We’re proud that High Country News is 43 years old — but our website, hcn.org, is still incomplete, because our online archive goes back only 20 years. Now we’re finally scanning in issues published before 1994. Soon they’ll be available online. We need your help to finish the project, though. So far, our point man, […]
Communities
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Hikers face assorted hazards, bull elk get revenge on hunters, and more
What have you heard?
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Is this heaven? No, it’s Idaho
Godforsaken Idaho: StoriesShawn Vestal,209 pages, softcover:$15.95.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Shawn Vestal sets the stories in his focused yet far-reaching debut collection among regular Mormon folks who live in Idaho, touching on their lives in the past, the present and even the afterworld. Most of his characters have fallen away from their faith or are struggling […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The cartographer’s lament
Thanks for keeping the art and science of cartography alive (“You are here,” HCN, 9/16/13)! I’m a cartographer, too, working in my own little shop. While the independence is really fine, the economics of competing with the large corporations is devastating. Now, with mapping going online, there is very little true cartography involved. It’s just […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The world of the speed artist
The FlamethrowersRachel Kushner400 pages, hardcover: $26.99.Scribner, 2013. Reno, the 22-year-old protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, makes her first appearance as she flies across Nevada on her way to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s. “The land was drained of color and specificity,” she observes. “The faster I went, the more connected […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Kids will be kids
See a full gallery of Rebecca Drobis’s images from the Blackfeet Reservation here. On the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, winters are long and difficult, unemployment is high and infrastructure lacking. Children grow up without the latest video games and movies or a rigid schedule of activities. But despite the sometimes-harsh realities of the reservation, […]
Posted inArticles
Travels with migrant farmworkers
A conversation with Seth Holmes about on-the-ground research for his new book.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Ruth Kirk, pioneering guidebook author
A natural and human histories expert of the West reflects on her work.
Posted inArticles
Kids will be kids
Photographer Rebecca Drobis looks for universal images of youth on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.
Posted inGoat
Touring Hopi via a 10K running race at dawn
I run. And I weep. My tears may come from the fact that it’s 6 a.m., or perhaps from the burning in legs and lungs as I try to hold the pace of the leaders. But I’m pretty sure my sobs come from a deep joy inspired by the way the rising sun lights up […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Marginalia: an essay
On a trek across the Arctic, a writer’s map becomes a record of the journey.
Posted inGoat
Check those attics: An archivist’s plea for your old newspapers
Halloween night in the windy railroad town of Livingston, Mont.: a Burlington Northern train, consisting of just three locomotives, hisses from the yard and begins the long, slow climb toward Bozeman. Nobody is onboard but a hobo. The engines crest the pass, pick up speed on the downgrade, hit 80 mph and jump the tracks. […]
Posted inWotr
My 15 years with that flaming guy
The truth is Burning Man is middle-aged, but still more fun than you can dream of.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
A California essayist on American optimism and how landscape shapes our imaginations
An interview with Richard Rodriguez.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Reconciling family narrative with textbook history in Montana’s Bighorn Valley
An essay by Joe Wilkins.
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason’s four-year road trip
Bringing poetry to an entire state, one county at a time.
Posted inRange
True Believers would destroy the Indian health system
Congress always works on two tracks. The first rail is legislation that gives the government authority to spend money. The second rail is one that actually appropriates the funds. It’s that second law that dictates how the government can spend dollars for the Indian Health Service (or any other program) under parameters set by law. […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
The renegade cartographer
Dave Imus challenges the murkiness of modern mapmaking.