A skipped issue Twice a year, the High Country News staff takes pity on its readers and stops the flow of news for a fortnight. This bonus issue, with its four extra pages, will have to take the place of the skipped July 21 issue. Our next issue will be dated August 4, 1997 – […]
Dear Friends
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Dear Friends
Word from Gretchen Circulation manager Gretchen Nicholoff is in the business of increasing HCN’s subscription rolls, so she was horrified to learn that some subscribers thought a letter she wrote threatened to cut them off. It is the Postal Service that is threatening HCN with non-delivery unless we get subscriber addresses right. Gretchen is grateful […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
Dear Friends
Please, please, please The circulation department is mailing 700 requests to subscribers, asking this select group for their “official” addresses. These letters will get to you because we’re sending them – gasp! – first class, but your copies of HCN are now running the risk of being marked undeliverable by the post office because our […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Dear friends
Feedback We heard from 80-year-old Nancy Coy of Perry, N.Y., recently, who said our “green Christian” story April 28 made her hopeful, as both an environmentalist and agnostic, about the world again. “Since I have insomnia,” she writes, “I listen to late-night talk radio and have to choose between the Rush Limbaugh sort of rhetoric […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
Dear friends
Spring visitors Subscriber Ed Moreno took the scenic route from Denver, where he was visiting his parents, to Santa Fe, where he is an assistant commissioner in the New Mexico State Land Office. His boss is Ray Powell – one of the West’s most innovative public land commissioners. Freelance writer Peter Shelton, a resident of […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Dear Friends
Big Sky, big stress The March 31, 1997, issue of HCN described the litigious nature of Montana’s Big Sky Resort. We’ve gotten interesting responses to the story. Writer Ray Ring, sitting in Bozeman, says he sees signs that the article may have helped shift the tone of the dialogue. After a recent meeting, Gallatin County […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Dear Friends
Plaudits for the Poppers Frank and Deborah Popper are the mom-and-pop Darth Vaders of the Great Plains. The scholars from New Jersey coined “Buffalo Commons” to describe the turn they want the depopulated region to take. Harsh feelings against the Rutgers University-based pair will not be softened by the American Geographical Society, which recently awarded […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
Dear friends
Postal P.S. In the good old days, HCN only had to worry about habitat and species and clean air. Today, as the Old West curdles into the New West, the paper also worries about small towns. The Dec. 23, 1996, story on the Red Lodge, Mont., post office by John Clayton had a happy ending. […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Dear friends
Like a moth Idaho storyteller and folk singer Rosalie Sorrels sang at Paonia’s Paradise (movie) Theater last week, and thanks to two Stupid Band sound engineers from Montrose, Colo., her voice was clear and powerful. Yet the setting was as intimate as a cabaret, and the audience of 70 or so seemed entranced. Sorrels sings […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Dear friends
Heaven-o … Kissy lives! Stories here and elsewhere about a south Texas county that decided its employees should answer the phone with a spritely “HEAVEN-O” were tough on those who picked up the phone. It rang a lot. We were among those who called Kleberg County to see how the anti-HELLo greeting was going, and […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Dear friends
Out for birds We thought we were in for a noisy Saturday night. The motel parking lot was packed. In a small town like Socorro, N.M., that usually means a basketball or wrestling meet, with celebrating or mourning into Sunday morning. But the Holiday Inn Express was like a morgue, until we got to the […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Dear friends
About that toilet paper Cadillac Desert author Marc Reisner sent us a copy of a letter he wrote to former Durango, Colo., mayor Jeff Morrissey, a friend of the Animas-La Plata project and an enemy of all A-LP’s opponents. Morrissey was quoted as saying he wipes his *** with Reisner’s book. Reisner’s response, only the […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Dear friends
Join us in Socorro Do High Country News readers have as good taste in food as in newspapers? Come join us at the year’s first HCN potluck in Socorro, N.M., on Saturday, Feb. 1, at 6:30 p.m. to find out. Potlucks are held following meetings of the HCN board. This potluck will be at the […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Dear friends
Digging in Winter finally fell on Paonia after fooling us for so many weeks with sunny days and skittish snow. The ski areas are happy about their feet-thick bases, and local water supplies, though still in snowpack, seem robust. But it isn’t cold yet, with that dry, biting cold we’ve come to expect in December. […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Dear friends
Let the waters flow As the days grow shorter and darkness comes earlier, we look for signs that winter isn’t really closing in. Octogenarian David Brower helped us out the other day with a cheery phone call at dusk from California. He had surprising news: The club’s board had just voted unanimously to support emptying […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Dear friends
The aftermath With this issue we get our chance to punditify, prognosticate and otherwise ponder what Western voters meant to do when they each took five or 10 minutes to punch out their preferences: Urban voters may pull down levers in booths with curtains; rural voters tend to stand at open lecterns and punch out […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Dear friends
What happened? Unlike you, we don’t have a clue as to how the elections came out. Did Bob Dole come out of nowhere to upset Bill Clinton? Did Walt Minnick pull a similar feat in Idaho? Is it now illegal for cows to pee in Oregon’s streams? Do parents have new rights in Colorado? Did […]
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
Dear Friends
Braving blaze orange It’s hunting season again, and who knows it better than this office? Our neighbor to the south is a meat locker which works overtime this season, thanks to pickup loads of dead deer, elk and, lately, bear. The gang of cats that patrols the alley seems in hog heaven while the animal-lovers […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Dear friends
Thank you, Driggs Three times a year HCN holds board meetings and potlucks with subscribers around the region. Until recently, we tended to gather in places like Sun Valley or Boulder. Those are good places, but we realized we were neglecting less well-known towns. So last winter we met in Colorado Springs, famous as home […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Dear friends
Odds and ends Thanks to Boulder, Colo., reader Evan Cantor who sent us 10 years of back issues of High Country News. They’ve been snapped up by Paonia High School, which school secretary Judy Briscoe tells us has become much involved in interdisciplinary teaching. And thanks to Evergreen, Colo., writer Dyan Zaslowsky, who passed on […]