Dear Friends

Busting out When High Country News moved into its new quarters in early 1992 (New Year’s Day, to be exact), we assumed the 3,600 square-foot building would serve us forever. After all, we had come out of 1,000 square feet. But when the architect who designed the building happened to be in Paonia, we asked […]

Prairie paper wins a Pulitzer The 37,000-circulation Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota may have lost its building to flooding and fire in 1997, but this month the daily won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. The paper never missed a day of publication and circulated for free when its readers were forced to evacuate […]

Questions and visitors Gregory Reis of Lee Vining, Calif., writes that he was in a plane flying near New Mexico’s Aztec Ruins National Monument when he saw mysterious “rectangular cleared areas all over the place.” What might they be? he asked us. Intern JT Thomas called around until he found Rich Simmons, a staffer with […]

A class act Circulation staffer Kathy Martinez recently traveled to Las Vegas to attend the USPS National Postal Forum; there she learned that HCN is a very small fish in a very large ocean. According to Kathy, “When I told one postal official how much we spend on postage a year, she just turned away […]

Old and Older Aspen Although Aspen has become mythic as a place where great wealth collides with glamour and fame (and occasionally with trees), beneath the hoopla there beats the heart of a small Western town. That town was on display Jan. 31, when Aspen honored its own: environmentalist Joy Caudill, architect Sam Caudill, ski […]

A landmark potluck Three times a year, High Country News holds a board meeting and potluck somewhere in its 1 million square-mile territory. The potlucks especially always have lots of good company and good food. But – and this is no reflection on Socorro or Bozeman or Seattle or Salt Lake City or Cheyenne or […]

Visit from a stalwart Once upon a time, substantial chunks of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado were to be the scene of massive industrial development. Oil shale, aka the “rock that burns,” was to be mined and crushed, with the resulting hydrocarbons liquefied and then refined, freeing the U.S. from servitude to the Middle East. It […]

Reading into 1998 The bad thing about taking a break, which we accomplished by skipping the Jan. 5 issue, is coming back to a towering stack of accumulated papers from Western cities and small towns, as well as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Weekly. As we troll for story leads, […]

Into the desert HCN staffers Rita Murphy, Jason Lenderman, Sara Phillips and Peter Chilson and about 175 other anti-nuclear protesters walked onto the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site Nov. 9. Without fuss, security guards escorted everyone right into a barbwire detention pen because it is unlawful to enter the test site without permission. Staffers […]

Thinking out loud Patricia Nelson Limerick, the bane of the Old West’s historians – those (usually) white men who said white folks brought civilization as they rolled over a mostly empty, heathenish continent – came to Grand Junction, Colo., recently. During the afternoon she talked informally with members of the Western Colorado Congress, a coalition […]

The Research Fund The real burden of the Research Fund falls on the “gang of five,” a tenacious crew that is sitting in our central area putting together the letters that will determine HCN’s fate over the next year. It’s an especially tough job because ours is an open office, and so they can’t listen […]

The gardener’s payoff The best thing about the rain that continually pelted the West this summer is that gardens grew to gargantuan size. Now they’re flooding larders with zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, late corn, patty pan squash, calendula blooms to color a salad, dill and much, much more. This is the reward we reap, not by […]

“Depressing … diligent” Last spring we asked you to “give us a piece of your mind” by filling out our ninth annual reader survey. We asked for it and you delivered: 1,820 replies (10 percent of the paper’s readers) telling us what you liked, what you thought stepped over the line, what other newspapers and […]

Corrections Richard Millet, executive vice president of Denver operations at Woodward-Clyde, tells us that Robert (not Bill) Moran was employed as a part-time geochemist at his company, so he was not head geologist, as reported by HCN staffer Heather Abel in her lead story about “mining’s corporate nomads’ June 23. He also says that the […]

The contrary West We won’t regale you with old saws about weather, such as the one that goes, “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a minute – it’ll change.” But we’d like to, because here and in some places like eastern Idaho, where it’s been so damp there are fears of a […]

Out of the hot Kay Firor and Kent Osterberg, accompanied by their children, Brent and Lissa, all of Cove, Ore., came through town. Kay teaches math at Eastern Oregon University, and Kent swears that he is a metrologist – a specialist in the measuring of things. The Red Robin Bike Tour of Colorado, a benefit […]