“You can’t be a sissy and live in this country,” the old rancher told me, his German accent evident despite his being native to this mountain valley. “Or at least you didn’t use to,” he added, looking me in the eye. It was the 1970s, and I was new to the Interior West. The rancher […]
Communities
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
Heard around the West
Once in a while, Utah makes us wonder. Guns, for instance, enjoy a privileged status that extends everywhere on Beehive State property except prisons, hospitals and courtrooms. That means you can wear a .40-caliber Glock pistol while teaching or taking notes in a college classroom, and nobody has the right to ask you to leave […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Why the bad rap for Mormons?
If you live in the Intermountain West, you know at least a few of them. If you live in Utah, they’re everywhere. If you are also a nonmember, or “gentile,” as Mormons call the rest of us, you bear a special burden when you leave home. Once people hear I’m from Utah, they invariably ask, […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Heard around the West
It’s good to be queen – the food is better – but then you get stale and lay fewer eggs, and pretty soon you’re out of a job. Buying new queens is what honeybee breeders face every year, reports Capital Press, and “requeening” has usually been no big deal. Queens can easily be shipped from […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
The Steens Riviera?
OREGON One year after Congress approved groundbreaking legislation to protect Steens Mountain in eastern Oregon, environmentalists worry that the essential parts of the plan are going nowhere (HCN, 11/6/00: Congress moves on local proposals). Although the Cooperative Management Act authorizes federal legislators to appropriate as much as $25 million from the Land and Water Conservation […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Cat trouble dogs Flagstaff
ARIZONA Ever since the Arizona Game and Fish Department killed two mountain lions on the edge of Flagstaff last fall, residents have been grappling with the hard facts of life on the edge of the forest. Game and Fish contracted with the federal Wildlife Services agency to kill the two lions, one Sept. 16 and […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Artists paint a Pacific Northwest history
A book this smart makes you wonder why the undertaking hasn’t been done before: telling the story of a region through the paintings it has inspired. No matter, because Sasquatch Books has just released The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, an excellently assembled book edited by Northwest Bookfest founder Kitty Harmon. It presents canvases […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
A neighborhood for Aspen’s ‘middle’ class
Developer tries to revive his community
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
The American West is an island besieged
I saw the future of the American West. It stared at me with an unblinking black eye through a narrow metal window in the wall of an aviary on the island of Maui. “That’s the female,” said our guide, Mary Schwartz. “She’s the social one.” The facility manager for the Maui Bird Conservation Center opened […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
A sense of wonder needs no name
Once, I canoed around an Idaho river bend and surprised two enormous, white birds in the shallows. As they lifted off, showing black-tipped wings, I shaped my mouth around the unfamiliar words, “whooping cranes.” Another long-legged bird, farther downstream, joined the whoopers in flight. Yet when I told a knowledgeable birder that I’d seen three […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Ridgetop home may be toppled
UTAH It was Bruce Daley’s dream to retire to Park City, Utah, and build his home on the most spectacular hilltop he could find. But his dream has turned into a nightmare. In the mid-1990s, the Tucson, Ariz., resident and former auto-body shop owner began the planning process for his ridgetop home in Park City. […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Economics with a heart, but no soul
In 1996, Thomas Michael Power wrote Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, an economic study of the Interior West, in which everything that happened was for the good. If the West were not the best of all worlds, it was as good as life would get on the coasts. We had half the money, but twice […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Heard around the West
Can drinking milk be considered cool? Former Idaho Dairy Princess Colleen Underwood thought so, if she could just copy some tricks from Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So during her reign as cow-milk royalty two years ago, Underwood leased a vending machine, put photos of the Dixie Chicks guzzling milk on the front, then filled it with […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Cybermapping the West – a new view
Cybermapping is a template of the inside of things, a grand tapestry of our cumulative desires. It’s our shadowmap.
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Church aims to purchase public land
WYOMING A national historic site along the Oregon Trail could end up in the hands of private owners. At the request of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, congressional delegates from Wyoming and Utah are drafting legislation permitting the sale of a several-hundred-acre parcel of land in central Wyoming to the […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Go west, fruit picker
WASHINGTON For years, migrant workers have flocked to eastern Washington to pick apples in the fall (HCN, 12/18/00: Troubled harvest). But with a jump in global competition, apple orchards have streamlined their operations to save costs, eliminating jobs in the process. This season, a late hailstorm wiped out nearly 30 percent of the apple crop […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Friendship in the Sagebrush West
When I think “anthology,” I usually think boring compilation or shallow “Best of” CD. But this year, three Western women have pulled together an anthology of writing that reminds me more of my favorite mix tape. In Woven on the Wind, editors Gaydell Collier, Linda Hasselstrom and Nancy Curtis unleash an outpouring of new writing […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Stargazers defend darkness in Arizona
Flagstaff becomes the first “International Dark-Sky City”
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Powell’s enduring teachings
What remains so astonishing about John Wesley Powell is that someone whose policy recommendations were almost totally ignored while he was alive should continue to command the attention of so many Western observers and decision makers a century after his death. Powell’s career studying the West included expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and, most notably, […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Heard around the West
He had nothing but the best intentions, says a Stanford University surgeon. Then the publicity got out of hand. So Dr. Simon Stertzer reluctantly sold the three Nevada strip clubs he’d bought to finance his medical research. Stertzer tried to explain to the North Las Vegas City Council that owning the all-nude Palomino as well […]