Well, they’re not exactly kids, but HCN is pleased to welcome two new interns to our Paonia, Colorado, office for six months of journalism boot camp. And we’re also delighted that Krista Langlois, our extraordinary editorial fellow, is staying for another six months. Growing up in Toronto, new editorial intern Sarah Tory devoured books on […]
Communities
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Polite excuses
After reading Quinn Read’s article “The Virtues of Old-School Car Camping” (HCN, 7/21/14), I was struck with a wonderful moment of reminiscing. It took me back to the days of family car camping in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona and the Rockies in Colorado. We, like Quinn, would struggle to fall asleep before Dad’s snoring […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Summer swimming in a Washington lake
When I was a kid, I swam all summer in backyard pools and at the city park, lessons in the morning, wildness all afternoon. My bare feet grew calluses, my hair turned brittle green, my shoulders got broad, my Lycra suits disintegrated. And then I left home. I’ve lived in this mountain town for a […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The bomb builders’ wives
The Wives of Los AlamosTaraShea Nesbit233 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2014. In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The Tea Party loses one in Colorado
John Pennington lost his primary election bid for sheriff of Mesa County, here in western Colorado, last month. I don’t know why he lost to Steve King, a former Republican state legislator who then canceled his own campaign due to a scandal, leaving the general election race wide-open for several new candidates. But I do […]
Posted inGoat
Was the fatal thunderstorm in California a climate phenomenon?
The weather of Venice Beach, California, where I live, is for the most part stable, and almost always predictable. No sudden squalls appear out of the southwest to chase skateboarders off their concrete ramps; never do we hear the civil-defense sirens warning of an approaching tornado. Living here, swimming and surfing at the beach a […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
The virtues of old-school car camping
Backwoods adventure isn’t the only way to develop an affinity for the outdoors.
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Gear companies go local
A new crop of manufacturers try to succeed without selling out.
Posted inWotr
Our reliance on drones to patrol the borders
When I think of Canada, I picture caribou herds, universal healthcare and the occasional hockey brawl. Officials at our Department of Homeland Security, however, seem to think the neighbors up North pose a serious security threat. After all, the department has spent the last five years quietly building a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Photos of Bonneville Salt Flats
The Bonneville Salt Flats: Two Decades of Photography by Peter Vincent Peter Vincent with essays by Peter de Lory, Philip Linhares, Tom Fritz and others, 272 pages, hardcover: $85. Stance & Speed. 2013. “Salt fever”: That’s what drives thousands of people each year to gather with their hotrods, cars and motorcycles on the Utah-Nevada border, […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Predatory Ugliness
Jonathan Thompson’s terrific piece about the payday loan business (“A pimp in the family,” HCN, 6/23/14) spotlights some of the ugliest elements of the financial services business. Predatory lenders have found a lucrative niche in the largely unregulated world that flourishes in poor communities with immediate cash needs – like Native American reservations. Indeed, as […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
Visitors from Maine to Montana
Summer’s in full swing in Paonia, Colorado, our tiny hometown. The North Fork Valley’s sunny weather, scrumptious fruit and fine wines draw lots of visitors, and we’re always delighted when friends old and new drop by our office. Andreas (Andy) Mink, who reports for the Sunday edition of Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s leading paper, spent […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
An artist’s road to redemption
The PainterPeter Heller288 pages, hardcover:$24.95.Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. If it’s possible to paint in words alone, to create a wildly colorful story of grief in sentences layered like one of van Gogh’s swirling night scenes, Colorado author Peter Heller accomplishes it in his second novel, The Painter, narrated by artist Jim Stegner. A fly fisherman […]
Posted inGoat
Washington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t. Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many […]
Posted inGoat
California gears up to fine water wasters: Should we turn our neighbors in?
Five years ago, when south-central Texas was suffering through its driest year in more than a century, public officials in the city of San Antonio turned in desperation to a new tactic to enforce water conservation: They dispatched the police. From April of 2009 and on through the rest of the year, off-duty officers and […]
Posted inWotr
How Amazon taught Grand Junction a valuable lesson
Small businesses and nonprofits have a lot in common: They operate on thin margins, develop strong local ties and support their communities’ economic and social wellbeing. But what happens to those strong bonds when an online retailing giant comes in with a deal that benefits one side and threatens the other? That was the question […]
Posted inWotr
Boise may be low profile, but we’re high-tech
Over the years, whenever I’ve tried to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of living in a small town rather than a metropolis, the small town has always looked like the better choice. It used to be that cultural amenities and cosmopolitanism gave big cities significant boosts in this either/or match-up, but developments in technology have changed […]
Posted inWotr
What makes America unique is its public lands
As Independence Day approaches, let’s take a moment to celebrate our nation’s natural wonders. In this country we have the freedom to explore approximately 618 million acres of publicly owned federal lands, from the tundra of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the cliffs of the newly-created Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness on Lake Michigan and […]
Posted inArticles
Jonathan Thompson on payday lending
It may not come as a surprise that many Native Americans living on mostly poor, remote reservations in the American West have come to rely heavily on payday loan companies offering cash at high interest rates when money is tight. Yet as Jonathan Thompson reveals in the current issue of High Country News, some tribes […]
Posted inGoat
Nuclear Los Alamos, America’s best place to live?
We all love contemplating what makes a place worth living in. For some, it’s jobs and schools. For others, it’s recreation or the environment, or a reasonable cost of living. But whatever your criteria, one thing’s certain: In the transient, often rootless culture of the American West, the search for the Big Rock Candy Mountain is […]