THE WEST Don’t you just love those helpful hints about what to do when you’re caught in a jam while out hiking miles from the nearest rural road? Your first response is probably hopeless despair — the outback is, by definition, a long way from a hospital. Fortunately, a recent issue of Backpacker magazine offers […]
Communities
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Three days in southwest New Mexico
Downtown Santa Fe’s uniform aesthetic is no coincidence. It’s protected and propagated by city codes: Windows must be modestly sized, edges rounded, exteriors colored an earthy adobe blush. The resulting faraway mystique charms hordes of tourists. But the electric farolitos and “fauxdobe” make others groan: “Enough already!” with the “Disneyfication,” one architect told a local magazine […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
A review of Elevating Western American Art
Elevating Western American Art: Developing an Institute in the Cultural Capital of the Rockies Thomas Brent Smith, editor. 320 pages, hardcover: $34.95. Denver Art Museum, 2012. The Denver Art Museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art hosts an impressive collection of historic and contemporary paintings, textiles, prints and sculptures. Elevating Western American Art celebrates the […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
High Country News skips an issue
We’ll be skipping the July 9th issue. (We publish 22 issues per year.) Instead, we’ll be picking western Colorado cherries, celebrating the Fourth of July, welcoming new interns and working on exciting new stories. You’ll see the next edition of HCN around July 23; in the meantime, enjoy the sweet lazy days of early summer, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wearing hummingbirds
THE WEST Back in the late 1970s, Doug Weinant, a just-retired range boss in the Crawford country of western Colorado, had the reputation of being a genius with hummingbirds. He and his wife, Alma, who lived in a remote mountain cabin, would put out a bunch of sugar-water feeders in the spring, and dozens of […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Hidden in plain sight: A review of The American Wall
The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of MexicoMaurice Sherif 224 + 160 pages, two volumes, hardcover: $150.University of Texas Press, 2011 In its ungainly proportions, Maurice Sherif’s The American Wall mimics its massive subject, the U.S.-Mexico border fence. The “book” is actually two giant volumes enclosed in a slipcase. Heft one […]
Posted inArticles
The Excursions Episode
Just in time for summer travel season, we’ll spend this episode of West of 100 wandering the West. Journalist Scott Carrier and poet Alex Caldiero visit the Sun Tunnels, a far-flung art installation in the Utah desert. High Country News editorial fellow Neil LaRubbio gives us a peek into the world of modern hoboes. (Neil is producing […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
FLDS continues abusive polygamist practices in Utah and Arizona
Rumors swirled around the courthouse in San Angelo, Texas, last summer. Prosecutors had charged Warren Jeffs — leader of the nation’s most notorious polygamous sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — with sexually assaulting two underage girls in the group’s Texas compound. For weeks, spectators whispered that the prosecutors possessed a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Sea lion squatters in So-Cal
CALIFORNIA “A large gang of sea lions” is occupying three docks at Ventura in Southern California, the first time the 800-pound animals have squatted within the harbor itself. Until recently, the sociable sea lions congregated on large buoys that lead out of the harbor, but now, thanks to what rawstory.com describes as the animals’ “hostile […]
Posted inWotr
Remembering Ed Quillen, that prodigious writer of the West
Western writer, historian, thinker, polymath Ed Quillen, 61, died suddenly on Sunday, June 3. He had been a Denver Post columnist since the mid-1980s, a small-town journalist before that, and founded a regional magazine, Colorado Central, in the early 1990s. But that hardly begins to describe Quillen. When the news of his sudden passing began […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
High Country News gets visitors and a new employee
Angela Caldwell started as HCN’s new circulation assistant in May. She’ll help us keep track of new subscriptions and renewals here at our home office in Paonia, Colo. A resident of the North Fork Valley for 14 years, Angela says she doesn’t miss the hustle of her hometown, Aurora, on the state’s busy Front Range. In […]
Posted inWotr
Life among the Bluffoons
It’s not a well-traveled road in southeastern Utah, not far from the Arizona line, so chances are you haven’t seen two new, brick and stone signs close to the quiet town of Bluff that proudly say: “Bluff, Utah, established 650 A. D.” And you assumed that the Mormons settled Utah! No, local history for this […]
Posted inWotr
The Black Hills await justice
Every now and then a bombshell of a story comes along that screams for a reasonable amount of historical context. Why? Because it doesn’t make sense without it. But given a citizenry as poorly informed about its own history as ours is, our gross national product may best be measured in foolishness. For instance, the […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Rattlesnakes in Walmarts, deer in malls
WASHINGTON AND IDAHO There are many things to expect when pushing a shopping cart around the outdoor garden department of a Walmart, but a poisonous snake is certainly not one of them. So when 47-year-old Mica Craig of Lewiston, Idaho, saw what he thought was a stick lying in the aisle of Walmart in Clarkston, […]
Posted inGoat
Farewell to a wise curmudgeon
On Sunday, the West lost a unique voice – journalist Ed Quillen, who for nearly three decades had written about the region’s communities and issues with a keen eye for irony and an appreciation for history. Ed died at his home in Salida, Colo. at the all-too-young age of 61. “Colorado has lost one of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The Forest Service hearts explosives
MONTANA The Forest Service is getting more bang for its buck these days. Recently, rangers said they might have to blow up some frozen cows in Colorado to disperse them before they rotted; now comes the news that the Helena National Forest in Montana has already used explosives to bring down some trees — 500 […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Filling empty pages: A review of When Women Were Birds
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on VoiceTerry Tempest Williams224 pages, hardcover: $24.Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sarah Crichton Books), 2012. Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, When Women Were Birds, resonates with her signature gift — the ability to salvage beauty from great heartbreak. Like her acclaimed memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
In the desert, questions without answers: A review of Gods Without Men
Gods Without MenHari Kunzru384 pages, hardcover: $26.95.Knopf, 2012. The setup to Gods Without Men may sound like the beginning of a bad joke: “A Sikh, a hippie, and a monk walk out to the desert. …” But there’s nothing clichéd about British novelist Hari Kunzru’s latest work. Kunzru’s mosaic of a story envisions history lapping […]