History buffs can easily get an education alongside Western highways. Interpretive signs point out where Chief Joseph retreated, and where Lewis and Clark spent the winter. But what if you want to know what’s coming out of the smokestack in the distance? Or what gets made inside that gigantic steel structure you just passed? The […]
Communities
Posted inJanuary 23, 2006: Timberlands up for grabs
Eight decades of magic and beauty at Ghost Ranch
New Mexico’s most famous resort, Ghost Ranch, has charmed many visitors. One overwhelmed admirer proclaimed that any description of the place amounted to “an advertisement for God and New Mexico.” Area historian Lesley Poling-Kempes tells the story of Ghost Ranch and its lovers in her absorbing new book, Ghost Ranch. Ghost Ranch covers 20,000 acres […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2006: Timberlands up for grabs
Timberlands up for grabs
The West’s private forests are on the auction block, pitting forest communities against developers in a red-hot real estate market
Posted inJanuary 23, 2006: Timberlands up for grabs
Heard around the West
OREGON Bobby Henderson may be 25 years old and in between jobs, but the Oregon State University physics graduate is the founder and prophet of a wildly popular new religion. Henderson has it on good authority that a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” created mankind, along with everything else from dinosaurs to wombats. Therefore, he says, his […]
Posted inWotr
A wish for the new year: A Scrooged Bush
One of my favorite stories of the Holiday season is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. What could be more inspiring than that moment when Ebenezer Scrooge, after enduring the long dark night of the soul, wakes up a new man? Scrooge’s transformation from a fearful, angry tightwad to a joyful gift-giver always fills me […]
Posted inWotr
Oil shale, our feel-good rock
Oil shale has made big news this past year. Congress has ordered the leasing of federal oil shale lands, and would-be developers are reporting advances in both conventional retorting and innovative, in-situ extraction technologies. Yet somehow I don’t get a warm, fuzzy feeling that oil shale is going to help me out at the gas […]
Posted inWotr
Welcome, podnah, to the Westernized West
A hotel in my town has rechristened its newly remodeled pub the “Silver Spur Lounge.” I’m sure they just grabbed the last available piece of cowboy mythology that hadn’t been snapped up by someone else in the local tourism industry. But the name still has me puzzled: What exactly about the reality of upscale downtown […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
A natural and cultural history of the Rocky Mountains
The backbone of the West, the Great Divide, stretches some 1,100 rugged miles from Montana to New Mexico. It’s been the home of Native Americans, artists, miners, mountain men, preachers and charlatans, back-to-the-landers and trust funders. Each group has defined the landscape for its own purpose, leading author Gary Ferguson to conclude, “Hardly a story […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
The Sum of our Past: Revisiting Pioneer Women
The Sum of our Past: Revisiting Pioneer Women Judy Busk 224 pages, hardcover: $32.95 Signature Books, 2004. Pioneer women are often portrayed as strong, brazen heroines or meek, conforming housewives. Author Judy Busk looks beyond the stereotypes to find the truth of these women’s lives in a book that’s part personal memoir, part historical research. […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
The Pictograph Murders
The Pictograph Murders P.G. Karamesines 352 pages, softcover: $21.95 Signature Books, 2004. P.G. Karamesines combines pot hunting, witchcraft, and murder in a chilling first novel set on an archaeological dig in southern Utah. A sinister stranger appears in the field camp; he models himself on Coyote, the legendary Indian trickster. When Alex McKelvey, an archaeology […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
A New Green Revolution
In Montana’s dying farm country, ‘vanguard agriculture’ puts people back on the land
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
The ranch wife, reinvented
At the end of a long dusty road that bumps through Wyoming sage country, Twin Creek Ranch looks like a typical ranch. Outside a hand-hewn log building, turkeys and chickens peck at the ground; cattle graze on a nearby hillside, and ranch dogs guard a pack of goats. But it takes only one conversation with […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
Heard around the West
UTAH Wasatch Brewery’s new Evolution Amber Ale packs humor on every label. Complete with a “Darwin Approved” seal, it shows a hunched-over ape at the dawn of mankind, then two other simian incarnations leading to the current version of Modern Naked Guy: He’s slugging down a bottle of beer with one hand and toting a […]
Posted inWotr
Bet on Las Vegas for Western solutions
Las Vegas is a funny place to find solutions to the woes of Western cities, but in southern Nevada, the phenomenal growth of the last 20 years has spawned innovative ways to solve the problems of Western cities. Las Vegas has all the problems of a healthy economy — growth, sprawl, air pollution, traffic congestion, […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Not just any book about the grasslands
In the final scene of John Price’s book, Not Just Any Land, a botanist watches buffalo moving in at an Iowa wildlife refuge and says, “There are mysteries about Iowa tallgrass only buffalo can solve.” America’s grasslands, which once stretched from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, are now mostly gone, but several national […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Coming home to a Montana town
A clear stream and a cottonwood tree anchor Karen Brichoux’s pensive new novel. The Girl She Left Behind tells the story of Katherine Earle, who flees the big city to return to her tiny hometown in a Montana mountain valley. Katherine had crept away from Montana with her musician fiancé as a lovestruck 18-year-old, without […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Earth Notes
Earth Notes Edited by Peter Friederici 70 pages, softcover: $6.95 Grand Canyon Association and KNAU, 2005. Served up in two-page bites, Earth Notes is a tasty selection of tidbits about the Southwest’s canyon country. Editor Peter Friederici dishes out a smorgasbord of nicely illustrated topics ranging from heirloom plant seeds to ancient stone calendars to […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Flood insurance crimps Western waterways
Federal program fosters development, damages rivers and wetlands
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Healing the border with words
Denise Chávez believes that art can — and should — make a difference in everyday lives. “Why is the arts community so mute?” asks Chávez. “On the one hand, it’s a terrible time — people are so fearful, afraid of each other, afraid of people who are different, afraid to learn something new. But it’s […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Heard around the West
COLORADO A deliciously funny film called The Lost People of Mountain Village wowed audiences at Telluride’s Mountainfilm festival and other venues around western Colorado. In deadpan style, the 15-minute pseudo-documentary explores what happened to the overlords who once lived above high-altitude Telluride. The joke for locals: The “town” of Mountain Village always feels abandoned by […]