The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation may be in terminal decline, but its spirit lives on over at the Federal Highway Administration. The FHA recently rebuilt Highway 9, from Murray, Idaho, to Thompson Falls, Mont., and the new road is so high and so water-resistant that during wet periods it backs water into Murray, population 63, […]
Ed Marston
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
What happens when “True Grit” meets “Easy Rider’
Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1996, University of New Mexico Press, 416 pages, $35. Lois Palken Rudnick’s Utopian Vistas is almost enough to send me back to my native New York. But it’s probably too late. After more than two decades here, I’m unlikely to […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Heard around the West
Vail Resorts Inc. should be on top of the world. The already enormous ski area is about to swallow the Breckenridge and Keystone ski areas, making it gargantuan. And Vail president Adam Aron is not just a formidable businessman but also something of a wizard with words. The former cruise-line president recently “mused aloud” to […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Heard around the West
When we saw a copy of the Boobyprise out of Cody, Wyo., we thought: “That’s it! This endangered species stuff has gone too far.” For there was a photo of a flying dinosaur carrying off a human being. Worse than the photo was the headline – “Dinosaur reintroduction in Yellowstone Park has gone better than […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 1996: Last line of defense: Civil disobedience and protest slow down 'lawless logging'
Heard around the West
In an attempt to keep a tragedy in perspective, one small-town editor is said to have written the following lead paragraph: “While 200 students studied quietly at their desks, Johnny Jones threw principal Bob Smith out of his fourth-floor office window.” A similar lead out of Steamboat Springs, Colo., in early August might have read: […]
Posted inAugust 5, 1996: Disappearing railroad blues
A radical water czar is cashiered by his board
It is not on quite the scale as the 1989 defeat of Denver’s $1 billion Two Forks Dam, but it is worth a mention. On July 16, the Colorado River Water Conservation District board fired its secretary-engineer, Rolly Fischer, after 28 years on the job. Fischer was fired – officially he resigned – in large […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Bringing back grizzlies splits environmentalists
Note: this article is one of several feature stories in a special issue about collaboration in the West. It seems a deal made in heaven. The timber industry in the Northern Rockies and two major environmental groups have agreed to back the restoring of grizzly bears to central Idaho and western Montana. The proposal is […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Experts line up on all sides of the tree-grass debate
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead If only Sid Goodloe had confined himself to his six or so square miles of private property. Then his would be a straightforward story about the rejuvenation of a piece of exhausted land. But Goodloe doesn’t stop at […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Stephen Pyne
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “As I read the record, there were grasses everywhere in the Southwest linking all its different environments. Even ponderosa pine was more of a savanna than a forest. The grass provided the interstitial medium, and that’s what carried […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Sid Goodloe
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “Allan Savory said it best when he said we’re grass farmers and not animal ranchers. But I would say that much more emphasis has been put on breeding animals than on proper care of the range. Ranchers are […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
For further reading
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Princeton University Press, 1982. World Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Holt and Co., 1995 New Mexico Vegetation: Past, Present and Future, William A. […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Raising a ranch from the dead
For almost four years I have been biting down on Sid Goodloe’s story as though it were a suspicious gold coin. I have also been telling bits and pieces of it to audiences, testing ideas I wasn’t ready to put on paper. Putting it on paper meant confronting the audacity and complexity of Goodloe’s story, […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Monoculture meets its match in North Dakota
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Carrington, N.D. – Half of all North Dakotans huddle in the fertile, prosperous Red River Valley, a stone’s throw from Minnesota. But John Gardner happily does his agricultural research in central North […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Tactics first, ideas last
Back when I was a college sophomore, a disillusioned freshman wrote to the campus newspaper: “It seems to me that this college is all about what’s going to be on the test and whether the professor is a hard grader. Where are the ideas and the passion?” He didn’t get ideas, but he did get […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
Dear Friends
Corrections and emendations We apologize for garbling names in our coverage of the Adam’s Rib ski resort battle in Colorado (HCN, 2/19/96). Bud Gates, not Bud Grant, is the Eagle County commissioner; Kathy Heicher, with a K, is on the Eagle County planning commission, and Kathleen Forinash, not Forinesh, is the county’s director of health […]
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 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe’s boom goes flat. “The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him.” – Retired East Coast businessman It took several years for […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Heard around the West
A man living near Red Lodge, Mont., not that far from Yellowstone National Park, was heading home with a “Road Kill” hot pizza loaded with plenty of extra meat and cheese when he saw what looked like a wolf. So he did what anyone would do: stopped and fed the animal a few slices of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Dear friends
Thanks, Colorado Springs Colorado Springs is best known as the home of Fort Carson, the “Star Wars” missile defense, Focus on the Family and assorted “patriots.” But the board and staff of High Country News discovered another side to the town: a spirited environmental community that turned out in force for the potluck following our […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A few modest principles to help us manage Utah’s public lands
It wasn’t every day that I got to speak at a chamber of commerce meeting, so I tried to be careful. But I must have shown a bit too much green or too many urban mannerisms, and one member of the audience came rushing over almost before I’d stopped talking. In seconds we were going […]