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 […]
Communities
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
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 […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Experiential natural resource education thrives in the West
The environmental conundrums facing the West have never been more complex. How do you manage global problems like climate change locally? Is there any way to stop the cheatgrass invasion? Can the forest help our economy while protecting our watershed? And what’s going on with those bears east of town? The next generation must tackle […]
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 inArticles
My low-impact life
My low-impact life did not grow out of my concern for the environment, or anything the least bit altruistic. It sprang from my desire to get an education without falling into debt. Just back from caretaking an isolated Canadian fishing camp, I faced the challenge of finding an inexpensive place to rent in Bozeman, Mont., […]
Posted inWotr
The Wild and not so gun-loving West
On summer evenings in the former mining town of Silverton, Colo., the staccato sound of gunshots used to echo through otherwise quiet streets. A cast of stereotypical Old West characters riddled one another with bullets, as the legendary gunfighters did once upon a time in the West. Except that those kind of shoot-‘em-ups didn’t happen […]
Posted inArticles
Protecting culture in the ancient Sky City
About an hour west of Albuquerque, N.M., a sandstone bluff rises above the high desert floor. For more than 800 years, the people of Acoma Pueblo have lived there, protecting their culture, language and many traditional ways. Archaeologist Theresa Pasqual, the director of the Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, works with state and federal agencies […]
Posted inArticles
Photographing migrant foragers
Eirik Johnson’s photographs document the life and landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives. He’s been featured on National Public Radio and in Orion and Audubon Magazine, among others. Johnson’s series of images on the region’s logging industry, Sawdust Mountain, was recently published by the Aperture Foundation. High Country News assistant designer Andrew Cullen, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A coyote chorus
NEW MEXICO Coyotes roam freely throughout New Mexico, but finding a family of five hanging out in an Albuquerque churchyard surprised Ruth Wilson, who lives across the street and enjoys watching them. The church is in a busy part of town and so whenever police or ambulance sirens sound off — which they do several […]
Posted inGoat
There ain’t no app for that
It feels weird to write about this in a blog — a purely digital format. Hell, the fact that I’m typing this on a computer makes me feel like a full-on techno-weenie. That’s because the subject of this little article, a guy named Dean Coombs, puts out a newspaper every week without the benefit of […]
Posted inGoat
The wild and not so gun-loving West
On many a summer evening in the small, former mining town of Silverton, Colo., the staccato sound of gunshots echoes through the otherwise quiet streets. Follow the shots and you’ll come across a cast of stereotypical Old West characters riddling one another with bullets, as folks no doubt did once upon a time in these […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Deer assaults
CALIFORNIA There’s no doubt about it, says Connie Jenkins: A deer suddenly assaulted her small Honda while she was driving along a winding canyon to her home high above Malibu. Yet the suggestion in a letter from an expeditor for Farmers Insurance that she seek damages from the “third party” — which in this case […]