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 […]
Communities
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 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 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 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 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 […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Libro-tempest in a teacup
I live in sight of Tucson Unified School District’s ground zero, and this controversy is a storm in a teacup (HCN, 4/16/12, “The book smugglers”). Tucson is a multi-ethnic community, but this controversy seems to have only two cultural dimensions, Latinos and everybody else, with “everybody else” wearing the bad, black cowboy hat these days. […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Rowing to Yap
Michelle Nijhuis’ essay in the April 30, 2012, issue, “The row to nowhere,” was delightful. I lived on Yap, or more accurately, I spent several weeks there several times. The island is beautiful and traditional. Most amazing is that part of the islanders’ own “rowing history” involves rowing, or, rather, sailing, to the sort-of-nearby island […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Student visitors from near and far
As their foreign exchange program at Paonia High School came to a close, Henna Reinhardt, from Germany, and Gabby Moet, from Holland, stopped by to see how HCN operates. They sat in on our fast-paced weekly story meeting, in which the editorial staff huddles in a tiny, sweltering conference room to discuss (and argue passionately […]
Posted inWotr
Chosen by Wyoming
Good friends recently sold their home in Wyoming, packed up and moved to Florida. Even though they’d met in Wyoming and married in view of the Wind River Mountains, where they loved to hike and ski, and even though they often spoke of their affection for the West’s open spaces, within months they were gone. […]
Posted inGoat
3,000 miles to Paonia
At about midnight last Sunday, the hacking and swearing and puking outside my tent that had gone on for two hours ended with a hysterical man screaming into a starless night, “White power! White power! White power!” His shouts shocked my nerves like a rusty bucket of ticks thrown against my chest. An indecisive moment […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Hot hot Arizona, stubborn obituaries
ARIZONA Phoenix broke a record on April , though we can’t imagine anyone celebrated the event. The temperature climbed up to 105 degrees — six degrees hotter than the previous record for that day. COLORADO A recent paid obituary in the Denver Post for a man named Michael “Flathead” Blanchard made for some delightful reading. […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t bury her deep in the cold, cold ground
As anyone who knows her will tell you, my mother is opinionated. She knows exactly what she wants in life, and — as I recently learned — in death as well. She and I have been discussing her funerary wishes off and on since her own mother passed away a year ago. It was an […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
How to dispose of frozen cows
COLORADO Time has run out for the frozen cows of Conundrum Hot Springs, the immensely popular, 11,200-foot-high stopover for hikers in western Colorado’s White River National Forest. According to the Aspen Daily News, several cows jammed themselves into a Forest Service cabin this winter, apparently to get warm, though unfortunately they were unable to figure […]
Posted inRange
Treaty tribes dedicate final replacement fishing site
DALLESPORT, Wash. – On April 25, 2012, representatives from four tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Army Corps of Engineers all stood by the Columbia River to mark the end of a construction project both useful and symbolic. It was the completion of the 31st — and final — fishing access site on […]