Steve Nash was chosen as this year’s most valuable player in the National Basketball Association, and other than that he grew up in British Columbia and now plays for the Phoenix Suns, you might ask what this has to do with the West. A fair question, and one I will get to. Nash is a […]
Allen Best
Posted inWotr
Ski areas must move to end white on white
It certainly isn’t obvious when you arrive at a ski resort in the West, but nearly all are located primarily on publicly owned lands. It is, to use the U.S. Forest Service’s pet phrase, a “partnership.” The federal government provides most of the land; the ski area operators run the lifts and cafeterias. In theory, […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Glaciers offer a glimpse of the distant past
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Written in the Rings.” Inside one particular warehouse in suburban Denver, it feels like Antarctica. In a sense, it is. Within the cavernous walls of polystyrene foam lies an 80,000-cubic-foot deep freeze, filled with columns of ice: a few from Wyoming’s Wind River Range, […]
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Nostalgia for Colorado’s past isn’t what it used to be
A wave of yearning for “Colorado as it used to be” has been sweeping the state and I suspect much of the West. It’s almost enough to make you wish for a time machine. If only the past were as wonderful as we think it was. This nostalgic, backward-looking pose is particularly evident in the […]
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How a resort town loses its soul
If not paradise, Aspen during the summer comes close. The mountains are dazzling, the gussied-up Victorian homes beguiling. The musical menu is rich, and a Nobel or Pulitzer prize-winner lectures nearly every evening. Everywhere are trails. It’s a heaven for tourists. But Aspen is no longer a tourist town in the conventional sense. A new […]
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Here come the wolves
Wolves are once again loping through Colorado and Utah, and I suppose I should be glad. More rapidly than it took to wipe out grizzlies, lynx and other competitor species, wolves are returning to the ark of the Southern Rockies ecosystem. But yet I pause, and an absorbing four-minute film I saw recently gets at […]
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Reflections on small towns after a bulldozer rampage
To many of us who know Granby, Colo., or even mountain towns in general, the bizarre explosion last week — a man armoring his bulldozer, mowing down buildings and then shooting himself — was surprising. The explosion itself was not. Some people say they expect violence in cities and not in little towns. But mountain […]
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Stopping by a truck on a snowy road
It seems to me that the rural West has two types of people: those who believe internal combustion engines are the answer to everything, and those who don’t. Few dirt bikers ride mountain bikes, and seldom do you find cross-country skiers hopping on snowmobiles. We’re usually in one camp or the other. Or you could […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2004: The New Water Czars
The de-icer that tames Western roads
Dumping magnesium chloride on winter roads keeps the traffic moving — but how safe is the stuff?
Posted inMarch 1, 2004: The Last Open Range
Ski areas get greener
Western ski areas got their best grades yet in the 2003-2004 Ski Area Environmental Scorecard — but they weren’t spectacular. The median score for the 76 ski areas, graded by the Ski Area Citizens’ Coalition, was a C+. Tops were Colorado’s Aspen (93.9) and Buttermilk (93.3), which earned high marks for being environmentally conscious. Vail […]
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Colorado needs to break its cigarette habit
To stanch the state’s financial bleeding, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens wants to get a quick hit of $800 million owed by Big Tobacco instead of stretching out annual payments for a total of $2.1 billion. Meanwhile, money for anti-smoking programs remains in limbo. This is, at the least, a curious moral dilemma. Colorado is getting […]
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Colorado’s thirsty suburbs get the state into trouble
Denver’s southern suburbs have a rich, new-car smell. Emboldened by information-technology employers, Douglas County during the ‘90s was the nation’s fastest-growing county. It also ranked among the nation’s elite in per capita income, education and other measures of affluence. In short, this region of sleek and slinky subdivisions looks and feels an awful lot like […]
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Kobe Bryant bumps up against a small Western town
The week that the national media descended on Eagle, Colo., the lead story in the local newspaper was about a new swimming pool. The arrest of Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star, was noted on page 7, but not that Bryant’s 19-year-old accuser was a local woman. Eagle, located 30 miles from Vail […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Once touched by drought, you never forget
From the mothers of my family, I learned about poverty and drought, experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. When I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one day from Nebraska toward my grandparents’ farm. She had not, she announced later, seen […]
Posted inWotr
Once touched by drought, you never forget
From the mothers in my family I learned what poverty and drought were like during the 1930s. To them, these were experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. Not quite 30 years later, when I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Love and loathing on the interstate highways
At a conference several years ago, we were given crayons and sheets of white paper and asked to draw our visions of utopia. This was in the West, so of course a great many rustic cabins in meadows far removed from civilization were sketched onto these sheets. Not mine. Yes, of course, I had hills […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2002: The Royal Squeeze
Drought unearths a water dinosaur
Colorado’s Front Range reaches for a share of the Colorado River
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
How does snow melt? A test for all Westerners
“You can’t be a sissy and live in this country,” the old rancher told me, his German accent evident despite his being native to this mountain valley. “Or at least you didn’t use to,” he added, looking me in the eye. It was the 1970s, and I was new to the Interior West. The rancher […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Biologists caught in the crosshairs
WASHINGTON In December, headline writers were delighted by the metastasizing controversy over samples of lynx fur, purportedly collected from two national forests in Washington state. “Fur furor,” one paper called it. “Fur flies,” wrote another. Government agencies, though, found the fracas far from funny. Seven wildlife biologists, both federal and state, submitted hair samples to […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
A monorail for the mountains?
Colorado considers a space-age alternative to asphalt