As California’s water war grinds on, salmon fishermen gear up for a risky season
Communities
Posted inHeard Around the West
Doggone it
THE WORLDEveryone loves dogs, right? Don’t be so sure. In its spring issue, Earth Island Journal reviewed the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale. The Vales found that the carbon impact of a dog is double that of an SUV, that a […]
Posted inWotr
Springtime is whine-time
Spring is the cruelest month in the mountain West. Yes, I know that spring technically occupies three months as one-quarter of the four annual seasons. But here in northeastern Utah, it really only lasts a month. And it doesn’t even last a distinct month; what I’m saying is that you get about 31 days of […]
Posted inGoat
An Arizona Solution
Having lived in Colorado for all of my 59 years, I’ve certainly suffered from immigration. It’s cost me a job or two because immigrants from New York or Pennsylvania went to better schools and boasted more impressive resumés. I’ve had to compete against well-heeled California immigrants for housing. After these immigrants settle in, they assault […]
Posted inWotr
Black Sunday won’t ever happen again
Twenty-eight years ago this month, on the first Sunday in May, Exxon, the largest corporation in the world, pulled the plug on its massive western Colorado oil shale project. Overnight, 2,600 people lost their jobs. Overnight, small towns learned painful lessons about the speed of the corporate guillotine. Overnight, county commissioners and town planners learned […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Little doses of danger
Parenthood scares a fearless outdoorswoman
Posted inHeard Around the West
Don’t have a cow
CALIFORNIAThe folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium named their new exhibit about climate change “Hot Pink Flamingos: Stories of Hope in a Changing Sea.” With the help of humor, a hopeful tone and charismatic animals such as penguins and jellyfish, exhibit planners hoped to get visitors talking about the contentious topic of how too much […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Fair trade?
As a native-born Nevadan living in Humboldt County, Nev., I have seen firsthand both sides of the mining issue (HCN, 4/26/10). Twenty years from now, we will be asking what we have to show for all the mountains of tailing piles, open pits with poisoned water, miles of roads cut into the landscape for test […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
It takes a district: Utah landowners control groundwater use
Escalante Valley citizens plan to save their declining aquifer
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
No more horseplay
I’d like to see HCN correct the grave misinformation in “Eligible Mustangs” and treat the subject with the accuracy and respect it deserves (HCN, 4/12/10). First and foremost, the Bureau of Land Management sets the “Appropriate Management Level” for wild horses on our ranges and decides when to call horses “excess.” However, this is based […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Scapegoats on the range
It is clear to me that it is time for HCN to do a meaningful update on the wild horses and burros (HCN, 4/12/10). There is solid science that supports wild equids as having evolved on this continent and nowhere else. On Feb. 12, 2009, Jay F. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., and Patricia M. Fazio, Ph.D., testified […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Wanted: horse sense
Some radical wild horse advocates just keep repeating the same lies over and over, hoping people start to take their lies as truth (HCN, 4/26/10). The biggest lie is that horses are native to North America. The EPA defines introduced species as “species that have become able to survive and reproduce outside the habitats where […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Ghosts of Wyoming: A haunted past and present
Ghosts of WyomingAlyson Hagy170 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2010. Reading Alyson Hagy’s new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, is a bit like poring over a stranger’s photo album, some pictures grayed and dusty, the images gone faint, others recent and still vivid. Each deft vignette contains its own bounded narrative, but taken together, […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
A California Bestiary: Beauty of the beasts
A California BestiaryRebecca Solnit and Mona Caron64 pages, hardcover: $12.95.Heyday Books, 2010. In the tradition of illuminated medieval manuscripts, A California Bestiary presents 12 literary and visual portraits of fauna native to that state, from the extinct (California grizzly), to the emblematic (California condor), the ubiquitous (California ground squirrel), and the preciously obscure (mission blue […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Changing of the editorial guard
A couple of issues back, you may have noticed that High Country News was advertising for a new editor in chief. Jonathan Thompson has decided to leave HCN and Paonia in June and head out on a new adventure with his family, leaving the Four Corners region in which he has spent his first 40 […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News; hello, Mrs. Li
How one journalist coped with a great Western paper’s demise
Posted inWotr
What it took to win one small victory
We won. The tiny town of Conway, Wash., will not have a cell tower looming over its one street. Thanks to hours of work and thousands of dollars, we won. But it shouldn’t have been that hard. The 150-foot tower was to have been located behind the post office, where it would have dwarfed even […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
True or false?
WYOMINGWhen it comes to the Cowboy State, comedian Jeff Foxworthy gets it, or so say some locals who’ve been e-mailing around some of his spot-on observations. He says that if “you’ve ever refused to buy something because it’s ‘too spendy’,” if “you’ve worn shorts and a parka at the same time,” if “your town has […]
Posted inRange
HCN Reader Photo: Prisoner plantings
This week’s reader photo is another photo contest submission. It shows the hands of inmates propogating plants to be used in restoration projects in Washington State. Check out this photo and many others at our contest site, and enter your photos of Western people into the contest before the deadline – May 9.
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Urban habitat
Building an inner-city base hasn’t been easy for the Audubon Society