People put a lot of strange things in their yards: plastic pink flamingoes, ceramic garden gnomes, even giant plaster dinosaurs. But in the Intermountain West, we tend to go for something a bit more ...

Salvage yard, junk yard, scrap yard, recycling center—what you call it likely has some bearing on how you view these places filled with society’s unwanted detritus. But to me, “That which we call a ...