on ice skating and coasting in Utah, we are reminded that earlier generations of Utahns were not content to sit by the fire and wait for the warmth of spring and summer Instead, they adapted easily to the snow and cold turning city roads into coasting hills and developing primitive but effective -warning systems for both motorists and coasters Frozen ponds became ice skating arenas where couples could skate arm in arm or youngsters could compete in hockey games equipped with brooms or other kinds of makeshift hockey sticks. Utah's canals became highways of ice on which skaters covered miles and miles of unobstructed skating Anyone who has strapped on a pair of ice skates or jumped onto a coaster sled will savor this article.

The third article looks at the role of the United States Forest Service in the development of Utah's ski industry As a governmental agency created in 1905 to manage the timber and grazing resources on the nation's forest reserves, few imagined that the Forest Service would soon deal with recreational issues ranging from campgrounds to ski runs and skier safety. The process by which this occurred in Utah is outlined in this timely article.

Anthropologists instruct us that the environment has been a primary factor in our history for thousands of years More recently, the tremendous growth of Western cities has brought new demands and challenges in the post-World War II era Our last article focuses on the environmental issues and concerns that surfaced during the 1960s and 1970s and ultimately led to the cancellation of the Kaiparowits Power Project in southern Utah In this balanced treatment of the controversy, the concerns and tactics of environmental groups are examined, the casual approach to planning and implementation by power officials is presented, and the reasons for the ultimate cancellation of the project are summarized As we face new and ongoing challenges with immigration, the environment, the economy, our quality of life, and our own survival, the thought-provoking articles in this issue offer a meaningful historical perspective on the paths we have taken in the past.

OPPOSITE: The base of the Brighton chairlift circa 1955.