If you live in, say, Boulder, Napa or San Jose, and you feel like your neighbors are wealthier than you are, it’s probably not paranoia. They really do have more money than you. That’s the takeaway from the map of the week, released Feb. 11 by the U.S. Census Bureau, that shows which counties have […]
Communities
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
In a rural Colorado valley, old-fashioned print news lives on
On any given Tuesday, if you venture past the creaky door and the piles of paper and boxes and photos, you’ll find Dean Coombs marinating in the smell of hot lead, dust and the slow decay of old newsprint, tending an ancient printing press that emanates a rhythmic whir-swoosh. Coombs, with an unkempt gray beard, […]
Posted inWotr
Living in a caboose, supporting the railroad
I’ve lived for close on 20 years in an old heavyweight Burlington Railroad caboose. It’s grounded in Gilpin County, Colo., close to the Continental Divide, near milepost 41.77 on the Union Pacific Railroad’s Moffat tunnel sub –a subsidiary line leading up to the tunnel and through it. I may have slept in that old baby […]
Posted inWotr
Never underestimate the power of prejudice
Last year, both New Mexico and Arizona celebrated the centennial anniversaries of their becoming states. But why did it take them until 1912 to join the Union? The answer isn’t pretty; it reveals a pattern of racism and discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics and Catholics in the West. For New Mexico, the long road to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tonopah, Nev. and its “Fighting Muckers”
Utah “Remember,” says photographer Greg Woodall, “when enviros and liberals were the ones who were ‘anti-this and anti-that’?” Courtesy Greg Woodall. UTAH What’s in a name? If the name is Dixie State College, based in St. George, Utah, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Recently, as the college began moving closer to becoming a university, locals […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Chicken pastorale
“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. American folk musician and hillbilly existentialist Greg Brown offers some mid-song patter referring to Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem “On Weariness” (“Cierto Cansancio”), in which Neruda memorably wrote […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A review of An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps
An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps 1550-1941. Peter L. Eidenbach, 184 pages, hardcover: $45. University of New Mexico Press, 2012. In this colorful collection of maps, archaeologist and historian Peter L. Eidenbach presents the Land of Enchantment as seen by early conquerors, naturalists, surveyors, and railroaders. Geologically speaking, New Mexico has been mostly static […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Love wins
On the first day marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples in Washington state, Laurie and I headed to our rural county courthouse.
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Welcome, new interns!
Two new editorial interns just arrived at our Paonia, Colo., office for six months of intensive training in reporting, writing and (sometimes seemingly endless) rewriting. Sarah Jane Keller may be new to Paonia, but she’s no stranger to the territory. After growing up in rural Maryland, she made a leap to the West nine years […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Art finds a place alongside science at New Mexico research station
Everywhere, cardboard was scattered across metal counters and test tube racks. Natasha Ribeiro, an exuberant photographer with a blonde pixie cut, displayed one of the finished products: a box with a tiny hole and a slot for photographic paper, sealed with black tape. “A pinhole camera!” she exclaimed. “There are enough supplies for everyone to […]
Posted inWotr
Letting go of the comfortable
In central Washington’s Douglas County you can find ghost houses worn by wind and marooned on small islands of untilled dirt. Their inhabitants once gazed out at the easternmost Cascade Mountains, their peaks just above eye level from the county’s 3,000-foot high plain. My mother’s family lived in one of those houses surrounded by wheat […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A twittering elk in Boulder
COLORADO Believe me, we’re as sick as you are of reading about Boulder, Colo., on this page. But, still, it might make a good reality show location, except that most viewers would doubt the reality of even a reality show set here. In early January, for instance, according to the Daily Camera, a man entered […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
A field program teaches undergrads to think differently about public lands
I am in school, watching a grown man cry. He works at a clinic in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border. He tells me and 22 other visiting college students what happened to local farmers one season, when the federal government shut off their irrigation water to protect endangered fish during a drought. He […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Round River pushes kids out of their comfort zones and into the field
In 1992, four fresh-faced students joined conservationist Jim Tolisano in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains in search of grizzly bears. Grizzlies are thought to be extinct in the state, but sighting rumors circulated, and Round River Conservation Studies’ founders Dennis Sizemore and Doug Peacock — who inspired the character Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench […]
Posted inWotr
The beauty of the wood pile
The six-and-a-half pound maul making its way around my head travels through the October sunshine: dull gray, blunt, serious as an elk in rut. It windmills beneath the yellow larch needles and outstretched arms of evergreens, their fall odors incensing an already heady mix of dried grass, wood smoke, and sun-warmed bark. A wedge of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Sign-hating Californians
CALIFORNIA “Out here, people don’t like signs.” So said Sheriff’s Deputy Rob McDaniels to the Point Reyes Light in December, after apprehending “Sensitive Sean” for stealing more than 20 no-parking signs. This small community on the Northern California coast –– let’s just call it “Anonymous,” since the locals have asked us not to reveal its […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Great Old Broads for Wilderness laugh and learn
The pro-wilderness group teaches elders how to engage in public lands management, while having a great time.
Posted inWotr
Guns are different for women in the West
“In Montana, women go around with a baby bottle in one hand and a gun in the other,” quipped a man recently as he sat at the bar in Happy’s Road House, outside of Libby. Unlike the rural Montana women to whom he referred, my introduction to guns didn’t come about because I was surrounded by […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
The Power Lung Kid
At 8:30 a.m., the Power Lung Kid knocks at my trailer door. I’m eating Lucky Charms, staring out the window at the low-slung volcanic rock and aspens that rise into the ponderosa, spruce and fir of south-central Oregon. “You know why I’m called the Power Lung Kid?” he asks, leaning back in his chair. “No,” […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
A big thank-you to our supporters
We’re growing! Congrats to the many readers who recently stepped up to nourish the HCN community. You helped us blow the doors off our holiday gift-giving goal of 500 new subscribers. As we go to press, you’ve given at least 750 new gift subscriptions to family members, friends and colleagues, who, like you, care about […]