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, […]
Communities
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
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
‘The music of men’s lives’
Work SongIvan Doig288 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Riverhead Books, 2010. “My train journey had brought me across the Montana everyone thinks of, mile upon hypnotic mile of rolling prairie with snowcapped peaks in the distance, and here, as sudden and surprising as a lost city of legendary times, was a metropolis of nowhere. …” In his latest […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
A tight — but stable — budget, and a big bash
Eight members of the High Country News board of directors joined staff for a meeting in Fort Collins, Colo., Sept. 17-18. The main business was passing an annual budget, a task made easier by the tremendous financial support from readers during our 40th Anniversary. Despite the recession, HCN’s reserve remains at nearly $500,000, about the […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Deadly crossing
The number of people entering the U.S. illegally has plummeted by nearly half since 2007, but 2010 promises to be one of the deadliest years on record for undocumented migrants. The group Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, which keeps count of those who die crossing into Arizona from Mexico, says 236 bodies have been found this […]
Posted inWotr
Second best is OK with me
My wife and I have had the good fortune to visit some of the iconic landscapes of the Colorado Plateau in the years BG — before guidebooks. Back in those days, you could enjoy an hour’s solitude anywhere in the Escalante River’s side canyons. We recently returned to an old favorite in Utah, a colorful […]
Posted inWotr
Climate of denial
We’re a nation in denial. Record heat waves and shrinking snowpacks surround us, yet our appetite for fossil fuel remains unwavering, and, incredibly, some still doubt that it’s a threat to a stable climate. Witnessing this from southeast Alaska, where I work as a wilderness ranger, is a trip right into this odd realm of […]
Posted inWotr
Landlocked in New Mexico
It covers only 16,000 acres, but eastern New Mexico’s Sabinoso Wilderness could easily provide the backdrop for a spaghetti Western movie. Scrub juniper and cactus shade cow plop among the clumps of buffalo grass and blue grama, while stark cliffs, canyons and deeply cleft trenches loom in the distance, looking a lot like the handiwork […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Pro-social justice, pro-environment, pro-Mormon
I am a regular subscriber and practical environmentalist. I am also a practicing, if not entirely orthodox, Mormon. HCN seems to miss few opportunities to rant on my fellow Mormons, as if we were somehow a monolithic group of ultra-conservative Tea Party real estate developers. This is not the case. Were you to substitute “Jew” […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
No spike too small
In the article “The Second Second City,” Jeremy N. Smith states that William Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor, was president of the Union Pacific and that he hammered in the Golden Spike (HCN, 9/13/10). William Ogden was the first president of the Union Pacific, but he was not president in 1869 when the Golden Spike was […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Forget the ultralights
In your recent essay “Still Cranish After All These Years,” the caption under the photo on page 15 reads “Sandhill crane in flight over Nebraska’s South Platte River,” but by the time the South Platte reaches crane habitat in Nebraska, it has been joined by the North Platte and has become the Platte (HCN, 9/13/10). […]