If you live in a rural area with no zoning, and if one day a pesticide manufacturing plant announces plans to build in your neighborhood, you might want to consult Not In My Back Yard: The Handbook. Anthropologist and activist Jane Anne Morris details how to launch and win a grass-roots battle against LULUs, defined […]
Communities
Posted inAugust 22, 1994: Whose fault? A Utah canyon turns deadly
‘Poor man’s legacy’ may be preserved in Jackson Hole
It is perhaps one of Jackson Hole’s most photographed scenes: A weathered barn in a green meadow rises up against the Tetons. “They say it has angles that correspond with the mountains,” Clark Moulton says of the barn his father started building in 1913. For 81 years, Clark has lived in sight of the Tetons […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
Now you see them …
Indian ruins in the Southwest are disappearing, but it’s for their own good. Cartographers are wiping famous Anasazi sites off their maps. Due to a hot black market for sacred Indian objects and increased numbers of tourists, ancient cities such as Keet Seel, Awatovi, Hawikuh and Cutthroat Castle will no longer appear on many road […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
Children need the wild
In one of the eight essays that make up The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, Gary Paul Nabhan relates an amusing but poignant scene he witnessed about 10 years ago when he was asked to arrange a meeting between a noted Native American educator in Arizona and a Phoenix television news team. […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
Eating the scenery
Communities throughout the rural West worry about their futures, as wealthy urbanites buy property for vacation homes and speculation. Will congestion, pollution and increased property values destroy the very qualities that make these areas attractive? A report by CHEC, an Oregon economics consulting firm, says that it doesn’t have to be this way. Rural communities […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
FBI was out to get freethinking DeVoto
Nearly 40 years after his death, Bernard DeVoto is remembered as a brilliant historian, pungent social critic and one of the West’s earliest and most outspoken conservationists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, knew him differently. To the FBI, DeVoto was an “intellectual revolutionary,” “the son of a fallen away priest of the Roman Catholic […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Here come Rainbows
When some 15,000 members of the Rainbow Family meet within Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest later this month, things may be calm after all. In nearby Big Piney, population 454, townspeople are open-minded about the invasion of counterculture types from all over the country, says town clerk Susan Lison. In contrast to Pinedale, where residents are […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Home, home on the range … where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
John Trochman calls himself a “Christian Patriot” and defender of the American Constitution. The soft-spoken man with a Robert E. Lee beard is also a field general in the “Militia Of Montana,” a paramilitary survivalist organization formed to fight what it perceives as oppression by the federal government. The number one threat to freedom, Trochman […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Montana organizes to fight the hate groups
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Home, home on the range … where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam. BILLINGS, Mont. – When Wayne Inman left Portland, Ore., two years ago to become police chief of Billings, Mont., he thought he had put hate crimes in his rear view mirror. Only a month […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Camping out in the Merry Widow Mine
BOULDER, Mont. – Most people hear the word radon and think of an odorless, colorless gas that seeps into homes and can cause cancer. But some, like Denise Palmer, think of radon as a miracle drug. Crippled with psoriatic arthritis, her hands had become so painful she could no longer pull her clothes on or […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Summer camp for grown-ups
From June through August the Teton Science School in Jackson Hole, Wyo., offers day- and week-long natural history seminars for adults. Instructors such as photographer Bruce Thompson, artist Hannah Hinchman and naturalists Larry Livingood and Norm Bishop will offer their expertise on wildflower photography, field journals, alpine butterflies, wolf recovery in Yellowstone and scores of […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Reading the West
-Reading and writing the West: explorers, adventurers and civilizers’ is the title of an intensive two-week course July 17-29 at the University of Nevada, Reno. Designed for teachers and others who want to learn about Western problems and issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, the course will explore the Truckee River Basin from Lake Tahoe to […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Of buffalo thoughts and amethysts
I’ve grown up and moved away. I live in a city now instead of a little town. My grammar is better, my table manners hardly offend at all and I’ve been seen at art galleries and concerts. Yet still there are people who patronize me when they find out where I grew up. That was […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Group vows to head off the ‘New West’
GLORIETA, N.M. – About 500 members of People For the West, a Pueblo, Colo., group that supports traditional multiple use of public lands, concluded a three-day conference with vows to become more organized and politically active. Bill Grannell, the executive director and former Washington, D.C., lobbyist for the National Association of Counties, said the goal […]
Posted inMay 16, 1994: Babbitt is trying to nationalize the BLM
Court rains on title to Colorado land grant
The “little cloud” on the title of the Taylor Ranch in Colorado’s San Luis Valley remains, thanks to a landmark Colorado Supreme Court ruling in favor of Costilla County residents. On May 2, the court said there should be a trial to determine whether the constitutional rights of residents were violated in 1960, when landowner […]
Posted inMay 16, 1994: Babbitt is trying to nationalize the BLM
Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the AmericanWest
To Catch Wild Ducks,Geese or Birds AliveSoak wheat in strong alcohol.Scatter where they are in the habit of feeding.Take them while they are drunk. * Early recipe book titled Cookbook private collection, ca. 1880 Coon Cake Take what flour you have, mix with water, shorten with coon oil and fry in coon fat. Army Coffee […]
Posted inMay 2, 1994: A struggle for the last grass
Rancher fined for vandalism
A retired Escalante, Utah, rancher pleaded guilty to “enhancing” 21 Anasazi petroglyphs at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area with a pocket knife. Rancher McKay Bailey agreed to pay restoration costs and forfeit his 1990 Ford pickup for violating the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act. In exchange for his guilty plea, the government recommended a […]
Posted inMay 2, 1994: A struggle for the last grass
Lycra is as ‘authentic’ as denim
It has become commonplace to attack and ridicule the socio-economic changes that are taking place in the Rocky Mountain West. With disgust and caustic humor residents lash out at the new “cappuccino cowboys,” the brightly colored, lycra-clad mountain bikers, the 20-acre ranchettes, the trophy homes of newcomers, and the network surfers on the information highway. […]
Posted inApril 18, 1994: The salmon win one
Talk wild
This summer some 330 high school students will build trails in parks and national forests as volunteers for the Student Conservation Association. But their minds require a workout, too. The non-profit SCA needs people to visit backcountry crews and spend time talking to them about natural resource issues. Previous “Educators Bureau” speakers have shared information […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
Movable metaphor for the West now a video
The three Pinedale, Wyo., artists who transformed cows into ambulatory art last year now have a video commemorating the event. Thanks to a $4,000 federal grant, Duane Brandt, an art teacher at Pinedale High, along with his wife, Pip, and Sue Thornton, painted the words of a Wyoming pioneer on the backs of 74 pregnant […]