UTAH Even after he was caught making an outrageously racist remark, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars refused to resign. Buttars had criticized a revenue-sharing bill for school districts, saying, “This baby is black, I’ll tell you. This is a dark and ugly thing.” Buttars said he was sorry, but he apologized only after the Senate […]
Communities
Posted inMay 12, 2008: Boom! Boom!
Two weeks in the West
Spend an hour bare-skinned in the relentless sun and howling winds common along the Rocky Mountain states’ front ranges, and you’ll get a visceral (and likely angry red) understanding of the elements fueling yet another energy boom in the West. Wind and solar development is ramping up across the region, according to two recent industry […]
Posted inWotr
The scandal in Boulder that won’t go away
The scandal that people are still talking about in Boulder, Colo., isn’t the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey; it’s about a rich couple “stealing” land from their neighbors — and getting away with it in court. The latest tidbit involving Dick McLean, a former Boulder Mayor and district court judge, and his wife, […]
Posted inWotr
Where’s the remote
You may have heard the news: Fewer Americans are venturing into anything that resembles the outdoors. According to a Nature Conservancy study, the number of visitors to state and national parks is declining, and fewer people are hunting, fishing or going camping. Why are people trading in their hiking boots for slippers? The study’s authors, […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Two weeks in the West
Las Vegas’ overall ambience, not to mention those jug-sized cocktails, tends to breed a certain lasciviousness among its human inhabitants and visitors. Turns out that the same lust is infecting the mollusks of southern Nevada. Quagga mussels invaded the East and Midwest before hitching their way westward on promiscuous boats, and they were discovered in […]
Posted inWotr
Use it up, recycle, and never buy anything new – whew!
We may be running out of landfill space in the West, but not because of me. I’m a packrat. I spent summers in eastern Montana with my grandparents, who lived in an apartment above a department store. I spent the warm days rummaging through trash bins in the alley behind the store, and then I’d […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Men, machines, memories
The major characters in Five Skies are men at work and men on the run. It’s not surprising that they are men of few words as well. Art Key, a 40-something Hollywood stunt engineer fleeing a guilty conscience, and Ronnie Panelli, a 19-year-old petty thief dodging the law, join aging ranch hand Darwin Gallegos for […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Heard Around the West
MONTANA Karen Craver might have one of the toughest jobs in the West. For three years, she’s been a rural mail carrier in sparsely populated northern Montana, close to Canada. “Some places up here,” she says, “it’s 10 miles between mailboxes.” Every Tuesday and Thursday, Craver hits the rocky road that takes her north of […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
The People of the Sea
California’s Salton Sea could dry up and die, or be fixed and developed. Either way, its renegades, recluses, ruffians and retirees will lose.
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Havana goes West
Conservative Western Republicans embrace the Cuban cause
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Staying put
Lately my cat, Daisy, has me thinking about Al Gore. Daisy’s not as young as she used to be. She lazes most hours on the rug in front of the woodstove, snuggled inside the cardboard lid to a ream of paper from Office Depot. The lid is now festooned with a homemade quilt draped over […]
Posted inWotr
The West loses a scrappy daily paper
Just as the booming — or busting — West needs her most, the Albuquerque Tribune is no more. The paper published its last edition on Saturday, Feb. 23, after 86 years of rough-and-tumble journalism that included winning a Pulitzer Prize. The paper was owned by the Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co., which decided last August that […]
Posted inWotr
Who will work in the West’s future company towns?
One day last summer, I gave directions to two young Asian women on bicycles who were looking for the grocery store. Further chatting revealed that they weren’t tourists. In scattershot English, they told me that they were from Thailand and had come to Cody, Wyo., on temporary work visas to serve up hamburgers in Wendy’s, […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Following the tracks
Walking along the railroad tracks, I never could decide if it was easier to stretch my stride from one tie to the next, or if I should follow my natural rhythm, letting my foot land sometimes in the crushed stone ballast and sometimes on wood. I wanted the walking to be easy, unconscious. It wasn’t. […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Heard Around the West
WYOMING Perhaps in jest, the award-winning Jackson Hole News&Guide wants readers to come up with a new welcome sign for the town. The current greeting at Teton Pass is definitely outmoded: “Howdy, stranger, yonder is Jackson Hole, the last of the Old West.” With the town now urbanized and chock-full of New West bazillionaires, the […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Reluctant Boomtown
Mining abandoned Superior a decade ago. Now the industry is ready to return, but this little Arizona town is not sure it wants it back.
Posted inWotr
Lake Powell’s sandstone walls speak after 232 years
Across the Southwest, Native Americans, explorers, miners, settlers and Mormon pioneers have left dozens of inscriptions on rock walls. Now, a rare historical marking has been authenticated on one of the canyon cliffs that surround Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The inscription was carved when the United States was only six months […]
Posted inWotr
Hank, the non-cow dog
A story in my local Montana paper, the Missoulian, described the growing problem of family pets harassing wildlife and livestock. It seems that the expansion of urban life into the wild is taking its toll on deer, elk, cattle and all kinds of burrowing creatures. The story really hit home as my dog Hank, aka […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
Die with me
“Indians must either fall in with the march of civilization and progress,” wrote Major James McLaughlin, military director of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 1889, “or be crushed by the passage of the multitude.” More than a century later, three writers uncomfortably assess that prediction, and find that Native Americans have indeed fallen into […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
Heard around the West
UTAH Jim Stiles, publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr in Moab, has been called cynical, chronically ticked off, dour and – more kindly perhaps – curmudgeonly. He is greatly annoyed by the Lycra-clad bicyclists that invade his part of the world, and he’d like the rip-’em-up crowd of ATV and four-wheel-drivers to take a hike. […]