Tony the workhorse This paper depends on its readers and financial supporters, but above all it depends on people who hold down demanding full-time jobs and yet still find time to do little things, like writing huge chunks of High Country News. Over the years, reporter Tony Davis has been first among this group of […]
Ed Marston
Posted inDecember 7, 1998: Vail and the road to a recreational empire
A paradise resettled and a community lost
In 1974, when Peter and Deedee Decker bought a rundown, 600-acre ranch six miles from the small, doomed, also rundown town of Ridgway, Colo. (the Bureau of Reclamation planned to bury it under a reservoir, but later relented), it was nowheresville. Despite the San Juan Mountains, which loom up almost as abruptly and beautifully as […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
Dear Friends
It’s in the mail Forgive us if we sound dramatic. But this fall, as every fall, subscribers will make a life or death decision about High Country News. The decision will be whether to contribute to the paper’s Research Fund. The letter asking for your support will tell you that without the Research Fund, there […]
Posted inAugust 31, 1998: Excavating Ecotopia
Musings on the Big Sky
MUSINGS ON THE BIG SKY From several hundred miles away, Montana is a place of contradictions: occupied by people who deeply love the land and the rivers that run through it, except when they are voting by a lop-sided majority to turn those rivers into toxic, metal-laden sewers. Now comes John B. Wright with 10 […]
Posted inAugust 31, 1998: Excavating Ecotopia
How the Canyon Became Grand
Stephen Pyne, who is best known as an historian of fire, has written an audacious book which shows how, for a few wonderful decades in the 19th century, the Grand Canyon stood near the center of the intellectual development of the Western world. During those years, the Canyon was, all in one, the Hubble Telescope, […]
Posted inAugust 3, 1998: Tribes reclaim stolen lands
Not boring, not befuddling
Somewhere there is a school that teaches those who work for government agencies and environmental groups to write press releases. The school’s core curriculum consists of courses in Boasting in Print and Bad Writing; it also offers seminars in Boring and Befuddling the Reader, Grazing the Truth, and Tunnel Vision. Even in peacetime, those who […]
Posted inAugust 3, 1998: Tribes reclaim stolen lands
Dear Friends
Call for water If you called the Paonia office in mid-July to order five copies of HCN’s collection of water articles, Water in the West, please call again. We have the soft-bound collection of articles and the back issues you also asked for all packed. But we don’t have your name and address. We apologize […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Dear Friends
Skipping an issue … There will be no July 20, 1998, issue of High Country News. Twice a year, HCN skips an issue so that staff can skip town, or at least avoid the office. The next issue will be dated Aug. 3, 1998. A day in the life … It is the week before […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Dear Friends
A “genius” in Arizona Composers, artists, writers and historians have all won those coveted John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius’ grants, but Bill McDonald, 46, is the first rancher to receive a hefty $285,000 for his efforts to preserve huge stretches of undeveloped land in southern Arizona. McDonald, along with other ranchers, such as […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
A lively memoir out of the National Park Service
For a variety of reasons, I have been reading about the National Park Service – reports, histories, and bilious (but also far-seeing) polemics like Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone. They’re useful but tend to be lifeless. Now we have a restorative potion to go with the reports and histories: a book that breathes life […]
Posted inJune 8, 1998: Don't fence me in
Dear Friends
Celebrating the high life Mountain men had their rendezvous; today’s lovers of adventure in wild country have the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival. Film is the draw, but many come for the company available at this most intimate of festivals. Mountaineer legends and environmental heroes like Paul Watson, Bradford and Barbara Washburn, Paul Petzoldt and Galen Rowell […]
Posted inMay 25, 1998: Tackling tamarisk
Dear Friends
Salt Lake City potluck The High Country News staff and board will converge on Salt Lake City Saturday, June 6, to hold a potluck. These HCN events are held three times a year around the region; they are long on good food and good conversation and vanishingly short on ceremony and speeches. This one will […]
Posted inMay 11, 1998: The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
In February, High Country News asked readers to send in samples of newsletters published by grassroots environmental groups. I asked people to send in those newsletters without any clear idea of what I would do with them. And even after 70 individual newsletters had arrived, I still didn’t know what to make of them, except […]
Posted inMay 11, 1998: The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
A fiery Wyoming newspaper pursues the state’s fat cats
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If you weren’t around in 1970, when Tom Bell founded the scrappy High Country News in Lander, Wyo., you can catch a late 1990s reincarnation by reading the Grassroots Advocate, published by John Jolley out of Casper, Wyo. Bell in the early 1970s was […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
The old West is going under
Note: this front-page editor’s note introduces this issue’s three feature articles. Think of this as a deathwatch issue, in which we hover around the bed of the extractive West, some of us administering CPR, some of us trying to yank the creature off life support so it can die a quicker death, and some of […]
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
Dear Friends
Questions and visitors Gregory Reis of Lee Vining, Calif., writes that he was in a plane flying near New Mexico’s Aztec Ruins National Monument when he saw mysterious “rectangular cleared areas all over the place.” What might they be? he asked us. Intern JT Thomas called around until he found Rich Simmons, a staffer with […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Dear Friends
A class act Circulation staffer Kathy Martinez recently traveled to Las Vegas to attend the USPS National Postal Forum; there she learned that HCN is a very small fish in a very large ocean. According to Kathy, “When I told one postal official how much we spend on postage a year, she just turned away […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Note: this front-page editor’s note introduces this issue’s feature story. If Salt Lake City were held to the same standards as cigarette manufacturers, there would be warning signs on its inbound roads: “Chaos Ahead!” and “Allow yourself an extra four hours!” Residents joke that the fastest way to get from suburban Salt Lake to the […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Show me the science
It was the 1960s, and the signs plastered everywhere in western Colorado suggested that I “Ask a Friendly Native.” The “natives” were not the Utes – they were long gone. The signs referred to the Anglos who ran the gas stations and cafes scattered across the region’s 30,000 square miles of desert, forest and canyon. […]
Posted inMarch 2, 1998: Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
Dear Friends
Old and Older Aspen Although Aspen has become mythic as a place where great wealth collides with glamour and fame (and occasionally with trees), beneath the hoopla there beats the heart of a small Western town. That town was on display Jan. 31, when Aspen honored its own: environmentalist Joy Caudill, architect Sam Caudill, ski […]