When I was a kid in the 1970s and early ’80s, much of the landscape I called “home” was rural. Open space was always nearby, even if you lived in downtown Salt Lake City, and out on the edges of the valley where my family was located, there were far more hay fields than housing developments. It was a comfortable, worn-in landscape that soothed the eye and fit the body like a really old pair of jeans.

Everything started to change in the mid ’80s, when a few subdivisions sprang up in the pastures of retiring farmers whose children didn’t want to continue working the land. These were followed by a shopping center or two, and then a couple of new stop lights to handle the increased car traffic. No big deal, it seemed… there were still plenty of fields, and the sweet smell of alfalfa in the air, and the same old dirt roads and open irrigation ditches and sluggish canals there had always been. But change was coming. These small building projects were, in fact, the beginning of a massive and uncontrollable chain reaction, like the first couple of flying neutrons that lead to a full-scale nuclear blast.

Before we long-time residents of the valley realized what was happening, the valley we’d always known was gone, replaced by an endless backdrop of suburban tract houses, WalMarts, fast-food outlets, and high schools the size of shopping malls. This new landscape is raw and ugly, geometric, all glaring reflections and sharp edges; it hasn’t been here long enough for the weather to soften it into something more pleasing. It is a strange and alien place that doesn’t offer much comfort for those who remember something different.

The real hell of it is that by the time anyone realized what was happening, it was already too late. All that we who loved the old valley could do was stand and watch the ship go down. No one had thought to save any of the things that really mattered, and so we have nothing left. Like the song says, we didn’t know what we had until it was gone; we paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

For a brief window of time, however, there were still places you could go where the chain reaction hadn’t yet reached critical mass, places where the changes were coming more slowly. One of these was Park City, an old silver-mining-town-turned-ski-resort located in the mountains above SLC. I started going to Park City for outdoor concerts and the town’s annual Arts Festival. I kept going there because it was a place that felt like my old home: isolated, stubbornly undeveloped, and a welcome respite from suburbia. But no place remains safe from developers for long, and now even the Park City I fell in love with has been Stepfordized into a sprawling maze of mini-mansions (and genuine mansions, too) owned by those lucky few who can afford to live in Utah’s version of Aspen. Every time I’ve driven up there in recent years, I’ve seen stores and condos creeping closer and closer to the aging remnants of the Park City that was, and I have despaired that everything I loved about that place was doomed to vanish, too.

This morning, I read something in the Tribune that offset some of the bad feelings I have about the development in that area. It seems that the Hi Ute Ranch, a familiar landmark about a mile from the Kimball Junction/Park City freeway exit, has been placed into a “conservation easement” that will permanently preserve some 200 acres of pastures as well as a wonderful old barn. This is a fairly small gesture, a battle won in a war that was lost a decade ago, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.