Bob Rawlings, publisher of the Pueblo Chieftain, has battled for decades to bring water to southeastern Colorado and, once it’s there, to keep it no matter what. Also, sodbusting farmers plow up the Northern Plains prairie, saving a rare Oregon ponderosa pine, healing art on the Navajo Nation, finding the Old Spanish Trail, and more.
Following the Old Spanish Trail across the Southwest
In his search for the routes used by the West’s early travelers, archaeologist Jack Pfertsh has become a detective of detritus. Today he’s on the hunt for old tin cans and fragments of purple and green glass. The mid-November sun is sinking as we walk the windswept land just north of Delta, Colo. Brown grasses…
Traveling Arizona Highways, in your dreams and on the ground
Even as a kid, I recognized an obsession when I saw one. My father’s began late in the Eisenhower years when he got his first subscription to Arizona Highways. A rural route mailman in northern Illinois, he used to rise at 4 a.m. and be home by 1 p.m. As soon as each month’s issue…
Loggers give unique Oregon ponderosa pine a lifeline
On a gray February afternoon, rain falls in huge drops on Chuck Volz’s 65-acre property near Springfield, Ore. It drips from the brim of his faded camouflage baseball cap and rolls off his tan jacket as he walks down a muddy path crisscrossed by deer hoofprints. He stops at a young ponderosa pine and frowns:…
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West…
Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make…
A scrappy community ski hill hangs on in Colorado
In the one-room warming hut at the base of the Lake City Ski Hill, Betty Lou Blodgett serves hot cocoa to kids in no need of a sugar high. She mans the hut alone, maintaining a loose sense of order while selling lift tickets and doling out rental gear. A big barrel woodstove blazes while…
HCN takes a spring break
In mid-March, as spring starts to sneak back to our hometown of Paonia, Colo., the HCN crew will be taking one of our four annual publishing breaks. Look for the next issue to hit your mailbox around April 16. ALL THINGS DIGITALAs an HCN subscriber, you get free access to all content on our website,…
Limbaugh of the Left?
I read HCN religiously and hold it out to my right-wing friends as a source that can be trusted to present a Western perspective. But this lead story was flabbergasting (HCN, 2/20/12, “Extreme Arizona”). I felt like I was listening to a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh. As a third-generation native Arizonan who lives two…
Requiem for Arizona
Better access to mental health care in Arizona is an admirable goal, but it will do little to mitigate the madness of 6.5 million people trying to hustle a living in a nearly waterless state (HCN, 2/20/12, “Extreme Arizona”). I grew up in Arizona in the 1950s, when it was a much more livable place.…
Scars of an unfinished ski area
South of Missoula, Mont., there’s an intriguing albeit unnatural landscape feature. Nine years ago, Tom Maclay cut 30 ski runs through his 2,900-acre family ranch, pursuing his vision of a ski resort on Lolo Peak. His proposed Bitterroot Resort resembled other popular ski ventures — an all-season, upscale residential village augmented by shopping, restaurants, a…
Sodbusting farmers plow up the Northern Plains prairie
Updated April 17, 2012 Last November, University of Wyoming economist Ben Rashford traveled across North Dakota to see the area’s famed prairie pothole region, a patchwork of wetlands and grass running from Iowa up through the Dakotas into eastern Montana. He rode with a member of the conservation group Ducks Unlimited, who showed him the…
Stroke of insight: A review of Before the End, After the Beginning
Before the End, After the BeginningDagoberto Gilb194 pages, hardcover: $24.Grove Press, 2011. Before the End, After the Beginning, Dagoberto Gilb’s remarkable new fiction collection, begins with an arresting story written in lowercase letters, titled “please, thank you.” The reason becomes clear when a nurse reminds the narrator that he’s suffered a stroke, much as Gilb…
Watershed investments
National forest lands are the headwaters of some of our most coveted river systems and provide water for a range of uses (HCN, 2/20/12, “Trickle-down economics”). In the West, we rely on national forests to supply over half of our water. Climate change is increasing pressure on these water resources. The resulting threats — insect…
Colorado’s only full-time water reporter
In 2004, Pueblo Chieftain publisher Bob Rawlings, assisted by his daughter, Jane, was running full-throated editorials against water transfers and occasionally making news himself. The not-exactly-impartial coverage of the controversy bothered Chris Woodka, then a managing editor. So he asked to be assigned to the water beat. “I said, ‘OK: I’m going to do it…
What describes us doesn’t define us
Tom Zoellner has some great points about how Arizona fails the mentally ill, but I take issue with his assertion that Tucson neighborhoods are among the “coldest and most distant,” implying that we’re a hollow community and partially to blame for Gabby Giffords’ shooting (HCN, 2/20/12, “Extreme Arizona”). Zoellner says that he can attest to…
Colorado water diversions, urban and rural
I was born in Boulder, Colo., just long enough ago to witness the merging of the state’s Front Range communities into a megalopolis at the eastern foot of the Rockies. In my early 20s, I moved to the more sparsely populated Western Slope, spending time in Gothic, Leadville and Aspen before finally ending up in…
Falling to pieces
I’ve lived in Tucson for more than 30 years and I have mourned the steady erosion of social cohesion, the death of the village that raises the child (HCN, 2/20/12, “Extreme Arizona”). Whether due to a transient population only invested in selfish seasonal pleasure, or to rugged land and a challenging climate, to dry air…
Generosity of voice and heart: A review of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest TrailCheryl Strayed336 pages, hardcover: $25.95. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. A well-worn hiking boot dominates the cover of Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail. It’s a striking symbol of tenacity and a visual reminder of how travelers braving the…