High Country by Willard Wyman, 160 Pages, hardcover $24.95: University of Oklahoma Press, September 2005. If by now you’ve tired of the summer-reading crop of spy thrillers and cheesy romances, try this Depression-era novel about a boy, Ty Hardin, who leaves the family ranch in Montana to become a mulepacker. After being wounded in World […]
Communities
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
The Gangs of Zion
In Mormon Country, young Polynesians search for identity — and for escape from a seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
In the suburbs of Los Angeles, your future awaits
Los Angeles is nearly built out. The last empty bits of the metropolis are already being fitted into a titanic grid of neighborhoods that extends 60 miles from south to north and from the Pacific Ocean deep into the desert. The closing of the suburban frontier in Los Angeles ends a 100-year experiment in place-making […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
Heard around the West
WESTERN COLORADO The Gladstone Kibosh, a lively newspaper published 114 years ago in the then-booming mining town of Silverton, Colo., was surely edited by a Western wag. Here’s an excerpt from 1891, reprinted in the modern weekly, the Silverton Standard, which itself celebrated its 130th year of publication this summer: “Advertise in the Kibosh. It […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson from the old ones at Mesa Verde
A green-tailed towhee is down in the canyon, hidden amid the green leafy oaks, singing his heart out as all male towhees do. I am in Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, gazing at the spectacle of Cliff Palace. Just then, a ranger appears announcing some spare tickets to Cliff Palace; someone, it seems, has reconsidered […]
Posted inWotr
Stubborn people appreciate the ‘barren’ Great Plains
When people who don’t live here write about the Great Plains, they usually use the words “bleak,” “empty” and “wasteland” to describe it. The writer often suggests that our economy and people are “depressed” because their “lifestyles” are “vanishing.” Photographs show sky and clouds above miles of windblown, rolling — not flat — grass. Prairie […]
Posted inWotr
In a small town, the police blotter can be big news
The biggest deterrent to crime in a small rural town may be the newspaper’s police blotter. With so little crime news, every infraction makes it into print. Worse, since everybody knows everybody, even your tiniest speeding ticket goes into a gigantic Gossip Database, to be recalled by little old ladies at the least appropriate moments. […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Tales of Colorado’s high-elevation tailings
In 1983, an anonymous caller warned Doc Smith that “his river would turn red.” Sure enough, the next day, the rancher and veterinarian watched toxic mining metals surge through the Arkansas River as it crossed his property. This wasn’t the first time: His grandfather had fought the effects of mining on his ranchlands and livestock […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Head games in the hot, hot desert
No matter how well-mapped the world seems to be, explorers remain intrepid. In The Way Out, Colorado writer Craig Childs writes about how he and his traveling companion, Dirk Vaughan, found their way through a desert on the Navajo Indian Reservation in southern Utah. Both Childs and Vaughan seem to crave the harsh truths of […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Complete History of New Mexico
Complete History of New Mexico Kevin McIlvoy, 174 pages, paperback $15: Graywolf Press, 2004. This collection of short stories from a Las Cruces-based writer is published by the independent Graywolf Press. Kevin McIlvoy’s stories are written from a variety of perspectives — from 11-year-old Chum telling the history of the state as he sees it, […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Heard around the West
IDAHO “It’s the ultimate in recycling,” says Victor Bruha. He and a friend, Daniel Hidalgo, have begun turning large mounds of bison poop into high-quality art paper. The idea isn’t really new: An Australian company sells kangaroo-dung paper, and in Thailand, elephants supply the needed material in super-sized quantities. But it took months for Hidalgo […]
Posted inWotr
Why we need the ranch
I recently attended a benefit for an organic farm in Missoula, Mont., a town known for its leftist politics, environmental activism and outdoors culture. Missoula can be described as part Portland, part Telluride, a “New West” city by any measure. So I found it strange that both the performers that evening kept referring to their […]
Posted inWotr
Lewis and Clark trout at 200
One June evening exactly 200 years ago, a young private in the U.S. Army baited a hook tied to a willow stick and tossed it into one of the largest waterfalls on earth. The line went taut under the strength of a 2-pound flash of living silver. The soldier took in the line, hand over […]
Posted inWotr
Los Angeles in your future
Los Angeles is nearly built out. The last empty bits of the metropolis are already being fitted into a titanic grid of neighborhoods that extends, except for mountains and coastline, 60 miles from south to north and from the Pacific Ocean deep into the desert. The closing of the suburban frontier in Los Angeles ends […]
Posted inWotr
Rooting for the underdog
The hailstones came down like meteorites. They crashed against the house and whistled through the trees, ripping and shredding as if their icy edges were honed razor-sharp. I stood behind the screen door and watched as the clear fiberglass roofing on the front porch was torn, twisted and obliterated, bits and pieces of fiberglass flying […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
A tasty history of the Southwest
If you think fusion food was something California chefs cooked up in the 1980s, you’re off by a couple of centuries. Gardens of New Spain opens in 1492, the year Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand kicked the Moors out of Spain. The Moors fled, but they had already left an indelible mark on Iberian cuisine: […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
The more the West changes, the more it stays the same
Bernard DeVoto, a man with few sacred cows, wrote a monthly column on the West for Harper’s magazine from 1946 until 1955. From “The Easy Chair,” he expounded on everything from how cattlemen destroyed Western watersheds to why the West is “systematically looted and has always been bankrupt.” Now, history professor Edward K. Muller has […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
The Great Divide
It is 7:30 in the morning on July 24, 2004 — the day of Utah’s biggest holiday. Salt Lake City’s usually reserved downtown is bustling. Parade floats are parked haphazardly along side streets. Spectators spill out of the city’s light-rail system, lugging lawn chairs and water jugs as they scope out prime sidewalk real estate […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
Suburbia blasts through a national monument
With a road headed its way, a new development takes root on Albuquerque’s West side
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
This mayor sees a different shade of green
NAME Greg Nickels VOCATION Mayor of Seattle, D, elected in 2001 AGE 49 NOTED FOR Starting a mayoral “green team” to combat global warming HE SAYS “If we expect (people in) the community to change their habits, we need to lead by example.” Early this year, while the Pacific Northwest endured one of the […]