The rugged Old West meets New West in a tiny Wyoming town.
Marcia Hensley
Posted inArticles
On becoming reacquainted with sandhill cranes
I’m on my way south to chase the first harbingers of spring in our High Plains desert home.
Posted inArticles
Why Jim Unger came West: a Yellowstone love affair
There are tourists, and then there’s Jim Unger, a Pennsylvania resident who headed out this summer on his 41st pilgrimage to some of the places that have become his second home — the national parks, monuments and historic sites of the West. It all started in 1971, when Jim and his wife, Sandy, both elementary […]
Posted inApril 27, 2015: Lost frontier
Wyoming tough?
A recent article in Time magazine reported that the best place to be an old person is a city, primarily because of easy access to health care. If Time’s experts on aging are correct, those of us who choose to live in remote Western places will feel increasing pressure to urbanize, abandoning the landscapes that […]
Posted inArticles
Pioneer women get the Hollywood treatment
Did any Western history buffs besides me see The Homesman? A hot box office ticket earlier this winter, it’s hard to find in theaters now, though the cast was impressive — Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Meryl Streep — and most reviews were positive. Three pioneer wives have gone crazy in a small Nebraska community, […]
Posted inWotr
Chosen by Wyoming
Good friends recently sold their home in Wyoming, packed up and moved to Florida. Even though they’d met in Wyoming and married in view of the Wind River Mountains, where they loved to hike and ski, and even though they often spoke of their affection for the West’s open spaces, within months they were gone. […]
Posted inWotr
Dust off your survival skills
These are good days for survivalists, those dour predictors of dire times who’ve said all along that we’d better prepare for the worst. With people losing jobs, homes and life savings through no fault of their own, and with natural disasters, oil shortages and terrorists in the news, those long-predicted grim times may have arrived. […]
Posted inApril 2, 2007: Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields
The single women who homesteaded the West
Thanks to Western movies and popular novels, stereotypes come easily to mind when you think of women of the early West. There’s the saint in the sunbonnet, the soiled dove, the schoolmarm and the rancher’s daughter. Or maybe you remember dramatic figures like the Lewis and Clark guide Sacajawea, or Calamity Jane of the perfect […]
Posted inWotr
The single women who homesteaded the West
The women who settled in the Old West defy stereotypes.
Posted inWotr
Camping: We get grimy, look funky and love it
“What a hassle,” my husband complains as he wedges the camping table into the overloaded bed of our pickup truck. “You know, we’re going to spend less time in the mountains than we spent packing all this stuff. Why was it we wanted to go camping?” he asks half-seriously. That started me thinking. Why do […]
Posted inWotr
Spring comes grudgingly to Wyoming’s high desert
Although I expect more heartless wind and freezing nights, I think winter’s tight grip has been loosened. Summer lies ahead.
Posted inWotr
Sometimes, it takes a tourist
One day early in the summer, my husband, Mike, and I were working on our place, a few irrigated acres carved from Wyoming’s high desert. Tree limbs lay scattered from a recent tree trimming, manure was heaped in the corral. The last thing we needed was a telephone call from a stranger. He spoke with […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Don’t listen to bad advice
Dear HCN, Although poetic license and the First Amendment no doubt allow Chris Ransick the right to perpetuate a myth if s/he wants to, still I have to comment on the mean-spirited “Advice for Visitors to Rock Springs’ (HCN, 8/19/96). If people who so freely criticize Rock Springs ever left I-80’s truck stops they might […]