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. […]
Communities
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 inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
Imagine a West without heroes
Heroes have always come with the West. When Indians blocked homesteaders, the cavalry came. When cattle barons closed the open range, President Cleveland reopened it with the Unlawful Enclosures Act of 1885. When aridity slowed settlement, the Bureau of Reclamation built dams. When Western forests succumbed to flames and cutting, Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service pledged […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Mt. Graham telescope rides through Congress
The setting was as apocalyptic as a Gothic novel: While President Clinton was signing the bill April 26 approving the University of Arizona’s construction of a third telescope on Mount Graham, fire raced through the Coronado National Forest, up the base of the mountain, into red squirrel habitat and toward the two telescopes already pointed […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Letter to Edward Abbey from Earth: A Review
Dear Ed, You won’t, or probably you will, believe what’s currently happening in the West: Too many of us, a commercialized landscape “- all your worst predictions have come true. We’ve finally caught up with your predictions, your “good news.” Armed militias call the West their home – white-guy losers in Montana and Idaho who […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Take a seat
By the beginning of the 1996 school year, the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Public Affairs will choose a professor to hold the Timothy E. Wirth Chair in Environmental and Community Development Policy. The chair honors the former Colorado senator who is currently undersecretary of state for global affairs, appointed by President Bill Clinton. […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
A very large subdivision riles a very small town
BIG HORN, Wyo. – Residents of this unincorporated township stared bug-eyed at the lead story in the afternoon paper nearly two years ago. “700 homes planned for subdivision,” the 72-point headline read. Disbelief reigned; seven hundred homes could mean 2,100 people. Big Horn, which doesn’t even have paved streets, barely had 400 residents. But it […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
The nuts and bolts of Western gambling
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot.” Americans spend more money on games of chance than movies, concerts and theaters combined. In 1994, Americans lost $40 billion of the $482 billion they wagered. Since state-sponsored lotteries and video gambling started the current gambling craze in […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Deadwood pays dearly for gambling riches
Note: This article accompanies another feature story, “Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot.” DEADWOOD, S. D. – Before state residents legalized gambling here in 1989, most people in this town of 1,800 or so lived life in the slow lane. They’d see each other for coffee at Marie’s Cafe or later in the day at […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Goodbye, Deadwood
When I arrived in 1976, Deadwood, S.D., was 100 years old and still a living gold camp. I was 22, married and fresh out of suburban Minneapolis. Deadwood felt like home from the moment I set foot here. It wasn’t an easy place to live. You weren’t considered a local until you made it through […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Score one for local control
For awhile it seemed as if one of the most potent weapons available to local counties and towns in Colorado would be ripped out of their hands. Conservative legislators and water developers wanted to gut state law 1041, which allows local communities to develop stringent land-use regulations to control everything from water projects to airport […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Just a little advice
JUST A LITTLE ADVICE A county commissioner in Colorado thinks he can help newcomers adjust to the rural parts of Larimer County. John Clarke has written a seven-page primer, The Code of the West, which includes some useful tips. About utilities: even cellular phones won’t work in all areas; Mother Nature: expansive soils can buckle […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Arid art
Arid Art An Englishman from Cornwall in the west of England, Tony Foster is fascinated by the American West’s wilderness of eroded rocks and deserts, including Death Valley in California and the slickrock onion domes of Utah’s canyonlands. An exhibit of his latest work, Arid Lands, Watercolor Diaries of Journeys across Deserts, can be seen […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Playing politics or helping the range?
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Back in 1978, ranchers around the West felt the first tremors of grazing reform. Under legal pressure from environmentalists, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management found much of its rangeland in bad […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Talking ranching through its bleakest hour
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Reno, Nev. – The hall of the University of Nevada’s College of Agriculture is lined with dusty black-and-white photographs of former professors, peering knowingly from below their cowboy hats. Hudson Glimp seems […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Helping a busted mining town back to its feet
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Anaconda, Mont. – Rose Nyman is wearing an apron and shuttling back and forth between the kitchen, where she has a lasagna in the oven, and the dining room, where she pours […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Taking a stand for New Mexico’s small farmers
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Edmund Gomez worked for years on the Dulce, Colo., ranch his great-grandfather homesteaded in 1887. When his family sold the ranch […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
My God! Healthy trees!
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Cottonwood, Idaho – Sister Carol Ann Wassmuth of St. Gertrude’s Monastery wants to be reincarnated as the monastery porcupine so she can keep an eye on the progress of the 1,000 acres […]