When photographer Kenji Kawano left his native Japan in 1973 for the United States, he had never heard the word Navajo. Twenty-two years later, the Navajo Reservation seems like home, and many of Kawano’s friends are Navajo Marines who fought against his Japanese relatives during World War II. The Navajo Marines, known as “code talkers,” […]
Elizabeth Manning
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
To save a Utah canyon, a BLM ranger quits and turns activist
Floating past cottonwood trees and tamarisk just before dusk, Skip Edwards deftly keeps his raft within earshot of ours so he can pummel us with facts about the 1964 Wilderness Act. But around the next bend, the former Bureau of Land Management river ranger falls silent and points to a massive red and orange sandstone […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
The disagreement is total
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, To save a Utah canyon, a BLM ranger quits and turns activist. When it comes to his Westwater mining claims, Ron Pene and the BLM disagree on nearly everything. To begin with, Pene believes BLM staffers overlooked man-made disturbances when they surveyed the […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Heard Around The West
Paul Rauber of the Sierra Club wrote to say “I am a great fan of “Heard Around the West.” There is, however, something that drives me crazy about it: your habit of putting random phrases into boldface… Otherwise, I love you dearly.” We hear you, Paul. — Patricia A. McColm of California’s Bay Area likes […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Fund raising in parks takes a collection box, and a lawyer
When it comes to First Amendment rights, national parks operate a lot like airports. Park officials cannot discriminate against the speaker or the message, but they do have some discretion over how, where and when the delivery is made. While most decisions are left up to the park superintendent, there are some agency-wide rules, such […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 1995: The West's fisheries spin out of control
The USDA flexes its antitrust muscle
The Farmer’s Union is not the only organization concerned about the concentration of a few companies in the meatpacking industry. The Department of Agriculture recently charged IBP Inc., one of the nation’s largest meatpackers, with breaking antitrust laws by guaranteeing higher prices to one group of Kansas feedlot operators. The same agreement was never offered […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 1995: The West's fisheries spin out of control
Heard around the West
The national forests are lands of many uses, but not all uses are created equal. Every once in a while, one use trumps another. On the Helena National Forest recently, 22 Herefords drank too deeply from an arsenic-laced tailings pond at an abandoned mine near Helena, Mont. Fearful lest the dead cows poison bears and […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Navajo Nation bails out timber mill
The Navajo Nation has fired the remaining workers at its defunct sawmill and paid $500,000 from general funds to bail out Navajo Forest Products Industry, the business it created in Navajo, N.M. Tribal leaders say they had no alternative: Defaulting on the company’s loan would have damaged the tribe’s credit rating and lost the mill […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
The road to wilderness is paved with outdoor magazines
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook. When Larry Burke first started Outside magazine, he named it after his boat Mariah, meaning “winds of change.” That was in the mid-1970s, right around the time Patagonia started making jackets out of stuff that looked […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
For guilt-free wilderness trips
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook. For guilt-free wilderness trips Leave No Trace, Inc., is a new nonprofit group that provides information about “light on the land” backcountry skills (HCN, 6/12/95). Contact the group at P.O. Box 997, Boulder, CO 80306 (303/442-8222). […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Heard around the West
Everyone agrees that environmentalism has been hit out of the ballpark by “Wise Users’ and Republicans. But no one knew why we’d whiffed until Glen Martin of the San Francisco Chronicle did an analysis. Deconstructing his article (it used to be called reading between the lines) shows that Greens spend too much time hiking and […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Nobody’s home in resort towns
Homes, not people, are populating resort towns in Colorado. The Northwest Council of Governments says that the house vacancy rate in Vail – the emptiest town in Colorado – jumped from 59 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 1994, reports the Vail/Beaver Creek Times. While vacancy rates in towns such as Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN’s tough underbelly
The first intern landed on the paper’s doorstep sometime in the mid-70s, starting a train of 117 short-timers now scattered throughout the West and beyond. The intern program came with the paper from Lander – literally. It was an intern who drove the truck from Wyoming and helped haul boxes into the cramped Paonia office. […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
New prints on wolves
New prints on wolves It’s not the O.J. trial, but for environmentalists, wolf recovery in Idaho and Yellowstone Park warrants almost as much press. Now come the books. In Wolf Wars, Hank Fischer tells the sometimes compelling, other times snoozy, inside scoop on two decades of political maneuvering that led to the release of the […]
Posted inJuly 24, 1995: Making a mountain into a starbase
Militias busting rural budgets
Officials in Darby, Mont., a town of 625 in Ravalli County, estimate that dealing with militia leader Cal Greenup and his family cost $7,000 in enforcement and legal expenses. That scuffle, along with $13,000 in legal fees spent on another anti-government resident who sued the town over a drunk driving arrest, took nearly all of […]
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
When Tuttle walks, will they listen?
Larry Tuttle, director of the nonprofit Center for Environmental Equity, left his Oregon home on May 10 to go for a walk – an 1,872 mile walk. The mileage represents Tuttle’s impetus for taking to the West’s highways – to support reform of the 1872 General Mining Law. “Pending congressional mining reform is a sham, […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
County votes to control private-land logging
Alarmed by a rancher’s plans to log trees at the top of a watershed, a southern Colorado county is drafting regulations to stop the cut and protect the area’s water supply. Costilla County in the high, cold San Luis Valley now has no control over its watershed because the high mountain tracts – considered a […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
Californians talk too much trash
As co-chairs of the Kanab (Utah) Beautification Committee, California retirees Ken and Pat Nute discovered it takes more than good intentions and a little elbow grease to clean up a town. Tact would have helped, say city council members, who voted to disband the committee in March after Ken Nute flashed photos of houses he […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
Citizen action gets results
Spurred by a Sierra Club lawsuit, Texaco has agreed to prevent further contamination of the North Platte River by its defunct oil refinery near Casper, Wyo. If the EPA and Justice Department approve the consent decree next month, Texaco must clean up the river, report monthly to the Sierra Club, and step up efforts to […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
Wyoming refuses to join rebels
When the Wyoming Outdoor Council heard that state officials planned to meet with representatives from Nevada’s rebellious Nye County, the environmental group decided that people needed to know what Wyoming was up to. Nye County, Nev., gained notoriety when Commissioner Dick Carver bulldozed his way onto federal land and the justice department filed suit against […]