Take the Western boots off Don Colcord, add more trees to the main street of Nucla, Colorado, and you’d have the movie set for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with Colcord, a pharmacist, playing Jimmy Stewart’s role as the principled banker of a small New England town. But Colcord lives in arid western Colorado, in a town […]
Communities
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Inexhaustible supply
Regarding “Two-Wheel Revolution” (HCN, 4/28/14), I was amused by your comparison of Gallup to Santa Fe as to the prevalence of “small loan companies.” The problems in Gallup are symptoms of problems in Santa Fe: elite concentrations of wealth and unsustainable consumption. As Voltaire wrote hundreds of years ago: “The wealth of the rich is […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Oil and gas wells hold a place of honor in a Colorado subdivision
Oil and gas infrastructure is common near homes in Weld County, Colorado, which has more than 20,000 active wells. But wells, pumpjacks and tanks seem to hold a place of honor in the Frederick subdivision of Wyndham Hill, in spots where you might expect parks and playgrounds. This article appeared in the print edition of […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Parks deserve robust budgets
Thank you for your article on the national parks and cultural diversity (“Parks For All?” HCN, 5/12/14). However, it contained a critical error about the government shutdown and the Utah national parks. You wrote, “During last fall’s federal shutdown, states like Utah took over some national parks, fueling calls from some locals for permanent control.” […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann by Joe Ashbrook Nickell
Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann Joe Ashbrook Nickell, 140 pages, hardcover: $45. Missoula Art Museum In Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann, author Joe Ashbrook Nickell provides a glimpse into the psyche of a 95-year-old artist still grappling with his place in the world. Tension is palpable in the oeuvre of this […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The first college degree in drones, a baby born in Walmart parking lot and more
IDAHOIn the TV studio, the faces of the journalists questioning the four Republican would-be candidates for Idaho governor sometimes registered dismay, other times wonder. They simply could not believe what they were hearing, when Walt Bayes declared his “main loyalty” was to God and against vile affections and wickedness, when motorcyclist Harley Brown boasted that […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Thumbs up and still breathing
Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on FireJerry D. Mathes II221 pages, softcover: $17.95.Caxton Press, 2013. Jerry D. Mathes’ second nonfiction book, Ahead of the Flaming Front, portrays the day-to-day life of a wildland firefighter. With a poet’s sense of language, Mathes describes his experiences as a rookie, gaining knowledge as he rises through […]
Posted inWotr
Los Angeles needs to leave a rural valley alone
If we’re going to limit the coming climate change impacts, we surely need to harness a lot of solar electricity. But proposals from Los Angeles to spread four square miles of solar panels across rural Owens Valley have local people saying: “Whoa! Doesn’t the sun shine in L.A.?” Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Archaeology’s poisonous past
Most U.S. ethnographic collections are contaminated with toxins. Will new cleaning methods help tribes reclaim artifacts?
Posted inArticles
Will gun control do more harm than good?
As Americans grapple with the best way to stem the tide of mass shootings that have terrorized the country in recent years, one liberal journalist and author is arguing that adding gun control laws could actually do more harm than good in the effort to make Americans safer. In his recent book “Gun Guys: A […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Book Review: The Black Place: Two Seasons
The Black Place: Two Seasonsphotographs by Walter W. Nelson,essay by Douglas Preston108 pages, clothbound: $45. Museum of New Mexico Press, 2014 In the 1930s, while driving through northwest New Mexico, artist Georgia O’Keeffe stumbled upon a remote, uninhabited landscape she dubbed “The Black Place” – tall hills of layered sediment, coated in brown and black […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Baby birds get wood-chipped and draft horses for heavy dude ranchers.
THE WESTHuge draft horses, those “diesels of the horse world,” as the Idaho Statesman dubs them, are showing up at dude ranches these days, on tap for rugged trail rides because more and more would-be adventurers have supersized themselves. At Chico Hot Springs in Montana, for example, Heidi Saile of Rockin’ HK Outfitters said her […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The path of the imagination
Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination William E. Tydeman208 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. For 40 years now, Barry Lopez has been at the center of the national and international conversation about social justice, and the fate of humanity and the Earth. In Conversations with Barry Lopez, the National Book […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Welcome, Brian Calvert!
HCN is delighted to welcome new associate editor Brian Calvert. Brian, a fourth-generation Wyoming native, grew up in Pinedale and graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 1994 with a BA in English liberal arts and minors in writing and media studies. He has worked as a foreign correspondent, writer, audio journalist, and, most […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
‘Which parks aren’t relevant to black history?’
A black former park ranger talks about diversity on public lands.
Posted inWotr
Train Day brought out the Chief’s supporters
A baker’s dozen of us from central Colorado boarded the Amtrak Southwest Chief May 10. We were celebrating National Train Day, so called because back in 1869, a Golden Spike was pounded into a railroad tie, finally linking East and West Coasts by railroad. Lots of Americans still like to link up by train; on […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Out in the backcountry
A profile of a gay ranger in the National Park Service.
Posted inArticles
The National Park Service’s diversity problem
From Yosemite to Glacier National Park to the Harriet Tubman National Monument in Maryland, the 400 parks that make up the U.S. National Park system are supposed to be the shared heritage of all Americans. Yet as Jodi Peterson reports in the current issue of High Country News, the vast majority of people who visit […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Parks for all?
The National Park Service struggles to connect with a changing America.
Posted inWotr
A coffee entrepreneur’s unlikely success story
This is not a eulogy, just a slice of life, or in the case of Randy Wirth, 67, a fine cup of coffee with a good man. I can’t claim to have been a longtime friend, but I was a longtime acquaintance. We were both members of The Old-Guys-in-Speedos-Eeewww Club. We were fast and still […]