Although the Sangre de Cristo Mountains are almost synonymous with New Mexico, the range – the longest in the United States – extends about 110 miles into Colorado. Tom Wolf, a writer and one-time forestry student, explores these northern Sangres in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Starting with the Anasazi and continuing through the Spanish, […]
Communities
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Lessons of Lewis and Clark
Our Natural History: the Lessons of Lewis and Clark describes the wilderness of the American West as the two explorers encountered it during their journey 1804-1806, and compares it to today’s American West as shaped by industrial civilization. Long the subject of historians, the famous journals also offer author Daniel B. Botkin, a leader in […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
GLENWOOD, N.M. – In 1962, Hugh B. McKeen’s rancher parents brought him back to their native Catron County after 15 years in crowded, hectic Southern California. Catron County was then, and still is, everything that urban America is not. Lying four to five hours by car from Albuquerque and Phoenix, it has no local newspapers, […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The County Attorney
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Jim Catron is a fourth-generation New Mexican and a distant relative of Thomas Benton Catron, the land baron for whom Catron County is named. He lives in La Joya, N.M., and is county attorney […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Businessperson
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt “You’re not going to get people to tell you what’s going on here for the record, because they’re afraid of retaliation,” one Catron County businessperson told High Country News, speaking on condition of anonymity. […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Spreading the gospel
Outdoor education teaches people to know and care about the West
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Forest Ranger
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Mike Gardner has worked for the Forest Service in Catron County for 15 years, first as a wilderness ranger on the Gila National Forest, then as district ranger in Luna, and since 1988 as […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Psychologist
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Melinda Garcia of Albuquerque has been a clinical and community psychologist for 25 years. She has led three day-long sessions in Catron County for Forest Service employees and their families: one on the high […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Country Doctor
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Mark Unverzagt, a doctor in Reserve, N.M., took up Melinda Garcia’s challenge and became key to the formation of Concerned Citizens for Catron County. The group, comprised of some 18 ranchers, local politicians, Forest […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
An unsung army of students maintains our national parks
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel After wildfires raged through Yellowstone National Park in 1988, Park Service employees were overwhelmed: Trails and bridges had to be rebuilt, campsites restored and trees planted. The magnitude of the job was depressing. […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Acting for the environment
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel A man in an old-fashioned tuxedo knocks on the door of a first-grade Seattle classroom. The teacher ushers him in and he totters across the room and groans as he settles in a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
The big dogs: Outward Bound and NOLS hit their thirties
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel Instructors from the National Outdoor Leadership Schools (NOLS) and Outward Bound have a running joke: “NOLS is the place where you learn to stuff everything – even your feelings – in a backpack […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Tough love proves too tough
Controversial “wilderness therapy programs” come under critical scrutiny – and lawsuits – after several teenagers die while in their care.
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
The rise and fall of Steve Cartisano
The controversial “godfather” of wilderness therapy, has left a trail of lawsuits behind him.
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Hearing stories, finding family, returning home
It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Sagebrush rebels in the apple orchards
In Washington state, one county’s efforts to get state growth-management laws off its back have run aground in court, drawn the wrath of the governor and earned the scorn of environmental groups. But two of three Chelan County commissioners in central Washington like it that way. They’re betting on brinkmanship to draw attention to their […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Planning regulations bite a planning proponent
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Sagebrush rebels in the apple orchards.” Dan Evans has a problem: He wants to build a house on a five-acre, $127,250 parcel of land in western Washington’s Jefferson County, but a county zoning ordinance says a new […]