UTAH It must be nerve-racking to teach school in Salt Lake City, where, at any time, a person can legally walk into a classroom with a gun concealed in clothing or tucked into a backpack. But that’s state law, so what’s a school district to do? One state legislator pooh-poohs potential problems, advising teachers and […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
California’s growth machine fueled these disastrous wildfires
The wildfires that gnawed their way through drought-crisped Southern California are on a pace to establish a record for acreage charred and for the dollar value of structures and belongings destroyed. Perhaps this is no great feat in a state where homes worth $250,000 five years ago are worth twice that today. The monetary disaster […]
Posted inWotr
To have and have not in Flagstaff, Arizona
I’m still appalled by the subject line of the e-mail I received a month ago. “Great news: we are homeless!” I didn’t know the address on the e-mail. Based on the subject line, I figured it was probably from a Democratic candidate informing me about a Bushite atrocity. I clicked open the e-mail to find […]
Posted inWotr
Trying out for the new sport of Extreme Canning
It’s getting harder and harder to be an “extreme” athlete. The ultra-fit among us aren’t just climbing all Western peaks over 14,000 feet; they’re climbing them in less than 10 days and doing it on snowboards, skis, bikes and in-line skates. All this requires thousands of dollars’ worth of gear and years of training. And […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
The Gear Biz
The West has become the nation’s playground, but is there a future here for the folks who make our outdoor toys?
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
My Sensitive Man meets culture shock on the range
When the movie Open Range came to my western Colorado town, my sweetie and I made a beeline for the theater. We waited in line for popcorn with a good number of other folks: old-timers and Forest Service employees and their spouses. They apparently hadn’t had enough open range by the end of the long […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Heard Around The West
COLORADO The little racehorse that could — Seabiscuit — is adjusting to a life of luxury on a guest ranch in the mountains above Telluride, Colo. The 4-year-old horse who starred in the movie Seabiscuit “is really a sweetheart,” says Dave Farny, who runs Skyline Guest Ranch. “He’s got a good rein — he’ll spin, […]
Posted inWotr
Culture shock on the Range
When the movie Open Range came to my western Colorado town, my sweetie and I made a beeline for the theater. We waited in line for popcorn with a good number of other folks: old-timers and Forest Service employees and their spouses. They apparently hadn’t had enough open range by the end of the long […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Urban planners look to farmland to feed industrial growth
Portland — the darling of urban planners — is bursting at the seams, and the growth is forcing policy-makers to expand the region’s prized urban growth boundary. Metro, the agency responsible for keeping development within the boundary, already added an unprecedented 18,600 acres for residential and industrial use last year. But the agency says it […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA Non-Californians might assume that living close to nature is a wonderful thing. Not so at Del Webb’s Sun City in Palm Desert, a 1,600-acre gated community for 9,000 people. Residents complain vociferously about sand in a nearby nature preserve that won’t stay put. “We are getting buried,” said Dennis DeBorde, 74, at a public […]
Posted inWotr
How to dis-credit yourself without really trying
I made my first telephone call in the 1950s by turning a crank on a wooden telephone box. Some neighbors on the party line always listened; in that small ranching community of rural South Dakota, everybody knew everybody’s business. Perhaps for that reason, most of us dealt honestly with each other. We paid cash for […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
City at the end of its rope
Anyone who has lived in Albuquerque, and sworn a curse upon the city and all its planners, visitors and inhabitants while broiling in traffic, and then eaten chile rellenos at sunset while watching the Sandia Mountains turn pink, knows that love and hate, beauty and grit, stand shoulder to shoulder in this desert city. Longtime […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Heard Around the West
NEVADA The satirical newspaper The Onion spoofed the Burning Man celebration in the Black Rock Desert, reporting that everybody was too spaced out to bother going. But in fact, some 30,000 people turned out in late August to “burn the man” — a 77 foot-high neon-colored effigy made of wood. Flames shot 150 feet in […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
The West’s Biggest Bully
Environmentalists in Montana’s Flathead County make quiet progress against a 5,000-watt loudmouth
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Sin City keeps its fringes wild
Las Vegans rally in an unprecedented fight to preserve open space
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Changing the number won’t change the fortunes of small towns strung across the dusty Southwest … where the future offers little more hope than dry thunderclouds promise rain.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Heard Around the West
THE NEW WEST To the question, “What would Jesus drive?” originally asked by the Evangelical Environmental Network, one group has an easy answer: a large SUV, of course. “Most people think it’s a ridiculous question, and that’s the approach we’ve taken toward our own ads,” says a spokesman for the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of […]
Posted inWotr
T-shirt etiquette confounds and confuses
“Just grab a shirt and let’s go,” my girlfriend said. But I hesitated. We were going whitewater rafting with her mother, and the top T-shirt in my drawer proclaimed its wearer an “Uneducated Idiot.” Somehow it didn’t seem a wise message. The moment has resonated with me, in part because I live near Yellowstone National […]
Posted inWotr
The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Route 666 is fading in the distance. That stepson of the Mother Road –Route 66 –is headed toward oblivion. That’s a shame, because for me, like plenty of pavement pilgrims who arrived in the West over the last half-century in RVs, SUVs or astride Harleys, the Devil’s Highway was the road into God’s Country. U.S. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Digging through the dust of Libby
For decades, the best jobs in Libby, Mont., were to be found at the local vermiculite mine. The work was tough and dusty, but it paid better than anything else in northern Montana. In the 1970s, however, mine workers, their families, and their neighbors started dying of respiratory diseases and rare, painful cancers. Libbyites didn’t […]