A special issue celebrates the thousands of educators who are working to teach people about the West. But it also raises some questions: Who are they reaching and where should the lessons be learned?
Spreading the gospel
Outdoor education teaches people to know and care about the West
Climbing ban makes sense
Dear HCN, I am a long-time climber and resident of Wyoming and have worked here as a professional mountain guide for the past five years. I would like to make it known that many climbers and guides of Wyoming support the voluntary closure of climbing at Devils Tower (HCN, 4/16/96). It is unfortunate that many…
On the fate of Hanford
Dear HCN, I appreciate your Hanford issue (HCN, 1/22/96) since I was born and raised in Othello, a small town to the northeast of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Our farm, which my brother still owns, lies a little more than a mile away from the northern border. Our father was also raised nearby, on a…
Operation bullsling
The Forest Service really slung the bull this time – eight tons of it. To improve the vegetation and watershed of the Ishi Wilderness in northeastern California, agency officials strapped 13 tranquilized bulls into helicopter cargo nets and flew them out at the end of a 40-foot cable. The cattle were the last of a…
Salmon find a friend
Endangered Snake River salmon recently found a northern ally in their battle against Columbia River dams. Republican Gov. Tony Knowles of Alaska announced April 28 that his state had begun legal action to join a lawsuit brought by environmental and fishing groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service. The groups sued the agency this spring…
New life springs from tainted soil at a Denver school
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel DENVER, Colo. – Garden Place Academy stands in an aging Hispanic neighborhood, teeming with fast-food outlets and liquor stores. But inside, you wouldn’t know that an inch of top soil was removed from…
Dear Friends
They don’t know it all This issue is an exploration by Elizabeth Manning and other writers of the state of outdoor education in the West. It’s a subject some approach with awe, particularly if we’re the one who admits: “That (course, teacher, backpacking expedition, river trip) changed my life.” Perhaps because so many of us…
The best guide knows how to let go
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel Roderick Nash, author of the still-selling book, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), likes to tell people he grew up in a New York apartment staring at a brick wall. A trip to…
An unsung army of students maintains our national parks
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel After wildfires raged through Yellowstone National Park in 1988, Park Service employees were overwhelmed: Trails and bridges had to be rebuilt, campsites restored and trees planted. The magnitude of the job was depressing.…
Acting for the environment
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel A man in an old-fashioned tuxedo knocks on the door of a first-grade Seattle classroom. The teacher ushers him in and he totters across the room and groans as he settles in a…
Military in a dogfight for crowded skies
After spending three years and $1.5 million on environmental studies, the Colorado Air National Guard is once again promoting its plan to increase fighter-jet training over southeastern Colorado. Because the Guard lost some of its mock combat areas to Denver International Airport, the “weekend warriors’ say they need to make up the difference over southeastern…
The big dogs: Outward Bound and NOLS hit their thirties
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel Instructors from the National Outdoor Leadership Schools (NOLS) and Outward Bound have a running joke: “NOLS is the place where you learn to stuff everything – even your feelings – in a backpack…
Silence could be shattered by military jets
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news story, “Military in a dogfight for crowded skies.” Brother Erik’s days at the Spiritual Life Institute in Crestone, Colo., rely on peace and quiet for contemplative meditation. “We base our life on silence and solitude,” he says. He…
Tough love proves too tough
Controversial “wilderness therapy programs” come under critical scrutiny – and lawsuits – after several teenagers die while in their care.
GOP moves to rein in its rebels
Two years ago, Barbara Cubin, a first-time candidate for the House of Representatives, stocked sporting goods stores across Wyoming with pamphlets describing her opposition to the “Clinton-Babbitt War on the West.” In Idaho, another first-time candidate, Helen Chenoweth, held a pretend endangered salmon bake to show her scorn for the Endangered Species Act. Now, as…
The rise and fall of Steve Cartisano
The controversial “godfather” of wilderness therapy, has left a trail of lawsuits behind him.
Sagebrush rebels in the apple orchards
In Washington state, one county’s efforts to get state growth-management laws off its back have run aground in court, drawn the wrath of the governor and earned the scorn of environmental groups. But two of three Chelan County commissioners in central Washington like it that way. They’re betting on brinkmanship to draw attention to their…
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past…
Planning regulations bite a planning proponent
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Sagebrush rebels in the apple orchards.” Dan Evans has a problem: He wants to build a house on a five-acre, $127,250 parcel of land in western Washington’s Jefferson County, but a county zoning ordinance says a new…
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18,…
A small fish takes a big hit
The Rio Grande silvery minnow is not a glamorous fish, but it does have a claim to fame: It’s the last minnow species to survive in New Mexico’s beleaguered stretch of the Rio Grande, where every native fish is extinct or threatened with extinction. But in April, an irrigation district diverted so much water from…
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was…
Lawmakers say Colorado prisons are king
With some heavy lobbying from Governor Roy Romer, the Colorado Legislature passed a bill allowing the state Corrections Department to ignore local zoning when it wants to build or expand a prison. The legislation responds to contentious expansion plans for prisons in the rural West Slope communities of Delta and Rifle. Just days before the…
Heard around the West
The West has no shortage of strange juxtapositions: Gold prospectors and mountain bikers, Utah’s tabernacle and Nevada’s casinos, Denver International Airport and airplanes. But a new pair of strange bedfellows has recently sprung up: The Forest Service and Wal-Mart. The federal agency and the retail behemoth are going to spend the summer jointly promoting environmental…
Salvage logging rider barrels into a shy seabird’s world
Even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 3.9 million acres of land along the Oregon and Washington coast as “critical habitat” for the marbled murrelet in late April, nothing changed for the Citizens Murrelet Survey Project. The members of the Corvallis, Ore.-based group continue their routine of getting up at 4:30 a.m. and…
Hearing stories, finding family, returning home
It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she…
Getting outside all around the West
The following sidebar articles accompany this article, in a special issue about outdoor recreation: – New life springs from tainted soil at a Denver school – The best guide knows how to let go – An unsung army of students maintains our national parks – Acting for the environment – The big dogs: Outward Bound…