Fighting for the environment is just part of this Navajo’s cultural identity.
Communities
Posted inWotr
Don’t be afraid to use the term ‘sacred’
Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front deserves protection from drilling.
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
The right-wing heiress who changed course in the desert
Looking back on Bazy Tankersley: publisher, rancher and conservationist.
Posted inGoat
Watch the who’s who of Montana’s dinosaur wars
The most recent issue of High Country News features a story about one-of-a-kind fossils that were unearthed in Montana and have stirred controversy in the scientific community. Reporter Montana Hodges tells the spellbinding narrative of the fossil hunters, commercial dealers, museum curators and professors of paleontology involved in the scuffle over the pair of skeletons […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Dinosaur Wars
Startling, one-of-a-kind fossils are unearthed in Montana – and shunned by scientists.
Posted inGoat
Interdisciplinary science programs are important but often get less support
As spring rolled into campus each year, students at my northern Indiana college would soak up the warmth on blankets outside, surrounded by textbooks and notes. The books on my blanket covered subjects from public policy and economics to chemistry and land management; I never could choose between biology and anthropology. Luckily for me, a […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
A California Hotshot photographs his life fighting wildfires
Get a rare peek into what it’s like at the fireline.
Posted inWotr
It is not okay for cats to kill all the neighborhood birds.
I’m living next to a killer named Frankie. He’s black-and-white and sweet as cats go; he’s also a menace that nobody talks much about, though feral and free-roaming housecats like Frankie have become a tragic problem all over the world. Every year in America, cats, many of them well-fed pets, kill about 12.3 billion mammals […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
A review of Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico portrait
Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico portrait photographs by Craig Varjabedian, essays by Marin Sardy, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Hampton Sides, 140 pages, hardcover: $50, University of New Mexico Press, 2012. Contemporary landscape photography often looks too pristine and over-saturated to feel authentic. But Craig Varjabedian’s monochromatic images of New Mexico transcend that. In place of […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Fishermen, writers and cyclists come to call
Colin Glover of Denver stopped by our Paonia, Colo., headquarters on a seven-day fly-fishing trip that had already taken him and his friends to Durango, Buena Vista and Ouray. When asked what stretch of the Gunnison’s North Fork, which passes through Paonia, he planned to fish, he shrugged and said he wasn’t sure. Fortunately, the […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Mourning before departure
The Days Are GodsLiz Stephens206 pages, softcover: $18.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2013. A wistful, at times mournful spirit permeates the 41 brief essays that make up Liz Stephens’ first book, The Days Are Gods. The Oklahoma-born Stephens is a “card-carrying Choctaw tribal member” and recently earned a Ph.D. in creative nonfiction. Her multifaceted memoir is […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
River tubing mishaps and more
MONTANA What could be more delightful than floating down a lazy river on a summer afternoon in an inner tube? Andy Hill and his wife, Amy, were both avid boaters, but had never tried tubing the Clark Fork River until late this July. All was calm and copacetic as they drifted through East Missoula, when […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Seek nature and ye shall find
The northwest branch of the Chicago River was my watercourse as a boy (“Pilgrim at Shit Creek,” HCN, 7/22/13). It was also polluted, but it was all we had. We rafted it, wading mostly. Since then I’ve gone back in a canoe and found all manner of wildlife — from foxes, deer and coyotes to […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Tools ‘R’ Us
Dirt Work: An Education in the WoodsChristine Byl256 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Beacon Press, 2013. Tired of school, broke and eager for a change, Christine Byl took to the woods with a National Park Service trail crew. Through 16 summers of manual labor in Alaska and Montana — maintaining, repairing, designing and building bridges, ditches and trails […]
Posted inGoat
Impressions of a county fair: heifer rituals, deep-fried pickles and all
It’s so noisy at the fairBut all your friends are thereAnd the candy floss you hadAnd your mother and your dad. — Neil Young, Sugar Mountain. His face was like leather, so much so that the only expression that showed up behind the utterly opaque mirrored sunglasses was a sort of perma-smirk that reminded me […]
Posted inWotr
Time to let go of the “Redskins” mascot
“Stupid political correctness is killing us!” was one longtime local’s response after the school superintendent of Teton County, Idaho, sacked the “Redskins” as the school’s mascot. As a fifth-generation resident and Teton High graduate himself, Superintendent Monte Woolstenhulme said he figured that the move would distress some people. Yet nothing could have prepared him for […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
The Blue Window
Journeying from redrock desert to an icy wasteland: an essay.
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
The Bakken oilfields: ‘No place for a woman’
One woman’s effort to survive the Great Recession in booming North Dakota.
Posted inGoat
Paonia’s Great Chicken Dump raises the question: what to do with all those old birds?
The news infiltrated the High Country News mothership like a cute animal video (which editors Sarah Gilman and Betsy Marston are particularly fond of) and spread through the North Fork Valley faster than a stomach flu. Soon, from the barstools of Revolution Brewing to the ratty couches of the HCN intern house, the Great Chicken […]
Posted inWotr
Pioneer league baseball is a slice of heaven
One of the best things about summer is watching these teams strive for major league.