If you were watching TV news over Christmas weekend, you likely saw weather forecasts mapping Santa’s position over the U.S., a few feel-good stories about hard-case animals finding happy homes, and a report or two about how on Dec. 26, gift-recipients thunder back into the malls to return what they got for what they REALLLY […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
Survival tips for 2012
In this New Year, we can’t take anything for granted when the global financial system of speculative swindles, leveraged frauds and doomed debts keeps circumnavigating the bowl. Another bailout might extend this game of charades; another scantily clad stimulus package might temporarily succeed in goosing our economy — but only at the cost of rendering […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
All I want for Christmas is a rifle
ARIZONAAlthough the Scottsdale Gun Club has yet to start selling Christmas cards showing baby Jesus cradling a machine gun in the manger, or the Magi bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh and crates full of extra ammo, the club did offer its members a unique photo op: posing with Santa Claus while holding military-style rifles. Choices […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Girls gone wild — 1900s style: A review of Nothing Daunted
Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the WestDorothy Wickenden304 pages, hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2011. “We did not want strays. We had serious matrimonial intentions, and we decided that young, pretty schoolteachers would be the best bet of all,” cowboy Ferry Carpenter recollected about his part in the effort to attract “schoolmarms” to […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Holiday break
While you snuggle up with your last issue of High Country News for 2011, our editorial staff will be taking a two-week publishing break to catch up on editing, writing, reporting and other projects, and, of course, spend time with family and friends. Expect your first issue of 2012 around Jan. 25. We wish you […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Lessons from Laos
I’ve been reading back issues of HCN while living and working in Vientiane, Laos. As a native Coloradan, outdoor enthusiast, and anti-corporate child of hippies, I tend to oppose commercial development of public lands and natural resources. However, on a small point, I found myself agreeing with the mining representative in “Hardrock Showdown” (HCN, 11/22/10). […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Love and loss on a Wyoming ranch: A review of Lime Creek
Lime CreekJoe Henry160 pages, hardcover: $20.Random House, 2011. Woody Creek, Colo.-based Joe Henry studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with John Irving, but then detoured from writing fiction to work as a rancher, becoming a successful lyricist along the way. Henry’s ravishing first work of fiction, Lime Creek, must have been inspired by the Western […]
Posted inRange
The Water Buffalo Postulate
I first heard of the Water Buffalo Postulate in a snowbound cabin near the Canadian line. Several friends were sitting around a wood stove after a vigorous day, sharing tales of danger and derring-do. One friend, I’ll call him Joe, rolled up a pant-leg, revealing a badly scarred calf muscle. “Water buffalo,” he said. As […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Deer smugglers and avocado thieves
THE WESTWe won’t go into the Freudian implications of hunters who covet wall decorations fashioned from the enormous antlers of the deer or elk they “hunted” on a fenced game ranch, but in Texas, where everything is supposed to be bigger than life, the desire for giant racks has gotten entirely out of hand. Smugglers […]
Posted inWotr
A do-it-yourself Christmas tradition
Last Christmas Eve, I found a new Christmas tradition. To shake off the crankiness of cookies gone wrong, of shopping and shipping and wrapping and frenzy, I took a long walk last December. And that’s when I got a wonderful, non-Grinchly idea. What if, as Dr. Seuss said, Christmas does not come from a store? […]
Posted inRange
The decline of rural incomes
Bill Bishop, the Daily Yonder Nearly 7 out of 10 rural counties saw their median family incomes drop from 2007 to 2010, according to new figures from the U.S. Census. Median income is point where half the families in the county make more than that amount and half make less. The national median family income […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The joys of ‘virtual hiking’
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 […]
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 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 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 […]