Western lore often portrays rural communities adjacent to public lands as joined at the hip with the federal government. Many people assume that if federal land managers reduce logging or curtail mining on public land, the tax base of the neighboring communities will plummet. Not true, says a new report by the Wilderness Society. After […]
Communities
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Caretakers wanted
Taking care of other people’s property for a living is taking off, says Gary Dunn, publisher of Washington state’s eight-page newsletter, The Caretaker Gazette. The bimonthly newsletter, first printed in 1983, lists some 90 caretaking opportunities in the United States and nine foreign counties. Interest is equal on either side of the equation, Dunn says: […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Lost and found
When last summer’s fires scorched more than 4,700 acres in Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, one of the park’s rare petroglyph panels, Battleship Rock, was damaged beyond repair. Vegetation surrounding the site burned so hot that the rock’s surface and its 1,000-year-old pecked designs fractured and flaked off. But the fire also revealed sites park […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Planning begins at the ballot box
Even though Wyoming locals lost a lawsuit to stop an 18-hole golf course and 600 homes near the town of Big Horn, they took revenge: They ousted one of the county commissioners who had allowed the new development. The Wyoming Supreme Court ruling concerned the Powderhorn, a golf course resort that will be built outside […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Renegade county gets a makeover
For two years, the county commissioners in Chelan County, Wash., have led the state’s property-rights movement. They thumbed their noses at Washington’s Growth Management Act, challenged its planning requirements in court and even suffered economic sanctions for ignoring them (HCN, 6/10/96). But the county’s outlaw image changed dramatically when voters threw out one of the […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
INS raid leads to lawsuit
Three people who believe they were mistreated in an immigration raid in Jackson, Wyo., last summer have filed paperwork seeking more than $1.8 million in damages from three government agencies. The first is AgustÆn Perez, a legal alien from neighoring Driggs, Idaho, who alleges that two guns were held to his head during an Aug. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
An 84-year-old postal veteran
The struggle by Red Lodge, Mont., that kept alive a downtown post office may be duplicated 150 miles away in Livingston, population 7,500. Recently, 1,500 Livingston residents signed a petition calling on Postal Service officials to forego a move to spacious new quarters and retain the 84-year-old post office in the heart of town. “It’s […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
El Nuevo West
The region’s new pioneers buoy the economy and live on the edge
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘The way they treated me, I don’t like it at all’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Thirty-one-year-old Agustin Perez of Driggs, Idaho, came to the United States in 1982 to make $4.50 an hour working for a potato farmer in nearby Ashton. He got his green card in 1990. When we interviewed him he was in the midst of remodeling […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘They’re good workers. And they’re all we’ve got’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kay Humann is the office manager at High Country Linen in Jackson, Wyo. Accustomed to running the computer and the phones in the front of the building, she worked in the hot, steamy laundry 16 hours a day for a week after the Aug. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘I don’t want to live in a community of rich white people. It’s boring’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Filmmaker Shelley Weiss moved from Los Angeles to Oakley, Utah, nine years ago. An avid swimmer, she quickly became a regular at the Park City Racquet Club. Over the past few years, she has heard racist comments there about the growing number of Mexican […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘I have a 1996 Dodge Caravan … I’m a family guy’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Standing in the waiting room of the INS building in Denver, the federal official read the names of the newest citizens of the United States – Irene Lopez Fernandez, José Chavez Flores, Arturo Ramirez Mendoza. They were all pleased, but no one smiled wider […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Amen!
La Iglesia in Emma offers Latinos a home in a foreign land
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
The shotgun wedding of tourism and public lands
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – They came from across the country and around the West to celebrate the shotgun wedding of tourism and the public lands. The potential Lords of the New West, the bosses of tourism agencies and industry lobbying groups, and the managers of federal lands and parks, arrived in limousines and chartered […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Denying the warts on the West’s service economy
Once upon a time, in 18th-century France, the king and his court had pet economists known as “physiocrats.” The nobility liked their physiocrats very much. Not only did they bow and scrape in a very respectful way, but they told the king and counts and dukes that all wealth comes from the ground. The aristocracy […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Keeping the heart in the center of town
The residents of very small Red Lodge, Mont., struck a blow, this month, for keeping their town a town. The forces for sprawling suburbanization are still all there: rising real estate prices, a major expansion at Red Lodge Mountain ski resort, and an influx of amenity-seeking newcomers attracted to the town’s setting, 60 twisting miles […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Belonging to the West
-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.” * Eric Paddock I moved to the West because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the West – […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Coyote Angels
Bart Koehler, director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and a co-founder of Earth First!, always took time out from fighting for environmental issues to sing about them. Now he and his Coyote Angels band have released a CD featuring songs about the wild life of the West. Some, dedicated to green greats such as […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Even in Quiet Places
It is a secret still, but already your tree is chosen. It has entered a forest for miles and hides deep in a valley by a river. No one else finds it; the sun passes over not noticing. But even while you are reading you happen to think of that tree, no matter where sentences […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
No name for art
-The reason I draw the designs is to make the past and present come together. It’s like mixing colors.” * Jordan Harvier, age 13 Bruce Hucko’s new book, Where There is No Name for Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children, is like Harvier’s quote. It blends black-and-white photographs of young artists, interviews and colorful […]