Dear Friends

Visitors The letters have been pouring in to HCN, and so have the people — folks like Minneapolis subscriber Larry Weisner, who is traipsing across the West, and Flagstaff subscriber Jeff Latham, who is on the initial leg of a motorcycle trip to Alaska. Colleen Nunn, who works in the Western History/Genealogy Department at the […]

The good news The High Country News board of directors came to Paonia in late May, to mull over the finances and plan for the future. The numbers for the first quarter of 2004 look good: Our expenses are below budget, and our income is above budget, thanks largely to a grant from the Hewlett […]

New Interns Zach Smith arrived in Paonia just in time to escape the blistering summer heat of Santa Fe, N.M., where he wrote for the Santa Fe Reporter and volunteered for the Audubon Society, teaching elementary school kids the basics of geology and birding. A Denver native who has lived in six states and studied […]

Visitors Spring weather has brought a stream of friends and luminaries to the High Country News office in western Colorado. Lyman Orton spent an afternoon with us. He and his sons own the Vermont Country Store, famous for its old-timey black-and-white catalogs, featuring everything from rubber galoshes to cheddar cheese. The store now puts out […]

Visitors A rite of winter here is climbing out of bed to tune in to the morning avalanche report, which is usually delivered with aplomb by Knox Williams, the head of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. We were pleasantly surprised when Williams and Vince Matthews, the director of the Colorado Geological Survey, showed up on […]

Heat wave It’s hard to believe that just over three weeks ago we got a call from nearby Telluride, Colo., saying an avalanche had wiped out the town’s power supply. Kelly Hearn, managing editor of The Telluride Watch, told us that the area’s main power line was buried under 20 feet of ice and snow, […]

An important anniversary On Sept. 3, the Wilderness Act will turn 40 years old — an anniversary that comes as the Bush administration’s shift away from wildlands protection has highlighted just how political wilderness can be. And that’s exactly what the Wallace Stegner Center’s Ninth Annual Symposium is all about. “Wilderness: Preserving Nature in a […]

Gunning for the big screen Adam Jackaway is a man who likes to make big statements with small tools. Last winter, with war looming in Iraq, he shouldered his snow shovel and tromped out into a Boulder, Colo., park. There, he sculpted a massive peace sign in a blank field, recruiting others to help, and […]

Congratulations! The crew at High Country News extends a hearty welcome to the newest member of the clan: Paolo Bacigalupi and his wife, Anjula Jalan, arrived in the world at 3:24 a.m. on Jan. 25 — and has hardly allowed his parents a wink of sleep since. Paolo reports that Arjun set a record a […]

Give and Take Inside this issue of High Country News, you’ll find a flier for our newest book, called Give and Take: How the Clinton Administration’s Public Lands Offensive Transformed the American West. It pulls together our best coverage of the national monument spree engineered by Clinton and his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, along with […]

COLORADO INTERNS Colorado native and high-tech refugee Jodi Peterson has decided to write about her passion, the beautiful but threatened American West. After 15 years of penning online help and users’ guides for Hewlett-Packard, she has taken a sabbatical to become an intern at HCN. Now, Jodi looks forward to the freedom of writing without […]

VACATION TIME

PARTY TIME The staff of High Country News cordially invites all readers and friends to HCN’s holiday open house at our Paonia, Colo., office (119 Grand Ave.) on Monday, Dec. 15. Knock back a few eggnogs with the entire HCN crew between 5 and 7:30 p.m. Please bring a treat to share. We’ll provide drinks. […]

HCN shows its roots There was a veritable High Country News love-fest in Gunnison, Colo., in early November. Western State journalism professor George Sibley called together several hundred academics, activists, writers, students — and even a rancher or two — to ponder the history of this newspaper, and the state of the West, at the […]

Radio Special Radio High Country News will return to the airwaves in mid-November for a special one-hour show called “Atomic Tales: Living in the Nuclear West.” The program will explore our region’s cradle-to-grave relationship with all things nuclear — a relationship that reaches from the dawn of the nuclear age to the burial of radioactive […]

CHARGE ON The High Country News board and staff couldn’t have wished for a better weekend — or a better location — for the fall ’03 board meeting. Fifteen board members, eight staffers, and HCN founder Tom Bell all gathered at the Murie Ranch, just inside Grand Teton National Park, near Moose, Wyo., to talk […]

CONGRATULATIONS Michelle Nijhuis penned her final words as HCN’s senior editor in December 2001, but she has not been sitting still since then. Michelle returned as our contributing editor last year; she’s also written for Audubon, The Christian Science Monitor and Salon, and has forthcoming articles in Smithsonian and Orion. Michelle’s feature story about urban […]

THE WRITE STUFF The season’s beginning to change here in Paonia, and with crisper days we’ve also got fresh editorial blood for the fall. Hailing from tropical Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, new HCN intern Pua Mench moved to Hawaii’s “polar” opposite to attend Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where the temperatures dipped to minus-40 degrees. Eventually, she […]