A novice logger helps thin the forest in Washington.
Communities
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Look, Ma – a real Indian!
A performance artist tackles stereotypes of Native Americans in public.
Posted inArticles
A reluctant rebellion in the Utah desert
For ATVers at Recapture Canyon, realpolitik meets out-of-town zeal.
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Guns are welcome, Idaho poachers, and a popping eyeball.
IDAHO A secretive predator stalks the elk, moose and deer that roam the forests of north Idaho, reports the Spokesman-Review, and according to George Fischer, a state Fish and Game conservation officer, these two-legged, stealthy animals are “probably killing as many (game animals) or more than wolves … that is the shock-and-awe message.” Poachers have […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Not fade away
Monument Road:A NovelCharlie Quimby365 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2013. Rancher Leonard Self is the type of elderly man who keeps “his shades drawn, his talk necessary, his actions to the problem at hand.” In the wake of his wife Inetta’s death, he’s been winnowing his ranch goods, his farmhouse, his life itself, succumbing to […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
A path to the parks
Veronica Verdin is a 21-year-old junior at Maine’s Bowdoin College, majoring in anthropology and minoring in history. Of Mexican and Japanese-American heritage, she grew up in El Sereno, in Southern California. She hopes to work for the National Park Service as an archaeologist or interpretive ranger and has already participated in two of the agency’s […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Pinocchios on Whitney
My April 14 issue arrived in today’s mail, and as usual I started reading pretty much right away. I was soon into the Horror Stories, where I realized that Colin Weatherby’s tall tale (“The Boy Scouts didn’t prepare us for this”) could have used some fact-checking. The peak named Mount Whitney is not “the highest in the […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Rock Art of the Grand Canyon Region
Rock Art of the Grand Canyon RegionDon D. Christensen, Jerry Dickey, and Steven M. Freers,248 pages, softcover:$24.95.Sunbelt Publications, Inc., 2013 Hiking the Grand Canyon is a journey through geologic time: The pink sedimentary layers, the limestone left by antediluvian seas, and the river-carved gorge are stunning reminders of our planet’s age. But as Rock Art […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Backcountry memoir
Yellowstone Has TeethMarjane Ambler223 pages, $16.95.Riverbend Publishing, 2013. Cindy Mernin puts it bluntly: “Paradise isn’t for sissies!” she says, recalling the 14 years she spent as a ranger’s wife at Yellowstone National Park. In particular, as she tells author Marjane Ambler, the winters weren’t for sissies. The couple had moved there in the early 1970s, […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Frosty recesses
I must admit that after glancing at “Touring the frosties of the Lost Sierra” (HCN, 4/14/14), I was tempted to pass over it and move on to a weightier issue that would have more resonance with an under-employed conservation biologist. But because it involved the Sierra, not to mention frosties, it latched onto something in […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
A long-submerged town becomes visible
Water recedes under drought conditions and reveals a lost California community.
Posted inGoat
Huge payout for Wind River Reservation
The sight was so unusual we stopped our meeting to stare: men in helmets and riot gear, carrying semi-automatic weapons, were surrounding a bank in Lander, Wyoming, on a Wednesday in late April. As we sipped our chai lattes from the coffee shop across the street, we watched as the armed men escorted a guy […]
Posted inWotr
One battle for civil rights continues
Sometime next year, a federal judge will decide whether Native Americans are still being shut out of political power in Utah’s San Juan County, where more than 52 percent of the people are members of the Navajo or Ute Mountain Ute tribes. The trial will be presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby, […]
Posted inGoat
Simon J. Ortiz poetry is a road map to Indian Country
About 20 years ago, my father gave me the book, Woven Stone, by Simon J. Ortiz. I was reading a lot of Native American literature at the time, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie. I was also reading a lot of poetry, from Richard Shelton to Rilke. Ortiz, a poet […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Two-wheel revolution in Gallup
Can a bunch of trails and bikes transform this down-and-out New Mexico town?
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Embracing parched ground
All the Land to Hold UsRick Bass322 pages, hardcover: $25.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Rick Bass’ fourth novel, All the Land to Hold Us, focuses on human desire and – like the Montana writer’s many previous books – our relationship with the natural world. Richard is a geologist who reads rock layers to find oil, fossils […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Hot Mess and other fears for the future
I live in an idyllic little Western town, rich in natural beauty and culture. I have a great family, no pressing health or financial worries – in short, it’s a utopian life. And yet … somehow I can’t leave it at that. I can’t tune out the news, can’t ignore economic and political injustices, and […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
In like a lion, out like a donut
Spring has hit High Country News headquarters in Paonia, Colo.: The trees are blooming and the temperatures rising, the winds are strafing our winter-complacent mucus membranes with Colorado Plateau dust and juniper pollen, and snowpack is raging down the North Fork in a torrent of red water. HCN is undergoing a sort of season change […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Inconclusive conclusions
Sierra Crane-Murdoch’s thoughtful article on the legacy of the tragic cancer deaths of young children in Fallon, Nev., brought to mind the cancer clusters amid the pesticide-saturated lands in California’s Central Valley (HCN, 3/3/14). The investigations result in the same inconclusive and deeply unsatisfying official conclusions. Suspicions linger for years that information has been withheld, […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Minidoka: An American Concentration Camp by Teresa Tamura
Minidoka: An American Concentration Camp Teresa Tamura, 305 pages, hardcover: $27.95. Caxton Press, 2013 In the wake of the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order forcing the West Coast’s entire Japanese and Japanese American population to relocate to internment camps. Photojournalist Teresa Tamura, a third-generation Japanese American, tells the […]