Eureka! As I read the article “Once More Unto the Breach” and glanced at the bookcase behind me, it hit me — I had most of (Michael Kelsey’s) books (HCN, 10/10/11)! But I had never connected the dots. The first, Guide to the World’s Mountains, had steered my climbing itineraries overseas, and ultimately led me […]
Communities
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
The river (too) wild
We wouldn’t want to engineer every river, but rivers are transient, anyway (HCN, 10/10/25). Making one rapid consistent with the rest of the run makes sense. As a climber, I’m a little tired of the argument that placing enough bolts on a route to prevent someone dying is “dumbing it down.” I’ve seen people die […]
Posted inBlog
Buying “green” in the rural West
I recently took a little unscientific field trip to a Walmart Supercenter near my home in Mesa, Arizona. I chose Walmart partly because of its prices but also because it is widely available in rural areas in the West, where shopping choices are often limited. My “research” questions: Would the prices for ‘greener’ products be […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
What to do with the dead?
MONTANA The funniest picture in Montana Magazine’s profile of coffin-maker Willy von Bracht shows him and an assistant putting the cover on a casket painted to look exactly like a giant box of Marlboro cigarettes. This was a “personal project” of von Bracht, whose lively sense of humor informs his business, Sweet Earth Caskets and […]
Posted inWotr
Voting at the dump
In my bluish precinct in thoroughly red Idaho, we vote at the dump. We troop to a doublewide manufactured home that serves as the landfill office, out by the edge of the Caribou National Forest. “Saves the middleman,” my late husband liked to say. Our whole county makes a blue showing in most elections, thanks […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A house like a buffalo
A carpenter muses on dismantling and recycling tumbledown buildings
Posted inWotr
When voting, listen to the grass
When I say I’m from the High Plains, people often tell me how bored they were on their last drive through eastern Colorado or Kansas. I agree. The Plains are boring now that most of the land has been farmed into a drab patchwork of corn, soybeans and wheat. But no land was ever as […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A raw-edged memoir
Raw Edges: A MemoirPhyllis Barber280 pages, hardcover: $26.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010. All memoirs risk provoking the reader’s question: What’s so important about your life, anyway? Why should we bother to read a whole book about it? Nevada author Phyllis Barber tries to answer that question in her second autobiography, Raw Edges: “While this search […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Hello, and goodbye
High Country News welcomes new assistant editor Cally Carswell. Cally has spent the last nine months here as a multimedia fellow after completing an internship; now, she’ll continue her excellent work reporting and writing stories, editing articles, and producing video and audio as a permanent staff member. Born in New Mexico but raised in Chicago, […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Writing in tradition
From the HilltopToni Jensen179 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2010. In From the Hilltop, her first short story collection, Toni Jensen relies on her Métis heritage (a mixed Indian and European cultural group from Canada and the Northern U.S.) to explore contemporary Indian life off the reservation. It is not surprising that her writing […]
Posted inBlog
Journo conference highlights Native American issues
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. A drive from Portland’s emerald green landscape took me into the Columbia River Gorge and the reds, golds and browns of autumn in eastern Oregon and Washington, through the panhandle of Idaho then […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
We’re listening
Below are some of the comments you sent us on the most recent reader survey. Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think. We’ve been reading all your survey responses, and thinking about how we can keep HCN on your “essential reading” list. I have learned more from HCN about the […]
Posted inBlog
Special Treatment for Ag
Farmers and ranchers across the West like to complain about the Endangered Species Act. To hear them and their Farm Bureau lobbyists talk, you would expect that the ESA has put nearly every western farmer and rancher into the poor house. Verifiable cases of farmers or ranchers actually being put out of business by the […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Fighting the logic of fire
A writer reassesses her love for the West.
Posted inWotr
The way it is for some people
Recently, I returned from a second visit to my dentist, who works “en el otro lado” – the other side. I live in Arizona, so that means across the border, in Mexico. Emilia Saenz is a fine dentist, but her assistant, Jose, a gracious young man, is even finer, as far as I’m concerned. That’s […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
No walk in the park
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human HeartLynn Schooler272 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2010. Hoping to gain perspective on his troubled marriage, the deaths of friends, and the vagaries of male middle age, Lynn Schooler (author of The Blue Bear) embarks on a walkabout along one of the wildest stretches […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Once More Unto The Breach
Into Utah’s Black Hole with guidebook author Michael Kelsey