High Country News is thrilled to participate in a special educational project with marketing students from Washington State University. Under the guidance of WSU instructors and ActionSprout, a marketing firm that specializes in social media engagement, students are partnering with HCN to develop and implement a marketing campaign. The students will gain real-world experience, and […]
Communities
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
‘We Don’t Give a Damn How They Do It Outside’
An Alaska native struggles to “blend in” in the Lower 48.
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
An unlikely penitent: A review of On Top of Spoon Mountain
On Top of Spoon MountainJohn Nichols232 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2012. In a career that spans five decades, New Mexico author John Nichols has written more books and screenplays than he can count on his fingers and toes. His first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, was published when he was 23, and The […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Girl in the woods: A review of The Snow Child
The Snow ChildEowyn Ivey416 pages, softcover: $14.99.Reagan Arthur Books, 2012. Eowyn Ivey’s surefooted and captivating debut novel, The Snow Child, begins in 1920, as Mabel and Jack, middle-aged homesteaders in Alaska, try to rough it through their second winter there. They’d moved West to escape painful memories of their only child, stillborn 10 years earlier, […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Good wishes for the Badlands
I read with interest the feature article by Brendan Borrell concerning Badlands National Park (HCN, 2/4/13, “Making Good on the Badlands“). I served as the superintendent there in the mid-1980s and was responsible for the preparation of a revision to the park’s 1982 master plan. This revision was approved by the director of the Park […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Lake Mead’s retreat leaves Nevada ghost town high and dry
Looking down on a Nevada valley from a rocky ledge near the edge of Lake Mead, it was hard to believe that the bustling town of St. Thomas had ever thrived here. A woman shielded her eyes from the October sun and asked our guide, “Is this it?” Eighty years ago, neighbors gossiped under cottonwood […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Reimaginations
After we buried my grandfather behind the Falls Church and hauled the dress bags out of the attic and stacked his books into traveling trunks, my aunt, in the final throes of our archeological dig, found a sketchbook that had belonged to my great-grandfather, Donn P. Crane. The cover was marbled and brown, held together […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bright bears
NEVADA Bob Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects was sad to see Energy Secretary Steven Chu leaving after four years on the job. Grabbing a garland of verbal images to describe Halstead’s reaction, the Las Vegas Review-Journal said Chu was “a breath of fresh air for Nevada after a string of […]
Posted inGoat
Side effects
In a video released last fall by the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research, Google Earth zooms in on Humboldt County, Calif.’s forested hills. Cruising the ridges from one watershed of this virtual landscape to the next, one gets a bird’s-eye view of the hundreds of new roads, out-buildings, and even the tall, leafy pot […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Economy, distrust complicate allocation of tribal settlement money
When the Obama administration announced in April that it would pay 41 tribes some $1 billion to settle a lawsuit over federal mismanagement of trust funds, many saw it as a sort of stimulus package for Indian Country — a chance to invest in long-term development and infrastructure, such as schools, clinics and roads. “The […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
My Dakota: A photo essay and conversation
We recommend you select the gallery option to view these images. In 2005, photographer Rebecca Norris Webb decided it was time to head West with her camera. She’d lived in New York City for 15 years, and spent six years working in the cramped interiors of zoos and aquariums for The Glass Between Us, her […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Gun gluttony
WASHINGTON “Seattle’s nice,” says photographer Regina Johnson, “but it isn’t Paradise.” Courtesy Regina Johnson. UTAH AND WYOMING Could Second Amendment defenders have gone too far, even in this gun-loving region? If two calmly reasoned editorials in Utah and Wyoming’s major daily newspapers are right, you’d have to say, yep, looks like it. Editorializing last month, […]
Posted inGoat
The sad tale of Shiprock South
Residents of northwestern New Mexico may by now be numbed by the almost surreal, ongoing saga of the busted housing development in Shiprock. But to those unfamiliar with the tale, it’s downright heartbreaking. “Navajo housing project could waste millions,” reads the headline in the Farmington Daily Times, and “be forever incomplete.” The story opens: SHIPROCK […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
A Montanan walks into a Cairo bar: A review of Evel Knievel Days
Evel Knievel DaysPauls Toutonghi293 pages,hardcover: $24.Crown, 2012. Khosi Saqr Clark, the narrator of Pauls Toutonghi’s funny and winsome second novel, Evel Knievel Days, isn’t a typical native of Butte. Sure, he loves Montana and enjoys the annual Evel Knievel Days spectacle, complete with its “American Motordome Wall of Death,” but his neurotic nature (“the obsessive-compulsive’s […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Book review: Quilts: California Bound, California Made 1840-1940
Quilts: California Bound, California Made 1840-1940. Sandi Fox 208 pages, softcover: $40. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Quilts are cherished both for their warmth and for the memories they hold, so it makes sense that they were among the sparse belongings early immigrants brought with them by horse, wagon, ship or train to California. In […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
No more ‘social studies’
I am a Colorado rancher. I subscribe to HCN for the responsible research and reporting its contributors provide on environmental issues affecting the West. (The Dec. 24 feature on energy development in British Columbia is a perfect recent example.) While there is a decidedly liberal view evident in much of what HCN produces, I support […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Our loyal readers come through, yet again
The staff had great news to pass on to the High Country News board of directors during our winter board meeting (held in cyberspace) Jan. 25th: Over the holidays, you all sent in a record number of gift subscriptions and Research Fund donations, along with several substantial grants supporting HCN‘s editorial work and the upgrade of […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Reading the Brautigan Bible: A review of Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard BrautiganWilliam Hjortsberg896 pages,hardcover: $38.Counterpoint Press, 2012. Richard Brautigan grew up in Oregon, convinced he’d be an influential writer. He rose to fame in San Francisco and later split his time between Bolinas, Calif., Livingston, Mont. and Japan. He published 10 poetry books and a dozen novels, including […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A map collection for time travelers
In 1952, rural Nebraskans encountered an extraordinary sight: an Army chaplain and his 11-year-old nephew zipping around the state in a silver Jaguar convertible. “People in Nebraska never saw such a thing as an open-topped sports car!” Robert Berlo, the nephew, told me last spring from his home in Livermore, Calif. Berlo didn’t inherit his […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Don’t eat the yellow snow
CALIFORNIA It read like one of the sweetest wildlife stories ever — the tale of an orphaned bobcat that was too darned nice. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the affectionate bobcat kitten — known as Chips — was found in the burning Plumas National Forest, a surprising survivor at only a few weeks old. […]