UTAH Some Western wag once said that the most dangerous thing in a forest was a bunch of Boy Scouts with hatchets. In Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest, make that heavy equipment instead of hatchets. When his son needed a service project to become an Eagle Scout, Scott Vanleeuwen proposed “cleaning up” an abandoned trail that […]
Communities
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Like Paul on the road to Damascus
The fact that cynicism and irony are deeply entrenched in popular culture is hardly headline news; most of us indulge in them from time to time, slide into a detached stance if for no other reason than self-defense. Harmless enough, probably, in small doses. But as I was walking past the Toyota dealership some weeks […]
Posted inWotr
One way to get rid of Lake Powell
What’s in a name? Controversy, as I learned about 25 years ago when I began editing a newspaper in Breckenridge, Colo. I called one local attraction what I’d always called it — “Dillon Reservoir.” The nearby Dillon Chamber of Commerce told me that it was scenic “Lake Dillon.” I argued that it was not a […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
Heard Around the West
IDAHO Editorials across the country spanked Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig for wielding his formidable clout just to bring what the New York Times called “wasteful pork” to Boise — in this case, eight C-130 cargo planes that the Air Force supposedly promised to Boise’s Air National Guard seven years ago. Only four planes have […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Journey to the bottom of Navajo Lake
José “Ed” Marquez, 67, squints into the late afternoon sunlight, scanning what remains of Navajo Reservoir. “When they started filling the lake in 1961, I couldn’t imagine that this town I’d grown up in would soon be under water,” he says, waving his hand over the miles of dried and cracked mud now taking the […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Women take the wheel
In the 1990s, the bumper sticker “Thelma and Louise Live!” sprouted on mini-vans driven by mothers in suburbs across America, proclaiming a craving for a journey beyond the kids’ soccer fields. The 19 women writers who contributed to A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West have peeled out of the daily commute, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Look before you eat
Surely, we would feel better if we knew that food companies were doing everything possible to minimize food hazards, and that the government was looking out for our interests and making sure food companies were doing what they were supposed to. In the absence of such reassurance, we lose trust. — Marion Nestle, Safe Food […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Ground Zero
A near miss in the Craters of the Moon puts the fight for the land into perspective
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Essays for thought
For the past 33 years, High Country News has lived up to its name, focusing on the news. Though we’ve concentrated on the environment, we’ve also covered Western culture, politics and economics, because you can’t separate the environmental issues from the arenas in which they play out. Besides, the context is part of what makes […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Running home
It’s been four years since I touched human bone, since I had silt and clay stuck beneath my fingernails and inside the cracked skin of my knuckles — silt and clay that had cradled bones for hundreds of years. I used to work as a contract archaeologist, scanning the landscape for petroglyphs and fire rings, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Love and loathing on the interstate highways
At a conference several years ago, we were given crayons and sheets of white paper and asked to draw our visions of utopia. This was in the West, so of course a great many rustic cabins in meadows far removed from civilization were sketched onto these sheets. Not mine. Yes, of course, I had hills […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Seeing the mysterious in the everyday
Someday, everything is gonna be different / When I paint my masterpiece. — Bob Dylan It’s late at night in the green springtime, and I’m wide awake in the studio, Van Morrison on the CD player and a pastel painting slowly coming to life on the easel before me. Hayfields and a line of cottonwoods, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA If you protest acts of violence, does that make you a violent person? The answer is yes, according to the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center. The center warned Oakland police that an anti-war protest planned for the city’s port might turn violent, even though there was no evidence that demonstrators intended to do anything but […]
Posted inWotr
Why I do what I do, the way that I do it
I hate corpo-jargon, the trying-to-be hip phrases that aren’t. But the first words in my mind as I pull off Quartzite, Arizona’s main drag into the gritty parking lot of Reader’s Oasis are: “I am definitely working outside the box.” The big-box bookstores, that is. Reader’s Oasis is a metal shed, a half-dozen tables, a […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Road-builders pay for archaeological damage
Even in “wild and woolly” Catron County, N.M., you still have to pay if you’re caught damaging archaeological sites on public land. In 1999, a private landowner hired a construction company to clear a dirt road through a national forest to a patch of private land. In the process, the bulldozer plowed through three prehistoric […]
Posted inWotr
The bittersweet comings and goings in a small town
Most schools have a Homecoming weekend. Red Lodge, Mont., celebrates a different kind of coming home, on Memorial Day. On the last weekend in May, snowplows finish clearing the 10,000-foot Beartooth Pass between Red Lodge and Cooke City. And unless blizzards close it right back up again, which happens with some regularity, people like to […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
A native son of Oregon writes of heartbreak, determination
As its subtitle suggests, David James Duncan’s latest book of essays, My Story as Told by Water, has a little bit of everything: “confessions, Druidic rants, bird-watchings, visions, prayers.” At its core, the book is about how this native son of Oregon — author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K — […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Heard Around the West
NEVADA Las Vegas’ drought has gotten so serious that some golf courses are replacing grass with crushed rock. But course managers aren’t ripping out their turf without casting verbal stones at homeowners, who use 65 percent of the area’s water, spraying three-quarters of it outdoors, according to The Associated Press. Golf courses are just the […]
Posted inWotr
The West loses an unsentimental guide
Historian David Lavender was the best sort of guide a traveler in the West could have: A quiet man with a wry sense of humor, he was passionate about this region, refused to romanticize it and was happy to share his knowledge if asked. He was never sentimental about the West, writing about cowboys: “Although […]
Posted inWotr
Real ranches don’t have “ette” in their name
Listen up, folks, here’s a vocabulary lesson from a rancher and writer who’s tired of bad writing distorting Western history. A ranch is not just any patch of rural ground, and the saying, “All hat, no cattle,” is more than a joke. It’s true most ranchers prefer not to reveal the size of their places, […]