Updated 11/14/12 At 3 on a Friday afternoon, Armando Rios and Ashley Ross are distributing fliers for tonight’s art show. Rios sports an ironic Burt Reynolds mustache and purple button-down. Ross, in her tight black leggings and long dark bangs, looks like she stepped out of a coffee shop in the Mission. But this isn’t […]
Communities
Posted inHeard Around the West
National Park air fresheners
ALASKA – Denny Akeya, a native of the St. Lawrence Island village of Savoonga, wears his opinion on his chest. Courtesy Loren Holmes, Alaska Dispatch THE WEST Marketers can sell anything, it seems, even metaphors. You can now buy an air freshener that mimics not the true scent of a national park, which might be a noxious […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Getting involved with the West
The High Country News Board of Directors gathered in Santa Fe, N.M., in late September to toss around story ideas with readers, discuss HCN‘s growing digital audience, and strategize about the future. The context for the discussions was a proposed $2.2 million budget that aims to improve the quality of the magazine and website, while […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Fire Wall: Escaping Four Mile Canyon
In the 18 minutes it took to evacuate my board-and-batten cabin in Colorado, I operated under a mountainous range of delusions, not least of which hinged upon my faulty understandings of metals, the flukiness of wildfires, and the persistence of history and memory. Danger, for one, didn’t seem imminent. When a neighborly deputy drove by […]
Posted inWotr
We’ve been picking up what you throw away
Since March 2010, I’ve become intimately acquainted with many of the things that people in our society no longer want to live with: empty liquor bottles, deflated soccer balls, the guts of deer, aluminum siding. My team and I have picked up this stuff on roadsides from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. It’s […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: My home lake
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Edward Abbey began Desert Solitaire with the following words: “This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places.” Well, my home lake here in Silver Hills is the most gorgeous […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Goodbye, listeners
Hi podcast listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Rants from the Hill podcast for the past 6 months. We recently decided to discontinue our podcasts due to staffing limitations at High Country News. But never fear, you can still read the Rants from the Hill online, at HCN.org, on the first Monday […]
Posted inWotr
A trip back in time
Despite all those scary stories I’ve been reading and seeing in the American media about how dangerous and violent Mexico has become, I’m always eager to head south of the border. It’s because rural Mexico reminds me of a simpler time. Like the recent trip I took to the town of Ortiz, a journey that […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Death Valley wins heat contest
CALIFORNIA Not far from stands of huge redwood trees and often doused by rain, fans of Humboldt State’s Division II football team cheer on their team with an unusual array of helpers. An ax-wielding drum major cavorts in front of the crowd while some members of the Marching Lumberjack Band make music by banging on […]
Posted inGoat
The carbon (spin) cycle
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science. We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Hages ride on
Actually, the Wayne Hage “taking” case is far from over (HCN, 9/17/2012, “One Sagebrush Rebellion flickers out — or does it?“). First, there are a number of significant findings by Judge Smith that were not overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Second, the Hages have filed a petition for rehearing […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Collectivists for Christ!
Orderville, Utah, is a smattering of modest homes in a narrow valley on the banks of southern Utah’s Virgin River. It feels both overgrown and empty: Thousands of people pass through here daily on their way between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet few ever stop. On a perfect September day in the thick […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Visitors from around the West
You may have noticed that the last two issues of HCN didn’t contain Dear Friends; we moved it online to get some extra space. You can catch up on our visitors, recent journalism awards and other announcements by visiting http://hcne.ws/PXudbz and http://hcne.ws/OTI73V. VISITORS As the weather cools and the leaves fall, we feel lucky to […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Inside the orchard: A conversation with novelist Amanda Coplin
Amanda Coplin spent the first years of her life in Wenatchee, Wash., the self-proclaimed “Apple Capital of the World,” and was indelibly shaped by its rolling acres of fruit trees, and by her frequent visits to the apple and apricot orchard owned by her grandparents. Those sights and smells are powerfully evoked in her debut […]
Posted inWotr
Heading out of fall’s impending darkness
One day in October every year, I leave my home valley and make a pilgrimage up into Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. I am not seeking enlightenment, exactly. I am seeking simply light. My birthday falls on Oct. 10, long enough past the fall equinox that the ever-growing darkness of autumn can no longer be denied. Every […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Already gone: a profile of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo
The author of She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War discusses her new memoir, Crazy Brave.
Posted inHeard Around the West
Snakes and guns
WYOMING AND UTAH Gun advocates keep turning up pesky impediments to their right to use guns any way they want, and when they do, they usually contact their state legislators and demand action. So recently, a Wyoming legislative panel endorsed a proposed bill that would permit silencers to be used while hunting any wildlife in […]
Posted inGoat
This rich Republican Mormon spreads the wealth
He’s a rich, conservative Republican businessman, and the scion of a powerful Mormon family. And four years into a devastating economic crisis, he has come to Washington, D.C., amid cries to balance the budget, to offer a solution. Mitt Romney? Nope. It’s Marriner S. Eccles. The year was 1933, and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Three Nevada fiction writers make their debut
This year, three accomplished and innovative fiction debuts by young Nevada-raised writers will hit the bookstores, including two novels –– Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild and Ben Rogers’ The Flamer (reviewed in HCN on Aug. 6) –– and a short story collection, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn. Girlchild tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, who at the […]