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. […]
Communities
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 […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Piling a new economy on the old
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For a century, mining and logging drove the economy of Coeur d’Alene. When those industries went bust in the early 1980s, a small group of city leaders began searching for a new engine. Among them was Duane Hagadone, a native son who owns most […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Help find Pyramid Lake
Locals around Pyramid Lake, Nev., have wondered for years how explorer John C. Fremont first discovered this body of water in 1842. To test some hypotheses and to publicize the area, the nonprofit Friends of Pyramid Lake is sponsoring a two-part essay contest: Writers are invited to submit essays by Dec. 31 describing how Fremont […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Californians stay home
After five years of stirring up the real estate pot, Californians have stopped moving east, and newcomers are moving to the coast again. That’s the conclusion of private researchers who studied surrendered drivers’ licenses in the Golden State. It marks the first time in six years that more people are moving into the state than […]
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
She works to save the past
Longtime HCN subscriber Ann Phillips finds herself drawn time and again back to a place that many experience as timeless: southeastern Utah. There, with one hand, she tries to record archaeological sites before they vanish; with the other, she works to prevent them from vanishing. The educational consultant turned archaeologist came through Paonia recently with […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Utah ranch to remain whole
The historic Dugout Ranch bordering Canyonlands National Park in southeast Utah will be purchased by The Nature Conservancy to prevent its possible development into recreational properties. The Conservancy has a one-year option on the ranch and will need to raise $4.62 million in the next year to complete the transaction. The ranch, northwest of Monticello, […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Congratulations
When the Western Colorado Congress gave its “Not-So-Smart Growth” awards Sept. 21, it was no surprise when the “winners’ failed to show up. The grassroots coalition held the event to showcase the worst examples of development on the Western Slope – a follow-up of sorts to Gov. Roy Romer’s 1995 “Smart Growth” awards. Had its […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Custom and culture’s worst enemy speaks
The West is certainly changing, but cultural beliefs rather than economic facts tend to dominate our dialogue. Because those beliefs are tied to a vision of a good society rooted in stereotypes of a simpler, less-corrupted-by-evil America, I see them as a type of economic fundamentalism. Consider these characteristics: Worshipping at the rearview mirror. Economic […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Montana Native: Who Cares?
In bold, black letters the bumperstickers declare: Montana Native. I spot them as I drive and, like the chiggers of my native Virginia, they make me itch. For the naive observer, the message must seem benign, a mere statement of birthplace pride. But for an increasingly wary transplant like me, it conveys something more sinister […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
What happens when “True Grit” meets “Easy Rider’
Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1996, University of New Mexico Press, 416 pages, $35. Lois Palken Rudnick’s Utopian Vistas is almost enough to send me back to my native New York. But it’s probably too late. After more than two decades here, I’m unlikely to […]