During my first full summer in the West, I participated in a rite of passage: I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The first character I fell in love with was the land. The stirrup-high grass near Leadville, Colorado, that “flowed and flawed in the wind, its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks […]
Communities
Posted inGoat
Fear and loathing in San Juan County
Vandalism and threats play out against wilderness proponents in Utah’s canyonlands.
Posted inArticles
In Montana, ‘Dr. Trout’ battles the planet’s most dangerous diseases
In his day job, Marshall Bloom is the associate director for scientific management at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a cutting-edge federal research campus in an unlikely place: Hamilton, Mont., a town of about 4,500 in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley. Nearly 500 workers in dozens of lab buildings are dedicated to studying “emerging infectious diseases” like […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Fraudulent corn robberies
Around Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, the livestock are a little different. Credit: Andrew Gulliford UTAH It seemed at first like just another armed holdup of a roadside corn stand. Corn-seller Dusty Moore told police that he was innocently selling ears in a North Ogden parking lot when a Hispanic-looking man in his 30s approached, demanded some money […]
Posted inArticles
First impressions: an Easterner’s new life in the West
Photographer Andrew Cullen used Instagram to document his summer 2012 move from Maine to Colorado, capturing Western scenes of surprise, wonder, and delight. Click on the gallery view to see the images full size.
Posted inGoat
Big dreams in a little town
Last Thursday evening, three members of the HCN crew stopped off in El Rito, N.M., an hour and a half north of Santa Fe, where we were headed for a Board of Directors meeting. There, in a hamlet of about 1,000, we strolled through a century-old campus and learned about a grand vision for education. […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: The desert shoe tree
Rants from the Hill are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in rural Nevada. They are posted at the beginning of each month at www.hcn.org. You can subscribe to the podcast for free in iTunes, or through Feedburner if you use other podcast readers. Each month’s rant is also available in written form. Musical credits for Rantcast: Bumper sticker sloganeering, licensed under […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Harvesting the Desert Shoe Tree
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Rants from the Hill is now a FREE podcast! Listen to an audio performance of this essay, here. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or through Feedburner for use in another podcast reader. On the […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Storm on Lava Creek: A season in Yellowstone
By the second mile of my third hike during my first season in Yellowstone, thunder booms near. I wonder if we’ll have time to finish the hike. • • • Ten days ago, my best friend, Alison, and I began our new summer jobs as Xanterra lodging reservation agents at Mammoth Hot Springs, after a […]
Posted inGoat
Brigham Young the enlightened one
In 1847, a few years after the violent death, in Missouri, of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led the Mormons on an exodus across the desert into the promised land, a place we now know as Utah. Young, as President of the Church of Latter Day Saints, then led the colonization of Utah and parts of […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
One Sagebrush Rebellion flickers out — or does it?
“No thief who has to pay for what he steals will steal for long.” — Nevada rancher Wayne Hage, explaining to High Country News in 1995 why he had filed a lawsuit against the federal government over restrictions on his livestock grazing. That landmark Sagebrush Rebellion lawsuit, hailed as protecting the rights of Western ranchers […]
Posted inWotr
Childhood’s end
My 7-year-old daughter Willa came home from school last week and said she knew what sex was. Her friend Melissa had told her. “OK, what is it?” My wife Ellen asked, as I poured the bourbon for the Manhattan I knew I’d need. “It’s when a man and a woman lie down together and kiss.” […]
Posted inGoat
Cheer up, Melon Queen
On a reporting trip over the weekend, I found myself riding in an old Ford pick-up draped with watermelon banners, wearing a sparkly top hat and holding a microphone out the window. As the truck crawled down Main Street in Green River, Utah, children scrambled like spiders to pick up thrown candy as retirees in […]
Posted inGoat
An audience for old Indians
Roland McCook wouldn’t care if he died tomorrow. Last Thursday, he stood before an amphitheater of aging white folks outside the Paonia public library. I wanted to hear what he wanted to say because most of the country doesn’t listen to old people, especially old Indians. A woman asked McCook, who is a Northern Ute […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
History through a wide-angle lens
History is conveniently framed in your story about the conflict over Taos land grants (“Troubled Taos,” HCN, 8/20/12). Nowhere is the King of Spain’s right to grant the land in the first place ever questioned. One cannot argue there is a greater good in returning the land grants to Spanish grantees on the basis of […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Home improvement: A review of Sugarhouse
Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House into Our Home Sweet HomeMatthew Batt258 pages, softcover: $14.95Mariner, 2012. Matthew Batt is a perpetual student, earning his Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah while his wife, Jenae, works — until she finally gets tired of supporting his grad-school habit. “I got home from ‘class’ one night, […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
See you in October
A heads-up: High Country News staffers will be taking a much needed two-week publishing break after this issue. We’ll be catching up on work around the office as well as harvesting North Fork Valley produce and watching the aspens change. Look for our special annual books and essays issue around Oct. 15, and visit hcn.org […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Song of loss and redemption: A review of Theft
Theft BK Loren224 pages, softcover: $16.Counterpoint, 2012. Development’s brutal erosion of the landscape is a fact of life in the West. In the hands of lesser writers, it often becomes a cliché — shorthand for the destructive side of human nature and the grief and rage it provokes. Even when tackled by good writers, it […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Gathering strength from the Continental Divide
The Continental Divide of my childhood rises up the moment I spy the fractured, uplifted horizon formed by the Rocky Mountains. Ahead lies Longs Peak, and the log cabin my family has rented for the summer. Ahead lie weeks full of freedom and possibility. Left behind, so close to Missouri it barely qualifies as Kansas: […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bloodsuckers in California
THE SOUTHWEST & CALIFORNIA It’s been hot lately. Damned hot. Phoenix, Ariz., Palm Springs, Calif., and other Western torrid zones posted temperatures of more than 100 degrees every day during the first two weeks of August. Death Valley’s high exceeded 115 degrees on 14 out of those 14 days, and on one occasion reached 126 […]