Mountain guide Forrest McCarthy told us he had learned a valuable lesson recently: Assume nothing – absolutely nothing. He learned that while leading a couple up a mountain in Grand Teton National Park. The range, he told them, is a 40-mile-long block fault into which glaciers, over the eons, had carved the mountain peaks above […]
Betsy Marston
Posted inAugust 19, 1996: Western voices
The artist
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: A new breed of artists depicts Montana – cyanide leach fields and all When artist Dana Boussard looks out the window of her studio on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, she still sees a few bison — animals that numbered in the […]
Posted inAugust 5, 1996: Disappearing railroad blues
Dear friends
Curiosity about consensus Perhaps feeling angry or resentful takes more work than cooperation, or maybe it’s the habit of perceiving people as black hats or white hats that eventually seems old hat. In any case, we’ve had so many requests for our special issue May 13 on consensus (-Howdy, neighbor!: As a last resort, Westerners […]
Posted inJuly 22, 1996: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
Heard around the West
As people like you and me swarm through the West’s national parks and forests, transmuting into that dreaded specimen, the summer tourist, agency staffers resort to trading quotes by e-mail to make the hot, hectic days pass more pleasantly. We are deliciously quotable because we are uninformed, stubborn, and we lie a lot. Darryl Stone, […]
Posted inJuly 22, 1996: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
Dear friends
Back with a bang Staff is back on the job, returning just in time for the 4th of July parade up Paonia’s Grand Avenue, an event which usually requires 30 minutes, tops. This time it took an hour for more than 100 entries to pass, what with past Cherry Days queens representing five decades, Shriners, […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Dear friends
We brake for summer We skip the next issue of High Country News because, we like to joke, everyone needs a chance to catch up on their HCN reading. Some of us here will hike, bike or cheer for kids at summer baseball games, others will head for “meditation camp” in New Mexico, and all […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
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 […]
Posted inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
Dear Friends
Woe is Montana Poor Montana. And we aren’t even counting the Freemen extortionists who won’t come out of their rooms. No, the latest slam against the “last best place” comes from a grumpy editor of the (need we say powerful?) New York Times Magazine. James Atlas’ family vacation near Yellowstone and Glacier national parks was […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Dear Friends
Going with the flow Locally, things are hopping. A cold snap wiped out up to half the fruit crop, and police say a “little old lady” mistook where the reverse gear was and plowed into the Paonia Post Office, demolishing three newspaper stands and a concrete wall. Both events were not novel. Fruitgrowers have always […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Dear Friends
A confusing season We realize it’s spring when an April day combines snow flurries, afternoon rain and thunder, intermittent sun and evening temperatures in the twenties. And the next morning the grass grows even greener. On this town’s main street the look of the season is layered with the one constant: muddy boots, for this […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Dear Friends
Hello, uh, fire department Pastures smudged with black ash, fast-rising billows of smoke visible from miles away, these are the signs that signal spring in this medium-altitude (5,600 feet) mountain valley. “Burning ditch” is an annual rite here, followed in more than a few instances by emergency calls to a town’s volunteer fire department (-Come […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Dear friends
They have our thanks Boise, Idaho, resident Kay Hummel sent us a note one night because she was too excited to sleep. She said she and close to 200 people had just attended a tribute to three of Idaho’s environmental heroes, and the feelings generated at the event Feb. 24 were still warm. Those honored […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Dear Friends
Spring interns The last time Michelle McClellan was in Colorado, she woke up in a pasture near Rocky Mountain National Park to a bellowing herd of cows trying to maneuver around her tent. Her reception in Paonia has been far less hectic, she reports. Michelle grew up in Kirkland, a city of 40,000 close to […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Heard around the West
Television has brought its own set of icons into our world: O.J. as hero, O.J. as anti-hero; the Super Bowl as football game, the Super Bowl as cultural landmark. And for the first time this year, the Super Bowl as intergenerational Navajo entertainment. Ernie Manuelito of KTNN, the tribe’s 50,000-watt radio station, provided a play-by-play […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Dear friends
A man of words From a cabin in Wyoming, C.L. Rawlins has served as the (mostly) unpaid poetry editor for this paper for 14 years. Now, he wants to call it quits since “editing for non-publication doesn’t appeal.” It’s true we have printed far less poetry than, say, a decade ago, mainly because we tend […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Bird Brains
-If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” * Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, c. 1880s Like coyotes, some members of the crow family have long been considered vermin. Scruffy crows steal crops; ravens rip into garbage; magpies and jays steal eggs and nestlings from “innocent” […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Dear Friends
Utah in the news Staff is still exhausted thinking about the trials of Utah Republican Rep. Enid Waldholtz. Her tears flowed copiously for almost five hours two weeks ago while she told the nation she was financially deceived by her husband. Retiring Democrat Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado minced no words in giving Waldholtz advice: […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Dear friends
Deep in the banana belt Sunny, still weather has persisted here into December, and at the Diner coffee shop on Grand Avenue, talk turns inevitably toward fear of drought. The West Elk Mountains, our backyard hills, look merely dusted with snow, and old-timers say this is shaping up as an “open winter.” Not to borrow […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Dear Friends
Hello, hello? We’re still not used to the sudden disappearance of staffers at the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service. Humans all over the West once answered our annoying and time-consuming questions; now recordings announce: “Sorry, due to a lack of budget appropriations, this office is closed.” Then a Denver Post story Nov. 16 […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Dear friends
Pear wars We’re not sure how to describe the $5 “Pear Insurance Contract” High Country News just signed. But two Paonia High School students assured us that after the “time of combat,” which in the past has meant teenagers gathering at night to hurl fruit at each other, “all you need to do is let […]