Until I traveled to Holland recently, I didn’t know how irreversibly American I am. Perhaps I’m not precisely a patriot — the word comes from the Latin for father — but I’m certainly one deeply identified with my native land. In Amsterdam, people eyed me with pity, suspicion or loathing as soon as I opened […]
Communities
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Heard around the West
WYOMING Residents of a golf course community near Grand Teton National Park are distressed about a hunter killing a bull moose in their midst. The animal, which sported a huge set of antlers, had been a regular visitor to the Teton Pines neighborhood, wandering from one backyard to another. This time it was accompanied by […]
Posted inWotr
Spaceboys: The manly myth strikes again
On Oct. 4, SpaceShipOne blasted to the edge of space from a Mojave Desert Airport for the second time in five days, winning its design team a $10 million prize. The ship is the only privately funded manned vehicle ever to leave the atmosphere, and has already inspired the owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways to […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Can Vail find room for its workers?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Part-Time Paradise.” When suspicious fires swept through a mountaintop restaurant and several chairlifts in October 1998, the resort village of Vail realized it had problems — and not just with the “ecoterrorists” of the Earth Liberation Front, who claimed responsibility for the blazes (HCN, […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
As the town hollows out, one Aspen neighborhood thrives
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Part-Time Paradise.” A few years ago, it was a Superfund site. Now the Smuggler Mobile Home Park is a vibrant neighborhood, whose residents have a wide range of incomes — from police officers and ski instructors to doctors and real estate brokers — in […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Heard around the West
COLORADO Mach schnell, little doggies: Thanks to a German TV reality show, five frauleins, age 20 to 61, are riding horses, flinging ropes at calves and fixing fence at a working ranch in New Raymer, in eastern Colorado. Selected from over 1,000 applicants who want to become cowgirls, the women face a daunting prospect, reports […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Part-Time Paradise
Mountain towns echo with construction activity, but the resulting homes lie silent much of the year
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Second homes, by the numbers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Part-Time Paradise.” Percentage that Summit County’s population has grown since 1990: 98 Percentage of Summit County homes that are second homes: 67 Percentage of second homes in five Colorado mountain counties occupied from April to June: 12 Percentage of second-home owners in Pitkin County […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Former Enron CEO took his money and ran
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Part-Time Paradise.” Former Enron CEO Ken Lay made out like a bandit, in a manner of speaking, when he sold his three Aspen houses and a land parcel in the wake of the energy giant’s bankruptcy. Lay sold a six-bedroom, six-bath house on more […]
Posted inWotr
The ghost of Richard Butler surfaces in Arizona
It would be foolish to believe that the death of Aryan Nations’ leader Richard Butler means the death of hate in the West. Butler, who sowed ill will for decades in the region, passed away at the age of 86 Sept. 8 in Hayden, Idaho. He died a broken man, his empire of knuckle-draggers that […]
Posted inWotr
Chain stores discount a town’s true worth
Glasgow, Mont., is a far cry and a long drive from the mountainous western portion of a state that draws its name from the Spanish word montana. I know that because I recently drove to Glasgow, a town of 3,253 that rests in a flat region of northeastern Montana and serves as the county seat […]
Posted inWotr
Nostalgia for Colorado’s past isn’t what it used to be
A wave of yearning for “Colorado as it used to be” has been sweeping the state and I suspect much of the West. It’s almost enough to make you wish for a time machine. If only the past were as wonderful as we think it was. This nostalgic, backward-looking pose is particularly evident in the […]
Posted inWotr
Red-baiters target greens in Oregon
A group in White City, Ore., has opened a broad attack on teaching environmental sustainability in our public schools and universities, calling it the kind of brainwashing Lenin and Hitler would do. The group, Operation Green Out, ran two full-page ads in The Oregonian, Oregon’s largest daily newspaper, earlier this year. They warned of a […]
Posted inWotr
What I Hate Most About You
Editor’s note: The author is said to live “on a 100-year-old ranch that once was miles from the nearest neighbor but now may be right next door to your new subdivision.” Dear new neighbors, I’ve never met any of you. If I did, I would be perfectly polite. Probably I’d even think you’re nice folks. […]
Posted inWotr
Automate this: personal interaction in a small town
The big news in my small town has been the new automated checkout line at the grocery store. You scan the purchases yourself, and then give the machine your credit card, with no need for any human interaction. At least that’s how I’m told it works — I haven’t used the thing myself. It’s a […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Dang crazy women
Like the two previous anthologies created by editors Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier and Nancy Curtis, Leaning into the Wind and Woven on the Wind, Crazy Woman Creek gathers hundreds of poems, stories and memories from women all across the West. This latest anthology’s theme is how Western women create and sustain the connections that define […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Heard Around the West
IDAHO The director of the BlueRibbon Coalition,a Boise-based group that lobbies for more all-terrain access on public lands, recently had to take a leave without pay. Bill Dart was cited this August by a U.S. Forest Service enforcement agent for illegally taking people on motorcycle tours through the backcountry. Dart neglected to get an outfitter’s […]
Posted inWotr
Lewis and Clark and the short view of Western history
If American history west of the Mississippi begins with Lewis and Clark, then the history of the United States seems pretty simple: “Indians owned the West, and then they lost it.” History is never so simple. That some of the people Lewis and Clark met had “never seen a white man” did not mean they […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
Wamsutter Profiles
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “When a Boom is a Bust.” The preacher Mike Smith has put in nine and a half years as pastor of Wamsutter Baptist Church, the town’s only surviving church (four others have closed in recent memory). He used to mine uranium in Jeffrey City, […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
The wages of sprawl
A new documentary, Making Sense of Place: Phoenix, the Urban Desert, uses the Arizona megalopolis to illustrate what happens when suburban sprawl goes unchecked. Historical and current footage shows how cheap land and even cheaper water have encouraged Phoenix to sprawl over more than 1,700 square miles of Sonoran desert. But the resulting generic suburbs, […]