THE WESTCouch potatoes, rejoice: Pretty soon, you won’t have to actually set foot on a trail through the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone national parks. Instead, you’ll be able to enjoy an online “virtual hiking expedition,” compliments of the energy-bar maker Nature Valley. The company hired crews with 360-degree cameras to hike 100 miles through each […]
Communities
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
A celebration of Cascadia: A review of Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest
Open Spaces: Voices from the NorthwestPenny Harrison, ed. 252 pages, softcover: $22.50.University of Washington Press, 2011. I read Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest over two weeks, setting it down still open so that its pages made a neat tent on my coffee table, returning to it over morning coffee, between garden chores, after dinner […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
California chronicles: A review of New California Writing: 2011
New California Writing: 2011Gayle Wattawa, ed. 320 pages, softcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. Most anthologies possess a ready-made but sometimes narrow audience. Readers come to these single-subject, multi-authored books with an already established connection and desire to know more. What, then, does a book focused on California offer to those who live outside the Golden State? Plenty, […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Vagabond visitors
Mark Winkler stopped by our western Colorado office while visiting his mother in nearby Montrose and touring the North Fork Valley. He’s a homemaker and freelance writer in Redwood Valley, Calif. When he got to Paonia, he first dropped by KVNF, our local community radio station, which sent him to tour our local movie theater, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
When a bear drives a Prius
CALIFORNIA A black bear in Lake Tahoe broke into a Toyota Prius parked at a cabin and then “went into a rampage” when he realized he was trapped inside it, reports the Contra Costa Times. The animal kicked, bit and tore at the seats and the steering wheel, and finally managed to shift the car […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service discriminates against poor kids
The summer before last, I took a four-day hike through the backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in the Washington Cascades. I’m accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when, after miles of travel off the trail, I heard the voices of teenagers wafting toward me. I met the intrepid boys […]
Posted inWotr
Home on the range
This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home usually include the traditional trappings of board games, gravy boats and hungry dogs making cute under the table, followed by food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when […]
Posted inWotr
The end is near — the end of 2011
To claim that the ancient Mayan culture of Mexico and Central America developed a nuanced conception of time is like saying the modern stock market is a complicated financial instrument. The Mayan calendars cover a multi-faceted collection of linear and cyclical measurements that go back almost 3,000 years as well as forward in time — […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West: Adobe sunrise
On a cold morning two days after Thanksgiving, I drove up into the ‘dobes north of Delta, Colorado. Here is what I saw: Shards of glass, clay skeet and shotgun shells imbedded in the cracked soil, the site where the locals hold thousands of shoot-outs in the apparent wasteland. As the first sun of the […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
“Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl”
THE NATION “Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl,” reads one of the labels on a condom distributed by the Center for Biological Diversity, the feisty and litigious conservation nonprofit that has offices throughout the West. While other environmental groups dodge the sticky issue of over-population, the center — run by Kierán Suckling — […]
Posted inGoat
Making memories, one stock tank at a time
This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home are plenty stuffed with the traditional trappings: board games, gravy boats, hungry pups making cute under the table, food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when I’m home […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
An unexpected L.A. story: A review of The Barbarian Nurseries
The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
And now, a message from our sponsors …
In this issue, along with our regular ad pages, you will find the holiday Green Gift Guide. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of our generous advertising sponsors for their support. It takes readers like you and sponsors like them to make HCN‘s work possible. Please help us thank them by supporting […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Dealt a bad hand: A review of Doc
Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The burial of Elouise Cobell
Elouise Cobell filed her class action suit in 1996 and originally thought it would take only three years to resolve the issues. She joined Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder in making the settlement announcement. Tami A. Heilemann-DOI On Oct. 22, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blacktail Ranch where she and […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bringing it home, keeping it wild
IDAHOYou might call it a minor movement, but “reshoring” — a new word that means bringing offshore jobs back home — is buoying some residents of rural Idaho. About 12 years ago, Buck Knives sent up to half its production to China, thinking it would save money. Unfortunately, many customers were steamed by that decision. […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Of things falling
WYOMING Marvin Bass, a Florida man who hadn’t taken a vacation in five years, didn’t get to enjoy his visit to Yellowstone National Park as planned. He was driving a borrowed 42-foot motor home up 8,431-foot-high Teton Pass when he realized how much it was laboring on the 10 percent grade. So Bass parked the […]
Posted inWotr
Of marigolds and a day with the dead
Living close to the Mexican border, I’m often asked if I have problems with drug smugglers or “illegals” trekking across our land here in the mountains of southern Arizona. When I tell friends in the Midwest or New York or Oregon that my main worry is walking into a Safeway parking lot in Tucson and […]
Posted inArticles
The times, they are a changin’
Dear Friend: Evolution happens. For the first 25 years of its existence, High Country News delivered its unique blend of in-depth reporting, essays and humor via a black-and-white tabloid printed on newspaper stock. Sometimes the ink got smeared and stained your fingers. In 1995, the “paper” was joined by a website, hcn.org, that served primarily […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Energy succeeds where housing developers can’t
If you’re looking for a parable of the post-housing-bust West — where the real estate economy appears to have crumbled while the extraction industry roars back with a vengeance — you might find one in the troubled Banning-Lewis Ranch on Colorado’s sprawling Front Range. The city of Colorado Springs annexed the more than 21,000-acre property, […]