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 […]
Communities
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 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
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). […]
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
Even in Wyoming
I first met Tom Bell over 40 years ago. He remains one of the most courageous men I’ve ever known and something of a hero to me (HCN, 8/30/10). Here is Wyoming, a state where the leading radio station daily broadcasts hours of Rush Limbaugh’s bombast to eager listeners. Here is a state that can field a viable […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Give-’em-hell Bell
With his courage and fierce determination to save Western lands and wildlife, HCN founder and guiding muse Tom Bell is a true prophet (HCN, 8/30/10). A conservationist in the mold of Thoreau, Muir and Leopold, Bell deserves our respect and esteem for his noble fight against avaricious mining and ranching interests hell-bent on pursuing profit at […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
A Bell-wether for the young
In 1963, I was a youngster in a grade school science class, when an instructor demonstrated that fish required oxygen through an experiment that diminished the O2 content of a fishbowl till the goldfish passed out. The instructor noted the efficacy of the experiment but said that he worried about the state of the fish […]
Posted inWotr
Stealing the West, bone by bone
Early morning sunrise washed over the Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction as I headed for a boulder-strewn knoll. There, 110 years ago, paleontologist Elmer Riggs discovered a previously unknown dinosaur that we now call Brachiosaurus. When it was alive some 150 million years ago, the plant-eating dinosaur measured 75 feet or more from teeth […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Doomster chorus
Note: This is a sidebar to a profile of the founder of High Country News and his increasingly pessimistic view of the future, headlined, “A Hell of an Anniversary.” — “… A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse-gas emissions (indicates) we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
The Western Lit Blues
I’m-a-gettin’ tired of living up to my fictional counterpart
Posted inRange
Death by suicide
By Clarence Worly, NewWest.net Guest Writer, 9-22-10 Between 1999 and 2007 there were nearly as many suicides as highway fatalities in the Mountain West states. In the case of Colorado, Utah and Nevada there were more self-inflicted deaths than traffic deaths. Am I the only person west of the Mississippi to see a problem here? […]
Posted inWotr
What we don’t admit about wildfire
Arizona had no big wildfires burning in early September, so in Flagstaff where I live, all eyes turned toward Boulder. The most destructive fire in Colorado history was raging out of control and we all wanted to watch. We couldn’t resist. I think it’s in our DNA. The internal combustion engine, electricity, the Internet — […]
Posted inRange
The difficult windows of September
Often I have observed that September is our reward for putting up with Colorado the rest of the year: Generally clear skies, warm sunny days that don’t get too hot, brisk mornings, glowing aspen leaves — what’s not to like? Well, as the nights get cooler — our first killing frost typically arrives around Sept. […]