Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. LEADVILLE, Colo. – Cross-country skier Mike LeVine strides by the rusted ore car and other mining relics that decorate the Mineral Belt Trail. LeVine moved to Leadville from Chicago five years ago, looking to retire in a mountain town that isn’t a glitzy resort. […]
Communities
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Heard Around the West
Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar says it’s no secret: The Bush administration “hates” environmentalists. “I cannot see another way to explain the endless string of one-sided decisions and the dripping condescension with which they are delivered,” Balzar writes. “In a feather-brained brief, the administration argued that conservationists should consider the upside of bird deaths […]
Posted inWotr
Life on the border, where education gets lost
Before I started my job this year as librarian and English teacher on the Tohono O’odham reservation, I visited the campus. A teacher looked me over and said, “You better come in that library like a gangbuster.” A gangbuster? Having just turned 25, I must have looked as young as I felt. But I’d studied […]
Posted inWotr
Medical use of marijuana is a states’ rights issue
Medical use of marijuana is a states’ rights issue By Seth Zuckerman Like the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, marijuana advocates suffered a setback at the polls last month. By a margin of 2 to 1, Nevada voters trounced a much-publicized proposal to legalize cannabis for personal use. B ut the Bush administration would be […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Like Butte, a lonely dog hangs on
BUTTE, Mont. – On the fringe of this faded mining town, at the core of one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, lives an amazing paradox. Its genus is Canus, but its species would have to be called extraordinarius. I doubt there’s ever been another dog like this on the planet. The mysterious, mostly wild […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Farmers band together to stave off sprawl
In California’s Central Valley, a strategy for steering growth takes shape
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
What Dick Cheney might have learned in Rock Springs, Wyoming
It’s too bad that Dick Cheney didn’t stick around longer in Rock Springs back when he was growing up in the deep West. He worked in the Wyoming city decades ago, in the early 1960s, after he flunked out of Yale. For Cheney, it was a bottom-of-the-heap job, stringing electrical lines as a “groundman.” It […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Heard Around the West
Cabela’s of Nebraska, the consumer bible for hunters, anglers and other rugged outdoor folk, offers a novel gift for Christmas in its new catalog: Camouflage bedding. Sheets come in elusive patterns of wetlands, hardwoods and mossy oak that bring “the look and feel of the outdoors to the bedroom.” Spouses who indulge in other products, […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
A briny time capsule
In 1970, when artist Robert Smithson constructed his 1,500-ft-long spiral-shaped sculpture in the Great Salt Lake, he planned for the natural rise and fall of the water to deposit salt crystals on its black stone base. But “The Spiral Jetty,” which used more than 6,650 tons of basalt, disappeared entirely in 1972, submerged in the […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Putting green Portland on the map
Though Portland has earned a reputation as a green city, with its well-publicized parks, organic markets and light-rail lines, even savvy locals find it challenging to connect the city’s disparate venues. The search just got easier with the Portland Green Map, a map with 800 resources and points of interest for Portlanders who lean green. […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
A slap of Western reality
“Piety, kitsch, self-importance, sentimentalism – these deadly literary sins seem to thrive on good clean country air,” writes William Finnegan in his foreword to William Gruber’s book, On All Sides Nowhere. Finnegan hails Gruber for avoiding these sins in his memoir of life in northern Idaho. In 1972, Gruber and his wife moved from Philadelphia […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Planning’s poster child grows up
Oregon’s 30-year-old land-use rules may need a face-lift
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
New Urbanism creates living communities
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Urban planner Jacob Brostoff lounges in a grassy common area and beams with admiration as he looks out over Orenco Station, a new development in a suburb of Portland. “This place is nothing like traditional suburbia,” he says. “I hated growing up in the […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Across the Columbia, a game of catch-up
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Pam Vanderheiden listens to a lot of radio – she certainly has the time. Every day, she joins the throngs of people who commute from Vancouver, Wash., across the Columbia River into Portland, Ore. Every day, the traffic is bad. “Getting home is a […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Wherever you go, sprawl isn’t far behind
Some of my wilderness-loving friends are abandoning California. Sick of the traffic, the smog, the subdivisions creeping up and destroying beloved landscapes, they’re bailing out in search of smaller communities in the true West. But urban sprawl is everywhere east of here. Like most other man-made problems, sprawl is not something you can run away […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Heard Around the West
Animal rights activists just don’t get it: Not all animals are wimps. A 4-year-old dachshund called Brutus loves jumping out of planes, according to his skydiving owner, Ron Sirull, who puts the pooch in a pouch to strap him to his chest. The daring duo took part in an air show at Vandenberg Air Force […]
Posted inWotr
Ranchers band together to break a monopoly on marketing
Step onto almost any ranch in the West nowadays and you’re likely to hear someone cussin’ the meatpackers. The next thing you might hear is a phone call from that same rancher to his or her congressman asking support for a ban on packer ownership of cattle. Packers are the people at the end of […]
Posted inWotr
Mexican workers in our towns want to legitimize their presence
The hour was early, the high desert air was fall-frosty, and the coffee was, well, truly horrible. I’d arrived for my volunteer shift at a Catholic church in the western Colorado town of Delta, and I had a very bad feeling. Five hundred people were already waiting on the sidewalk outside, sipping the acrid coffee, […]
Posted inWotr
My trysts with Miss November
November out West: The spectacle of changing leaves has passed, the hills collecting snow are not yet blanketed in white, and daylight savings brings night time all too soon. It may sound innocent, but the season feels like a cruel and careless mistress to me. I first ventured West in November, four years ago; I […]
Posted inWotr
Why I’m thankful this Thanksgiving
The things I am thankful for this week are still there: family, health, work, life in the rural West. But I have to scratch beneath world events to find them. I can no longer live as if my well-being depended only on me. In fairness, I never fully lived as if what was immediately around […]