In mid-April, writer Laura Paskus told us of a dozen murdered women whose remains were found in the New Mexico desert. This week, the desert has given up additional bodies — one an explorer who disappeared 75 years ago, the other a hiker missing only since November. Everett Ruess, artist, poet and aesthete, was 20 […]
Communities
Posted inArticles
Wind River revelations
To listen to the audio interview you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed and Javascript enabled. Lisa Jones talks about Northern Arapaho horse whisperer and healer Stanford Addison, the subject of her book, Broken.
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Got warriors?
A quadriplegic horse gentler helps reservation boys through their dangerous teens
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The collected Sierra Nevada
Meteorologist Hal Klieforth has spent his life exploring and documenting California’s ‘Range of Light’
Posted inWotr
Suffering and solace
“He died just like that. He didn’t suffer,” the woman said, speaking of a deceased pet. “Not like your cat.” I was stunned by her words: cruel, thoughtless and dead wrong. But she wasn’t the only one to make such a pronouncement. In the months my husband and I provided hospice for our tabby cat […]
Posted inRay
Idaho-style reality TV
Just a quick grin here. Rocky Barker, a veteran Idaho Statesman writer and friend of mine, plays with this news: … The Idaho Department of Commerce is planning on picking a Seattle family for an all-expense-paid trip to Idaho for fishing, rafting, hiking, horseback riding and the like — in exchange for (the family) starring […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A Paonia love story
In March, we hired a new senior advertising representative, David Anderson. With 20 years of experience in marketing and sales and an upbeat personality, he helps fill our advertising pages, which contribute an essential chunk to our annual budget. David enjoys golf, live music, and spending time with wife Stevi and young son Skylar. The […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The vitality of language
My husband and I have volunteered at a raptor rehabilitation center for years, and when we decided to adopt a toddler, the center’s staff threw us a baby shower on the lawn outside the kestrel’s cage. They presented our new daughter, Maia, with bird-embossed T-shirts and a stuffed toy turkey vulture. We ourselves received a […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Renewing a battered land
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie LandscapeRichard Manning 238 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2009. In 1874, when most of the West was still held in common, a simple invention — barbed wire — pushed the region toward a long-held national ideal: privatization. With amazing swiftness, ranchers began to enclose their lands and […]
Posted inArticles
When good times go bad
A video journey through Phoenix’s unusually busy food banks
Posted inWotr
The persistence of a golden time in the West
In the evening a strange thing happened; the 20 families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. — John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Long before Tom Joad and his family set out for […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Let’s paint Wal-Marts
I was inspired by the report on public art in Salt Lake City (“Breaking Down Walls, With Art”), but have to ask, does not the medium — structures about to be demolished — reinforce the notion, at least subliminally, that art is worthless (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09)? So much of our everyday living environment is […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The mythic Westerner
Your latest issue on “great ideas” from the West contained some instances of historical revisionism (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). For one thing, far from having to “scratch out a living … competing against the likes of saber-toothed tigers, cave bears, dire wolves, mastodons, woolly mammoths and giant beavers,” the evidence suggests that “early Westerners” actually […]
Posted inGoat
Blue jeans and their critics
Doubtless you’ve heard of George Will, a prominent member of the chattering class. He wears a bow tie. And now this fop, with prominent sartorial affectations of his own, presumes to give us fashion advice. In a recent syndicated column, Will rants against blue jeans, also known as “Western wear.” Will borrows many of his […]
Posted inRay
Ex-congressman dies in Utah ATV crash
For years I’ve collected stories about people around the West who get killed or seriously hurt in off-road driving wrecks. I got interested in the ongoing tragedy when an admirable young man I knew crashed his machine in a popular ATV playground. He was a math teacher who inspired one of my kids. He went […]
Posted inArticles
A passion to protect
Glo Cunningham perseveres over three decades in Crested Butte
Posted inHeard Around the West
Back from the outback
Jim Stiles, the West’s curmudgeon-in-chief (“All the news that causes fits” is his motto), is back in southern Utah’s sandstone country — Australia, alas, did not work out. Stiles’ quirky Canyon Country Zephyr is back, too, though
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Why I ride the Greyhound
Bus passengers become citizens of the world.
Posted inHeard Around the West
Salmonid stanzas
Eleven years ago, a weekend tradition began in Astoria, Ore., the coastal town at the mouth of the Columbia River that once boasted scores of busy salmon canneries. It’s called the annual Fisher Poets Gathering, and this time participants in what one observer called “the blue-collar school of poetry” were given just 24 hours to […]