Without a college degree, work on the oil and gas fields is the best job you can get in the rural West – unless, of course, it kills you.
Also in this issue: Thirsty Santa Fe, N.M., considers an innovative law requiring all new buildings to install rainwater-harvesting systems.
Two weeks in the West
“An industry of this size is not something you can just turn on its head in six weeks.” —Colorado Oil and Gas Association Executive Director Greg Schnacke on the rash of oil- and gas-related bills moving through the Colorado General Assembly Sacred trumps sewage: Snowbowl ski area near Flagstaff, Ariz., wants to use treated…
Harvesting the sky
Thirsty Santa Fe catches on to catching rainwater
Lewis’ Web
NAME: Randy Lewis VOCATION: Professor of microbiology MARRIED: To his high school sweetheart CURRENT FUNDERS: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Air Force BREAKTHROUGHS: Sequenced genes for several Rocky Mountain arachnids, including cat face, garden, wolf, jumping, and brown widow spiders. KNOWN FOR: Wearing gray or tan Wranglers. FAVORITE TIME OF DAY: Lunch. “It’s…
Thomas McGuane’s lonely freaks
One of our most distinctive short story writers, Flannery O’Connor, famously opined, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Her subject was the metaphysical and geographical American South, its spirit inextricable from its landscape and history.…
Get out, and stay out
I have enjoyed reading your newspaper for over 10 years. However, when I read the new editor’s call for amnesty for all undocumented aliens in the U.S., I realized that HCN is no longer a paper for people that “care about the West.” Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, anyone who takes…
Mission, impossible
Regarding the Feb. 19 Editor’s Note, it is refreshing to read something that actually makes sense regarding the subject of illegal immigration. The solution is to find a way to accommodate the people who want to come to this country and work, and at the same time to find a way for illegal immigrants who…
Not the end of NEPA analysis
While I know you need to take a little literary license to keep the controversy alive and sell papers, you went way over the edge and into fiction with your article “The end of ‘analysis paralysis’?” You state five times in this article that under the new planning regulations “Forest plans would no longer be…
She didn’t order a sandwich, either
I read with interest and amusement “A Wolf’s Life” by Erin Halcomb. While the age and tenacity of wolf B7 is remarkable and surely notable, there were a few inaccuracies in the story. B7’s mate, B11, was not named “Blackfire” by the schoolchildren in Salmon. The name came from a grade school in Meridian, Idaho,…
Praise for a former mule-packer
Jason Fisher’s essay “The Knowledge of Mules” contains an intimate reality that a person can only express through real life experience, something fiction can’t touch. It’s a masterpiece that HCN should be very proud to have circulated. I guess you can tell it hit home with me, but moreover, HCN continues to impress me with…
Renewing an ancient bond
Jason Fisher’s essay on his experiences with mules brings optimism. Seems like the younger generations have strayed far away from such non-motorized pursuits. It is great to know there are still young individuals such as Fisher who like to see the landscape from atop an equine’s back. I challenge anyone to see how different the…
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…
Heard Around the West
MONTANA Let’s get this straight: Was a unicorn behind the wheel of a truck that crashed in Billings? A deputy prosecutor told a judge that story in all seriousness, asking for a high bond because he thought the driver had claimed a unicorn was driving. But the prosecutor misunderstood a colleague’s e-mail using the term…
It tolls for us
One of my High Country News colleagues was proofreading a chart that’s part of this issue’s cover package. From deep concentration, she looked up to note that it had the same impact as the lists of Iraq War fatalities that the New York Times has been publishing of late. She wasn’t making chitchat, either; her…
Fatalities in the energy fields: 2000-2006
NOTE this list is a sidebar to the main story — “Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields.” — At least 89 people died on the job in the Interior West’s oil and gas industry from 2000 to 2006, in a variety of accidents, including 90-foot falls, massive explosions, poison gas inhalations and crushings…
Disposable workers of the oil and gas fields
If you don’t have a college degree, it’s the best job in the West. Unless you die, unnoticed.
Dear friends
VISITOR, SINGULAR Spring is coming to our valley, but visitors are still far and few between. Wilf Bruschke of nearby Montrose, Colo., came by recently to check us out and start a new subscription. BURY ME GREEN Singer/songwriter John Winn of Grand Junction, Colo., tells us his latest CD, Wild Stallion, contains a song titled…