The original monkey wrencher

Ken Sleight inspired renegade writer Edward Abbey to create his most legendary character. Today, with sprawl and tourism devouring the West, the grand old man of environmental activism is still facing down the bulldozers.

By Christopher Ketcham

Read more: Politics, News

Oct. 21, 2006 | MOAB, Utah --

Almost all the country within their view was roadless, uninhabited, a wilderness. They meant to keep it that way. -- Edward Abbey, "The Monkey Wrench Gang"

Ken Sleight is 77 years old, lean, dusty-booted, hard of hearing, wears old jeans and long-tailed shirts untucked. It is said that as a younger man he was the model for the lapsed Mormon renegade Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang," which itself became the incendiary model for eco-saboteurs such as Earth First. Sleight owns a horse farm called Pack Creek Ranch, up on Abbey Road, outside Moab, Utah, in the high red desert of the canyon country, where for the last five months I've been renting a cabin 33 steps from the door of his lodge. I see him every day in his old blue Ranger pickup, or tending to his Appaloosas and Arabians with his wife, Jane, or laying gravel with his tractor and shoveling manure for shade trees.

I like Sleight. I like him because the other night he drank me under the table, because a few days later I got stuck in a September snow in the mountains above the ranch and he dropped everything to get in the Ranger and winch out my truck. I like him because when he drives long distances he pisses in a bottle instead of stopping at the side of the road. "No time to waste and why pollute the water," he says. I like him because on his horse a few years ago he charged two bulldozers in the forest near the ranch, refusing to dismount until the drivers shut their engines. I like him because he reminds me of my father, both of them agitators and nostalgics, angry young men more than twice my age, twice as angry as the young men you meet today.

Sleight talks about the way things were in southern Utah before the too-many strangers like me showed up, before Arches National Park, so beloved by his old friend Abbey, was snatched away by the seekers of heat and light and solitude once just his own, before the motor-home panzer units full of speedboats and mountain bikes and grandpas and babies in diapers. Just under 800,000 people flocked to Arches last year, almost a fivefold increase from 30 years ago. Everywhere in the red rock national parks of southern Utah -- in Arches, Capitol Reef, Zion, Bryce, wherever motorized man can find a way -- the people are coming. Sleight calls this "obscene." Too many "goddamn people," Sleight says. "In such a conglomeration, it's like down in Rome when all those masses see the pope. I don't understand how in the hell they get any meditative spiritual great stuff with so many damn people around."

Which would sound blinkered, curmudgeonly, elitist, plain mean if it were spoken by anyone else but Sleight, who says it with a sad, generous smile, sipping whiskey at noon. Sleight at first glance has settled down in his old age. He has been a river runner, cattle driver, canyoneer, sheepherder, wilderness guide and, as once denounced by a land developer, a "dangerous saboteur."

In "The Monkey Wrench Gang," published in 1975, Sleight, aka Smith, topples road-grading Caterpillars off a cliff, derails a coal train with dynamite, and attempts to incinerate the armatures of three bridges north of Lake Powell, which he refers to as "the Blue Death," the water having drowned the marvels of Glen Canyon. He prays on his knees atop the dam that created the hated lake. "Dear old god," the jack Mormon river rat cries out, "how about a little ol' pre-cision-type earthquake right under this dam?"

Abbey and Sleight met in 1967 at the put-in at Lee's Ferry on the Colorado River, 15 miles below Glen Canyon Dam, which had been completed four years earlier to charge a hydroelectric turbine that, in turn, would power casinos in Las Vegas and electric toothbrushes in Phoenix. Abbey was posted at Lee's Ferry as a park ranger with a penchant for cadging beer from river-runners. "Instant recognition," says Sleight. "We sat there and built a fire and drank and laughed until 3 in the morning. Talked about how to get rid of the goddamned dam! That was probably the start of the Monkey Wrench Gang right there."

So was Sleight really the model for the marauding Smith? "I admit to nothing except the Mormon part," he tells me.

In reality the character is not as effective as the man has been himself. "Ken has tilted at more windmills than Don Quixote could in 10 lifetimes -- he never gives up," says Jim Stiles, who publishes (and writes and edits) the Canyon Country Zephyr, southeast Utah's only alternative monthly newspaper.

Sleight indeed has had a very real hand in stopping more ill-conceived and rapacious projects threatening red rock country than probably any other Utahan. He was the first elected chair and catalyzing force behind the radical Glen Canyon Group of the Sierra Club's Utah Chapter (his original vision for the group, he would discover, was too radical). In 1999, he was bestowed the David R. Brower Award "for Outstanding Service in the Field of Conservation," with Brower, the unruly and iconic mountaineer and environmentalist, personally presenting the plaque. For eight years, Sleight honchoed the San Juan County Democratic Club, his chairmanship mostly spent trying to elect Native Americans, more than 55 percent of the jurisdiction, in a county ruled by minority whites. (He himself in 1990 would run for the Utah House of Representatives on an Indian ticket and lose with 35 percent of the vote.)

From what I can tell living at Pack Creek, Sleight doesn't sleep. Often I see him at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. -- "Ken keeps wolf-hours, watch-hours," says Jane -- heading north in his Ranger on the 260 miles of exhausting road to Salt Lake City (bound for a quixotic morning meeting about draining Lake Powell) or driving more contentedly south to work with the Navajo and Ute nations, where corporate prospectors claim the land for coal, uranium, oil and gas, calling it progress; the Indians, left to suffer the cancers and clean up the mess, call it "energy genocide." At the age of 75, Sleight himself was diagnosed with prostate cancer: "You know what this guy does? He's getting radiation therapy five days a week in Salt Lake City," Jane Sleight tells me, "and he's sleeping in the back of his pickup, in November, in a parking lot. With no heater."

Today, in Moab and Monticello and Blanding, main habitations in southeast Utah, Sleight's enemies, a good number of them ranchers, sprawl boosters, oilmen or mining scions with interests in industrializing the high desert to no end, will say (off the record -- "in respect for Ken") that Sleight's got too much Abbey in his head, too much of Abbey's doomy vision of technology and sprawl and greed run riot. Maybe this is so.

The drowning of Glen Canyon in 1963 transformed Sleight, but in the end the change had nothing to do with Abbey. If the wilderness needed no defense, only more defenders, as Abbey would write, Sleight was destined for the duty, though his birth would seem to have conspired against it.

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