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 […]
Communities
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
Posted inHeard Around the West
Talk about dedication
MONTANASometimes you have to look a little silly to get the job done. It’s a risk Mark Renner, an avid bowhunter, was willing to take when he designed a hat to fool pronghorn antelope. The wily animals were always quick to flee once they spotted Renner standing up to shoot, so he tried outfitting a […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
The Secret Lives of River Guides
Grand Canyon boatman culture converges at “spring training”
Posted inGoat
Oh vaulted ancestors!
The Granite Mountain Record Vault is a veritable temple, a slightly more natural- and secure-looking version of the one in Salt Lake City, not far away. A spiritual glow even radiates from the arched entrance to its tunnels (at least in this promotional photo). But this vault holds way more folks than the spired House […]
Posted inRange
Meditational rant on the word “pristine”
This morning my local radio station aired an ad which referred to the natural environments of California’s North Coast. It was for an outdoor store; listeners were encouraged to enjoy our regions river, beaches and pristine mountain tops. This really gets my goat. I’ve been on most of those mountain tops over the past 35 […]
Posted inRange
New West, New Dust Bowl?
By Courtney White. Originally posted on NewWest.net, 4-28-2010 The apparent declining interest in the environment among Americans was much on my mind as I attended the 21st Annual Southern Plains conference in Lubbock, Texas, recently. Organized by the nonprofit Ogallala Commons, the event focused on a famous date in environmental history. No, it wasn’t the […]
Posted inRange
HCN Reader Photo: Wrangler and Little Cowboy
This week’s featured reader photo is one of the entries to our current photo contest, The People of the West. You can enter your photos that capture the West’s people to this contest until May 9, 2010. Check out our contests page for more information on this and other writing and photography contests celebrating HCN’s […]
Posted inApril 26, 2010: Nevada's Pot of Gold
Grasshoppered!
“A metabolic wildfire”: That’s how entomologist-nature writer Jeffrey Lockwood of the University of Wyoming describes a grasshopper outbreak. At high densities — say 30 per square yard — a swarm can obliterate rangeland vegetation like “a maniac on a riding mower.” And with last year’s bumper crop of grasshoppers and the potential for a warm, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
“The gas of life”
UTAHSome parents in Utah County are pressing their school district to stop spreading “false educational ideas,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune. What might a false educational idea be? The notion that the word “democracy” defines our system of government. To parents who belong to a group called “Utah’s Republic,” which advocates a strict interpretation of […]
Posted inApril 26, 2010: Nevada's Pot of Gold
A Western state of mind
Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the MissouriEdited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton286 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Texas Press, 2009. This impressive anthology of contemporary short fiction grounded in the American West showcases 18 stories from emerging writers and literary stars, selected from publications as diverse as […]