Summer brings many visitors our way. Rod Vanderwall of Boulder, Colo., stopped by our Paonia office to renew his subscription and pick up a snazzy HCN T-shirt on his way to Cortez in southern Colorado, where he’ll be reviewing the energy conservation needs of a community college. As head of energy management for the Office […]
Communities
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
Meet the makers
Please wait while the player loads. Note: you must have javascript enabled and the Adobe Flash Player installed. Read more about Colorado wine in our recent feature, But is it any good? This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Meet the makers.
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
The spirit of the place
The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in MontanaRick Bass384 pages, softcover: $26.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. The Yaak Valley in the northwestern corner of Montana is one of the wildest places in the continental United States, home to grizzly bears and mountain lions, wolverine and elk. Nature writer Rick Bass, who lives there, has devoted […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
But is it any good?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “From Corn to Cabernet.” Colorado wines are higher in acid than the California wines that Westerners are most familiar with. They bear more resemblance to the wines of central mountainous Europe, such as Austria and northern Italy, than to West Coast wines, says Kansas […]
Posted inGoat
Obama in Grand Junction
Promoting his health care package, President Obama will appear Saturday, August 15 in Grand Junction, Colorado, where some of Western Colorado’s angry natives are primed — by right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck and others — to vent their opposition, not just to Obama’s health care proposal but to his presidency as a whole. Some […]
Posted inGoat
A culture of violence
On July 12, a gang member brutally attacked a female police officer on the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The officer was forced to shoot the suspect and is now in hiding with her family, said John Mousseau, chairman of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council, at a hearing in D.C. last month. […]
Posted inRange
On the upper Clark Fork River
Summer is in full swing on the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch—the birds are chirping, the mosquitoes are plentiful, the hay is cut, and the cattle are grazing. Since hiring on in June as the Clark Fork Coalition’s Ranchlands Program Manager, I’ve had a chance to get a feel for the day-to-day operation of the ranch, […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
Cigarette wars
Northwest Indians want no taxation in their sovereign nations
Posted inGoat
West Nile figures trickling in
The Centers for Disease Control say that only 35 cases of the West Nile virus have so far been reported in the United States this year, but the season is just getting started: late summer and early fall are the times when most infections occur. Of the 35 cases, 19 are in the West and […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
2,000 miles of controversy
A 15-foot-high, rust-colored steel wall snakes across the scrubby desert landscape, dividing the twin border cities of Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora. On the Arizona side, Border Patrol agents sit at the ready while reconnaissance airplanes drone overhead. On the Mexican side, border crossers driven by poverty lie in wait for nightfall. Then they will […]
Posted inGoat
A pleasing discovery
In general, I think it is no coincidence that the words “travel” and “travail” have the same root — the Latin word “tripalium,” a three-pronged instrument of torture. But on occasion, there are pleasant surprises. It was time for Martha and me to visit our daughters (and grandson) in Oregon. In the past, […]
Posted inWotr
Backcountry lessons from the Lost Forest of Oregon
The Scout we were driving across the treeless landscape was coated with dust so thick you couldn’t read the decal identifying us as scientists from a Forest Service Research Station. Had the decal been legible, an observer might have thought we were lost. We weren’t, but the forest that my work-partner, Doug, and I were […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
The bare bones of life
The Southwest reminds one writer of Mars
Posted inGoat
Crossroad at the foot of a mountain
Lilacs bloomed on the corner next to the hostel. A freight train rumbled through the little downtown, the third one in the past hour; the swirling clouds of railroad noise carried echoes of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. A block south of the tracks, a black Irish beauty from New York stood in front of a coffee shop, […]
Posted inWotr
Great Plains aura
Not long ago, I revisited the long-abandoned farm in south-central South Dakota where my grandparents farmed for over 30 years. Nothing could induce any of their children or grandchildren to copy their commitment to this lonely land, but it took a nasty cancer to get grandpa Lyle off the place. Standing at the farm’s highest […]
Posted inWotr
Coming home to roost
Like a lot of other Westerners, I recently added chickens to my suburban back yard. I didn’t plan on raising fryers; I envisioned only fresh eggs, grasshopper control and free entertainment. What I hadn’t anticipated was how attached I’d become. I began with nine, 2-month-old chicks. Town ordinance allows only six hens, but I figured […]
Posted inGoat
Social justice hits the road
For three months, Chloe Noble and Jill Hardman have been living out of backpacks and sleeping on the streets of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. They walk miles every day, and depend on the kindness of strangers. These women aren’t actually homeless — but they very well could be. Noble and Hardman are the creators […]
Posted inGoat
Honoring the forgotten
Today the remains of three African-American soldiers will be buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery, more than 130 years after their deaths. Army Pvts. David Ford, Levi Morris and Thomas Smith were among the famous “Buffalo Soldiers,” African-American men who served in the military during the Civil War and later guarded the farthest reaches of […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
Nirvana on a backhoe
Habitat restorer Kim Erion’s heartfelt connection to her work
Posted inWotr
In pothunter country, a small effort at healing
Two people are dead, and a lot of the living are furious. After an early-morning FBI raid last month in the Utah town of Blanding, which ended with 19 residents hauled in for trafficking in ancient artifacts, one of those indicted, a local doctor, sat in his Jeep and breathed in poisonous carbon monoxide. The […]