There are approximately 80 places in the United States where artists of all kinds can go to compose, paint, write, sculpt and photograph. These artists’ communities, which are mostly on the coasts, accommodate about 4,000 visitors a year. If all goes well, there will soon be a new one just outside Zion National Park in […]
Ed Marston
Posted inMay 8, 2000: After the fall
Telluride’s MountainFilm
If the past is guide, the 22nd MountainFilm in Telluride this May will be more than the sum of its parts. The individual elements will be impressive – a day-long opening symposium on the Andes and miles of celluloid about nature, other cultures, and jocks playing on rocks, glaciers and rivers. But the power of […]
Posted inMay 8, 2000: After the fall
Dear Friends
Spring visitors Glen Miller, a retired geologist from Grand Junction, came by to say hello and to talk about how guilty he felt because he’d let his subscription lapse. We’re always interested in why people drop their subscriptions, but he couldn’t tell us. “It just happened,” was as close as he could come. We could […]
Posted inApril 24, 2000: At your service: Unions help some Western workers serve themselves
Yes, we need the rural West
Note: this article accompanies another article in this issue, “Do we really need the rural West?“ Hal Rothman is normally a very cool guy – a history professor fascinated by the culture and economy of his hometown of Las Vegas. But he recently went to a conference about the rural Northern Rockies, and after sitting […]
Posted inApril 24, 2000: At your service: Unions help some Western workers serve themselves
An unruly river
In Rivers of Empire, historian Donald Worster argued that the West’s dams and irrigation systems and hydroelectric facilities were imposed on the region by an all-powerful water elite. The elite built a hydraulic empire, which thwarts democracy and subjects most of us to a peasant existence. Now comes historian Robert Kelley Schneiders with a different […]
Posted inApril 10, 2000: Beyond the Revolution
Beyond the Revolution
The struggle for the public lands is ending. Now what happens? Will the Interior West remain a rogue region, or will it choose to rejoin America?
Posted inApril 10, 2000: Beyond the Revolution
Dear Friends
Interns go far Sometimes we think the most important thing High Country News does is provide a way station for interns. For most of them, it’s a stop after college and a series of less-than-satisfying jobs, before they decide what they will ultimately do. We had this thought most recently at the March meeting of […]
Posted inApril 10, 2000: Beyond the Revolution
An industry booster becomes a supporter of Western land
There is nothing remotely radical about Alvin M. Josephy Jr., or if there is, he hides it in his memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon. There was a comfortable childhood in Manhattan; well-to-do relatives like his uncle, the founder of the firm that published this book; a couple of years at Harvard, until his father’s financial […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
Dear Friends
Reaching out Chris Setti’s work is a lot like that done by High Country News. He attempts to cover about 600,000 square miles of the West (Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming) with a few hundred square miles of resources. So when he stopped by our office a few weeks ago, we […]
Posted inMay 8, 2000: After the fall
A new day
Note: this front-page editor’s note introduces this issue’s feature story, “After the fall.” The “giant sucking sound” that presidential candidate H. Ross Perot described in his 1992 campaign can be heard today in the Northern Rockies, where the major timber companies are about done liquidating their private land and are busily moving cash, jobs and […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
Dear Friends
For the record In the gentlest way, J. Robb Brady, former editor of the Idaho Falls Post Register, corrects a statement in our front-page coverage of breaching dams on the Lower Snake River (HCN, 12/20/99: Unleashing the Snake). Paul Larmer had written that the Idaho Statesman had been the first newspaper to advocate breaching the […]
Posted inFebruary 14, 2000: Land of the fee
Dear Friends
In a union town It was probably the wrong place to hold the annual High Country Foundation budget meeting, if only because it led to so many bad jokes about balancing the budget at the craps table. Nevertheless, approximately 25 board members and staff of this organization converged on the San Remo Hotel, just off […]
Posted inJanuary 31, 2000: Searching for pasture
Dear Friends
It’s not easy It’s not easy to move a pile of radioactive rock that sprawls across the equivalent of 118 football fields in the floodplain of the Colorado River (HCN, 5/26/97). Not easy, but possible, as Bill Hedden of Castle Valley, Utah, has just shown (see page 4). Hedden, who is Utah Conservation Director for […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Dear Friends
A first If you wait long enough, 15 minutes of fame comes to every person and place. Paonia, Colo.’s, came in Nov. 22, when the nation’s most highbrow magazine finally got around to featuring this small town. The recognition is long overdue. Even though The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, was born just over the […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
A new road for the public lands
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature story. In early October, President Clinton visited the Washington and Jefferson National Forest. From that green pulpit, he asked us to tell him how to manage 40 million to 60 million acres of roadless national forest land: Do we want the clean water they produce, the wildlife […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
Dear Friends
Signed, sealed and (maybe) delivered The staff at High Country News does the trivial part of producing a newspaper: We contact writers and photographers, we edit, we lay out, we haul the papers back from the printer, we slap on 21,000-plus address labels, and then we truck the ton or so of forest product over […]
Posted inOctober 25, 1999: Monumental chaos
Living in the outdoors
Wilderness Guide, by Mark Harvey, Simon and Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020; paper, illustrated, $15. This starting-from-scratch revision of The National Outdoor Leadership School’s Wilderness Guide will tell you what to wear, how to navigate, and how to get across streams and scree fields in the backcountry. It will give […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Dear Friends
The Research Fund High Country News is a hybrid – partly a creature of the marketplace and partly a nonprofit organization. The price of a subscription pays for our basic needs, but it is tax-deductible contributions to the Research Fund that put words on the paper, voices on the air, and electronic images at www.hcn.org. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
A rare vote on water
For decades, water conservancy districts across the West have been shielded from the ballot box. Almost always, judges or governors appoint the board members, who have the power to levy taxes. This summer, for only the second time in 62 years, voters in Colorado had the chance to elect board members to a water district. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
A gem of a park
Great Basin National Park is a modest gem. Set in Nevada, within a stone’s throw of Utah, deep in the stillness of the Great Basin, the park was formed out of other public land in 1986. Like many parks, it was the child of compromise: Cattle were permitted to continue to graze the alpine meadows […]