The heck with drought! In some suburbs outside of Denver, it’s grass that counts, and heaven help you if you let it yellow and wither. Some residents of the covenant-controlled developments at Highlands Ranch and in the town of Westminster found that out recently when they tried to be good citizens and save water. Notices […]
Communities
Posted inJune 10, 2002: Hatching reform
In the throat of a black hole
I am standing over this crevice of Antelope Canyon, a thin fissure in the bedrock of far northern Arizona, a tourist attraction on the Navajo Reservation. It is dark down there, as if I am looking through the cracked roof of a mosque into an unlit interior. A metal ladder leads down and I follow […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Singing cowboys strike a bad chord
UTAH Cultural tourism may be a hot ticket in some parts of the West, but a troupe of singing cowboys is looking for a new home after their failed theater proposal divided a small northern Utah town. The Bar-K Wranglers, a six-man ensemble that performs a dinner theater show, wanted to build a permanent venue […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
New museum takes visitors beyond Yellowstone
Dr. Charles Preston wishes he had better understood the Yellowstone region during his first visit there as a teen-ager. Now, as curator of the new Draper Museum in Cody, Wyo., his job is to bolster the knowledge of a new generation of Yellowstone visitors. The Draper, part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, links geological, […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Small towns court upscale tourists
Visitors who like art, theater and fine cuisine bring big bucks to the rural West
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Ranching the changing times
My earliest memories revolve around my dad waking me up with the sun to work cattle. My feet took the shape of the pointed boots and my head grew within my Stetson, leaving an indented white forehead. I never even thought about not ranching. In 1978, I partnered with my dad to buy a ranch […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Heard around the West
Starbucks employees in Monroe, Wash., were greeted just before dawn recently by a man and woman who forced them to open a safe and hand over its contents. But instead of getting some java to go and making their get-away, the couple pitched in at a crowded takeout window. The man donned an apron, reports […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Riding the Line
Ruben Rivera leans his elbow on the side of a pickup truck. His wife and brother-in-law stand in the truck bed to get a better view of the race. Rivera’s horse, Misterio – “Mystery” he explains, rather unnecessarily – is running in the third race. “But on the other side.” We are officially in Mexico […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
Property rights reined in
Urban planning and environmental protection got a shot in the arm on April 23, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that property owners at Lake Tahoe are not entitled to government compensation for a moratorium that prevented them from building on their land (HCN, 2/18/02). Following a series of Supreme Court decisions that bolstered […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
BITTERROOT VALLEY, Mont. – Remember that scene from Dances with Wolves, when Kevin Costner’s character spins through billowing, thigh-deep yellow grassland, his fingers lightly grazing the seedheads? I’ve spent a good stretch of this radiant summer morning working across a prairie in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley doing the same thing, but without that inspiring light touch. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
The Old West went that-a-way
The East Coast editor wants me to tell her something new. Something nobody knows about the West. Something special. Something secret. I rack my brain. And my ethics. What we have left out here that’s special needs to stay special. Our secrets need to be kept. Here’s the piece I sent her. She turned it […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
Heard around the West
There’s yet another use for duct tape, one more innovative than the last one you might have thought of – such as wrapping up like a bullet for Halloween. Duct tape came in handy at a Montana airport after a botched takeoff knocked “stewardesses on their butts” and busted the lens on a navigational light, […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Sagebrush artistry
Nevada potter Dennis Parks celebrates his exit from the rat race in a new memoir, Living in the Country Growing Weird. With his wife and two sons in tow, Parks left a tenure-track professorship in Southern California 30 years ago, settled in Tuscarora, Nev., a ghost town, and founded a pottery school that today attracts […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Sprawl is in the numbers
Westerners are all too familiar with the phenomenon of “urban sprawl,” as development creeps farther from city limits and eats up more land. A study released by the nonprofit Numbers USA offers new insight into the causes of sprawl, emphasizing the contribution of population growth to changes in land use. Weighing Sprawl Factors in Large […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Suburbanites compete for the lake’s freshwater
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Great Salt Lake’s fate largely turns on three rivers that flow out of the Wasatch and Uinta mountains. But as population booms along the Wasatch Front and water-use rates remain among the highest in the nation, development pressure is mounting on the Bear, Weber […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Lake stops sprawl in its tracks … for now
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As Salt Lake City and its suburbs have sprawled across the Wasatch Front, little sleep has been lost over Great Salt Lake. So it was hardly a surprise to anyone last August when bulldozers started rolling through lakeside marshes, laying the foundation for what […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Leave my town out of your ‘Top 10’
Help me with a quick survey: Pick the “10 Best Towns” that people call home in America. Go ahead, take a minute. I’m betting Driggs, Idaho, wasn’t your top choice. But that’s assuming you didn’t pick up the March issue of Men’s Journal while waiting for a root canal and see its list of the […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Heard around the West
Alligators have arrived at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where they are enrolled in a research project. The fanged fauna from Florida must wear plastic masks over their long snouts, and once they’ve begun tooling along on a treadmill at one mile per hour, scientists start measuring their breathing. Alligators are peculiar […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Muscle car of the prairie
I drove out east in the car with the crumpled front end. It was a vintage 1966 Pontiac LeMans with no muffler. At 60 miles an hour it roared like an F-16. The dry western wind whipping through the open windows made me feel alive and powerful. A year earlier, when I was 15, my […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
City gets in the zone for fish
OREGON Portland is one of a few urban areas where endangered fish swim in the shadows of high-rises. In an effort to prevent eroding stream banks and rising water temperatures that harm fish, the city’s planning bureau designated zones along its streams that impose building and landscape regulations on 19,000 acres of residential property. That […]