Photographer Jeremy Lurgio unexpectedly finds that life carries on in Cartersville, a small Montana town whose name was struck from official state highway maps in 2000. Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West.
Communities
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
HCN takes a break
Note: This Dear Friends is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. In mid-March, as the last of the scanty winter snow melts here in Paonia, Colo., the HCN crew will be taking one of our four annual publishing breaks. Look for the next issue to hit your mailbox, […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Westerners love erotic landscapes
Note: This essay is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. On this October morning in southern Idaho, the air is dry and frosty, and the shifting sand dunes reflected in the lake at Bruneau are soft and curvy –– feminine shapes. The woman I love becomes one with […]
Posted inWotr
Local food, even in winter
Most of what I’ve read lately about food in America makes me lose my appetite. Outbreaks of deadly pathogens that sicken or even kill people. Chemical spray and dead zones. Exploited workers. “Hollywood Food” that looks great but lacks taste and nutrition. It’s enough to make me want to sell my vegetable farm. That is […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Football players and other thugs
MONTANA After former Democratic Congressman Pat Williams attacked a certain sacred cow at the University of Montana, reaction was swift. Here’s what he told The New York Times: “We’ve had sex assaults, vandalism, beatings by football players. The university has recruited thugs for its football team, and this thuggery has got to stop.” Williams, now […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Scaredy-cats and dogs
IDAHO Some state legislators like to rail against government intruding into people’s lives — unless, of course, those same legislators want to do the intruding themselves. Idaho Republican State Sen. John Goedde recently introduced a bill requiring all high school students to read “and comprehend” Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a doorstop of a novel about […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Upon the burning of our house
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. When I say that American writers have ignited fires, I don’t mean only that they have fired our imaginations or that they have sparked changes in the […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Lessons from Washington State
Your recent placement of Washington’s Chelan County in Oregon could be construed as a benefit in disguise (HCN, 2/4/2013, “Love Wins“). How so? Judging from the polls, Oregon has a very good chance of passing a same-sex marriage ballot measure in 2014 or 2016. We of the critical mass of supporters who desire an equivalent […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Letterpress memories
Thank you very much for your “Postcard” about the Saguache Crescent (HCN, 2/4/2013, “There ain’t no app for that”). As a 1977 graduate of Colorado College, I had the pleasure of visiting Saguache on a number of occasions. On one such visit, we were the front-page headline, as in Colorado College Students Visit Saguache. I […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Making connections to the land
My husband, Delaney, and I wholeheartedly thank you for your incredible Jan. 21 issue on natural resource education. Both of us visited your office in winter of 2010 and talked to your staff about including more articles about education. We are educators ourselves and we love teaching outside in the rural West. We have dedicated […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Philip Anschutz’s outsized reach in the West
For the first time since 1981, Montana’s Glacier National Park is seeking bids to operate its lodges, restaurants and shops, set amid the dramatic Northern Rockies. Among those reportedly considering the opportunity is Xanterra Parks & Resorts, the nation’s largest national park concessionaire, which belongs to Philip Anschutz’s Anschutz Corporation. Meanwhile, the same billionaire’s Anschutz […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Students take over HCN Facebook page
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 […]
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 […]