A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in AlaskaSergei Kan, 288 pages, hardcover: $39.95, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013 In A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska, ethnologist Sergei Kan brings 137 century-old images to light. Taken between 1890 and 1920 by amateur photographer Vincent Soboleff, they portray Tlingit […]
Communities
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Rural Americans have inferior Internet access
Does it matter that broadband quality varies so widely?
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Storm and stress on the frontier
Crossing PurgatoryGary Schanbacher292 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Pegasus Books, 2013. Thompson Grey abandons his Indiana farm in 1858 and joins a caravan of pioneers trekking west along the Santa Fe Trail in Gary Schanbacher’s accomplished new novel. Crossing Purgatory is a moral Western that questions what any decent human being owes another amid the harsh conditions of […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
This is a man’s world
Ballistics: A NovelD.W. Wilson400 pages, hardcover: $26.Bloomsbury, 2013. Nestled in British Columbia’s remote Kootenay Valley, the town of Invermere is a place where “sons take after their dads and teenagers in lift-kit trucks catch air off train tracks … burn shipping flats at the gravel pits and slurp homebrew that swims with wood ether.” Here, […]
Posted inArticles
KDNK Radio speaks with HCN reporter Kevin Taylor
The number of community gardens in the U.S. has been growing in recent years as more people take an interest in producing at least some of their own food. Yet in some western communities, a new and radical approach to communal agriculture is taking root: the edible forest garden. KDNK Radio’s Nelson Harvey spoke with […]
Posted inWotr
Got a local issue? Here’s how to organize
How a small group of people committed to academic freedom organized to turn around a school district.
Posted inGoat
Preserving ancient art in land marked for solar energy development
Like a great eye of reflective silicon, the largest utility-scale power plant in the United States is rapidly materializing in the Mojave Desert. According to company officials, when fully complete, the BrightSource Ivanpah Solar Power Facility will come on line early this year, supplying nearly 400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 140,000 homes during […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
Oilfield workers on Facebook, dynamite in a sperm whale, and more.
NORTH DAKOTA, MONTANAThere’s now a brilliant, low-cost way to start a newspaper smack in the middle of nowhere: Just open up a Facebook page or two, and share what you know and what you’d like to know more about. Ask local readers to pitch in with Smartphone photos and tips, and voilà! You’re in business, […]
Posted inWotr
An Iraq War veteran fights for public lands
Finding much-needed solace in Colorado’s Browns Canyon and hoping it becomes a national monument.
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
Will an apple a day keep the food desert away?
Reinventing the Garden of Eden in the Emerald City.
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
The shareable city: building a better legal foundation for urban sustainability
A conversation with a sharing economy guru.
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
Stopping deforestation, one pair of chopsticks at a time
HCN student essay contest winner.
Posted inGoat
Tale of two states: Utah’s a model for reducing homelessness, Wyoming lags behind
What happens when you give a homeless person a subsidized apartment? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. But in Utah, it’s proven a resounding success – out of 17 chronically homeless people who took part in the state’s 2005 pilot program, all were still off the streets two years later, spurring a […]
Posted inWotr
On the ground with economies built on snow
It has been snowing in Crested Butte, Colo., where people pray and dance for snow; the whole winter economy is predicated on snow. Crested Butte’s old miners used to call snow “the only crop that never failed.” They also used to say, “You can’t eat the scenery.” But Crested Butte and most mountain communities have […]
Posted inGoat
What the West would look like with state boundaries drawn by culture, population, or watersheds
Here at High Country News, some of us recently had a lively discussion about our slogan: “for people who care about the American West.” After 43 years, is it still the best phrase to convey who we are and what we do? We added the “American” to that slogan some years ago, realizing that in […]
Posted inGoat
As analog film grows obsolete, Western towns struggle to keep theaters afloat
One snowy evening over the holidays, I sat down for a beer with screenwriter Susan Shilliday (“Legends of the Fall”), who moved from Los Angeles to rural western Massachusetts eight years ago to run a used bookstore. We were discussing how difficult it is for independent booksellers to stay in business when Susan brought up […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Butcher of Heartache on the Bering Sea
A former newspaper copyeditor finds his way onboard a fishing boat.
Posted inGoat
As the economy recovers, many Westerners are left behind
Las Vegas is filled with symbols of how drastically the economic landscape of the West has changed over the past decade. Drive out into the city’s fringes, and you’ll see vast swaths of land for which developers — visions of master-planned tract home communities dancing in their heads — paid the Bureau of Land Management […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Out on Misfits Flat
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. The quintessential Nevada film is John Huston’s 1961 picture The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. The movie had its origins in playwright Arthur Miller’s trip to Nevada in 1956. While […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The fignificent fig man
Lloyd Kreitzer’s journey as New Mexico’s premier fig grower.