The Rogue Trader

The Dugway Incident A Dinner Tale of a youthful encounter on the Flats... The green vinyl bench of the over-sized booth in Virge's Diner is comfortable, worn smooth by decades of weary travelers and local gossip. The Rogue Trader, shaved head, full white beard, eyes that seem to hold the glow of a distant campfire, pushes his empty Coke glass aside. He gestures to the magnificent, half-eaten Virge Burger and the pile of hand-cut fries you just bought him, then taps a long, scarred finger on the item resting between you: a soiled, reddish-brown fox tail attached to a tarnished brass chain "Much obliged for the fuel, friend. Everything has a price, and sometimes that price is just a good meal and an open ear. This little relic here? It's not worth much in coin. But the story attached to it...” He tapped a beefy finger to his temple then continued, “that’s something you can't buy." "I collected this from Jimmy years ago, right here.” He looked...

  Area 52: The Utah Desert's Deepest Secret "Forget Area 51, man. That's the old news, the tourist trap. The real secret? It's right here in our backyard, out in the deepest, loneliest stretch of the Utah desert. It's called Dugway Proving Ground, near Tooele, Utah. But the locals? They whisper it's the new home for the things the government doesn't want us to know about. They call it Area 52." The Desert's Unnatural Canvas "But it's not just the name that sets this place apart; it's what happens after the sun sets. When the darkness is so absolute it feels like velvet, that's when the real activity begins. People driving the lonely stretches of Highway 6, or those tough enough to camp out in the alkali flats, they talk about the sky being wrong. They see silent, sweeping beams of light that don't belong to any tower or search party, cutting across the basin like slow, luminous scythes. Then there are the co...

                                                         The Prom-posal on The Barrens A story of brothers uncovering deep secrets. I am The Rogue Trader. A trader in things forgotten and things feared, a chipped arrowhead, a journal bound in human skin, and stories attached. The most valuable currency, however, is often the truth hidden in plain sight. This particular story came to me attached to a rusted length of half-inch rebar, broken twisted like a snake, found years later half-buried in the clay of the Box Elder Barrens. It is the tale of two brothers, a full moon, and a proposal that was never finished. It happened on a comfortable spring night in 1988, although "comfortable" meant something different out on The Barrens. The evening sky above the Wasatch Front was a deep, velvet black, periodically swept by soft gray clouds...

The Concrete Skeleton of Box Elder County About five miles northwest of Brigham City, where the barren land meets the highway, stands a stark, monumental ruin, a towering shell of concrete and steel that refuses to be forgotten. This is the Ogden Portland Cement Plant, a silent witness to early 20th-century industry, local ambition, and eventual decline. The Foundations of Industry The story of the cement plant begins not in Ogden, but about 35 minutes north, on the desolate, forbidding ground known locally only as "The Barrens." Long before any settler claimed the area, whispers persisted among native peoples that the land was inert, shunned, and carried a chilling void, a place where horses would balk and refuse to tread, and where life itself seemed to recede, leaving behind an unnatural stillness. Yet, it was upon these seemingly worthless tracts, where the minerals lay deep and undisturbed, that ambition took root. As early as 1893, a forward-thinking man n...

  A Strange Encounter at Willow Creek A Strange encounter on a stormy fall afternoon Hello there. Sit down, make yourself comfortable. It's not often I get to tell a story like this one, not one that's meant for a cozy hearth and a warm mug. It's a bit of a departure from the usual tales of adventures and lost relics. But every man, no matter how far he roams, has a starting point. This particular story, well, it's about mine. It’s a true tale, mind you, and a bit of a strange one. I was just a boy back then, before I learned the names of the constellations and the price of a tall tell. Here it is, just as I remember it. The air had the sharp, clean scent of late autumn. It was the kind of scent that carried the promise of wood-smoke and the lingering sweetness of drying leaves, the kind that made my lungs feel full and clean with every breath. I was a young man then, just on the cusp of truly knowing the world, though I believed I already did. Donning a heavy wo...