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 […]
Communities
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 […]
Posted inGoat
Finding true north
Two weeks ago, I traveled to Alaska for likely the same reasons most people visit: To experience the American landscape as I imagine it once was, as a place where you can’t walk five yards in the forest without spying scat of predator or prey, where fish crowd the rivers and eagles wing overhead enjoying […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
In rural California, a Liberian family finds an agricultural refuge
On a historic 50-acre ranch in Northern California, Cynnomih Tarlesson and her nine children drop watermelon seeds into the ground. Behind them, her father, Roosevelt, uses a tractor to churn up the dirt for tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant — along with some lesser-known crops, like the Tarlesson-named ‘Billy Goat Pepper,’ from the family’s native West […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Dark days for bovines
WASHINGTON: “It’s all downhill from here, sweetie.” Courtesy Alexis Alloway. COLORADO These are dark days for bovines. In northeastern Colorado, 50 cows keeled over this summer, most likely from anthrax, which thrives during drought. That sad news came on the heels of a grisly spate of livestock mutilations in the western part of the state. […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t ever forget Cecil Garland
Cecil Garland is not well known beyond the Big Blackfoot River of western Montana. But in this scenic valley, he is remembered as the hardware store owner and WWII veteran who led a 10-year fight to designate the 240,000-acre Scapegoat Wilderness. He is a legend among conservationists, largely because the Scapegoat was the first wilderness […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Mother nature’s hot heyday
I really think that proper defensible space during the High Park fire was a crapshoot (HCN, 8/6/12, ‘Lessons burned?’). The fire moved so fast, with the intense wind gusts, through such dry and dead vegetation, that even if you had 30 feet of defensible space, your house could have easily caught fire. I live in […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
High Country News hires an associate designer
Andy Cullen, HCN‘s new associate designer, drove more than 2,000 miles to get to our office in Paonia, Colo., for his first day on the job. Andy, who earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism, with a concentration in photojournalism, in 2005 at Boston University, spent four years in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh and Mongolia […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Return to innocence: A review of Queen of America
Queen of AmericaLuis Alberto Urrea492 pages, softcover:$14.99.Little, Brown and Company, 2011. It’s hard to be a saint, but being a saint’s father, husband or friend can’t be easy, either. ‘Not all crosses are made of wood,’ as Luis Alberto Urrea observes in his novel Queen of America. It’s a sequel to his 2005 book, […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
A parent lost and found: A review of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life
Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a LifeBy Harrison Candelaria Fletcher147 pages, softcover: $14.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2012. When Colorado writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was almost 2 years old, his father, a pharmacist, died, leaving behind a wife and five children. His mother, who was 29 years younger than her husband, grew up in a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wildlife-tracking drones
THE WEST Ah, technology, isn’t it wonderful? Drones aren’t just useful for targeting suspected terrorists in far-off countries; unmanned aircraft can also be used to photograph birds roosting on cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean. Or so thinks the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which plans to send a 6-pound drone with a 54-inch […]