I pull apart the sooty rocks, exposing wads of foil, blobs of heated plastic and paper plates. The trash goes in my yellow Woodsy the Owl bag; the ash I scatter in the bushes. This soggy alpine meadow here in Idaho offers no good burial sites for a summer’s accumulation of cinders, and I do […]
Essays
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
How to get rural people to stand proud and tall
It usually takes something substantial – a dam or the earth’s 5 billion people – to annoy David Brower. But just credit him with having founded the Sierra Club and watch the scowl form. The annoyance is part vanity. The Sierra Club is now 103; Brower is a youthful 83. His reaction is also part […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Devastation at the center of his universe
For many of us, some places become more special than all others. One of mine is a raw asymmetrical land, lacking the scenic appeal of Colorado’s alps. It’s a quiltwork of lodgepole pine, spruce and Douglas fir, with heroic patches of alpine larch and whitebark pine hugging the highest and rockiest slopes. There’s old-growth ponderosa […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Grow up, dig in, and take root
Outside magazine recently picked six or seven towns – mostly in the West – as great places to live. But those seduced into pulling up stakes by the glossy photos and idyllic promises in July’s cover story should first consider a few facts. Here are three days’ worth of headlines from the Spokesman-Review, the newspaper […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Small town, quirky lives
Though the paper now has a state-of-the-art office, when I worked there it was based in an old church built like a hallway. Cardboard dividers separated Betsy from the interns, and the interns from the bathroom. Our house, “Intern Acres,” had no screens, and no windows in places, just window frames. “That’s good,” my housemate […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN interns: city kids meet gritty rural life
As word filters in from former HCN interns, I’m beginning to understand my place in a long and distinguished line of grunt laborers. I see now that I’m riding a wave’s crest, benefiting from past intern suffering. Compared to bygone days, my time is a cakewalk. One change is that the town of 1,400 is […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN’s tough underbelly
The first intern landed on the paper’s doorstep sometime in the mid-70s, starting a train of 117 short-timers now scattered throughout the West and beyond. The intern program came with the paper from Lander – literally. It was an intern who drove the truck from Wyoming and helped haul boxes into the cramped Paonia office. […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Tom Bell: outraged by the outrageous
If I were a consultant to the West’s energy and mineral companies and ranchers, and to their politicians and bureaucrats, I would give them one piece of advice: “Don’t get crosswise with Tom Bell. Early on in your ‘process’ tell Tom your plans. If he reacts with a strong no, change them. It will save […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
A decadent, old-growth timber baron is chopped down
Harry Merlo was brought down last month by his hand-picked board because he was in the process of destroying both it and the company it was supposed to oversee. Toward the end, the 22-year chief executive officer and chairman of Louisiana-Pacific was a grotesque ruin, bellowing threats to relocate his company across the Columbia River […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
The little paper that could
Like one of those gravity-defying trees that grows horizontally out of a rocky mountainside, High Country News has found its niche. Its beat is 10 Western states – the 1 million square miles where so many of the nation’s wild things live on mostly public lands. How do you cover this world from a small, […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
My kingdom is a horse
It was a gold mountain. The gray lodgepoles of the corral sorted it into altitudes: hooves and pasterns, the flaring column of muscle and bone above the knee, the glossy wheatfield of chest, and under a mane of cloud, the great, soft planetary eye. At four, I learned a trick. I would scoop double-handfuls of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Desert skin
The canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona – the Colorado Plateau – is something special. Something strange, marvelous, full of wonders. As far as I know there is no other region on earth much like it, or even remotely like it. Nowhere else have we had this lucky combination of vast sedimentary rock […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Endless opportunities for solitude
No place on earth has anything quite like the roads of the Great Basin. Maybe the most distinctive recollection of my life 15 years ago at Deep Springs College along the California-Nevada border, was dropping off Westgard Pass into Deep Springs Valley driving a ratty Chevy pickup truck whose sole virtue was a passable sound […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
A 22,000-square-foot castle is not a home
From the living room of my 1,200-square-foot house, I’ve watched a new house going up across the pasture and realized I live in a modern version of a log cabin. My house wasn’t built by hand, and the crew who built it worked together only from eight to five, although a few shared beers afterwards. […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Prison payrolls come with big hooks
I live in Salida: downstream from the Buena Vista Correctional Facility and its associated boot camp, and upstream from Canon City, home of Colorado’s major prison complex, and Florence, which now boasts a federal penitentiary, “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” And so I’ve noticed, firsthand and in my backyard, that most discussions of prisons ignore […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
A little sarcasm, a lot of love
I love tourists. I love everything about them. They are the mainstay of our economy and the joy of my life. They buy my newspaper even when I pick on them. What? Me pick on tourists? For example, I love the way they turn left onto Center Street from the right-hand lane on Main. I […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Have you hugged your tarantula lately?
We live in the Tucson Mountains. Our house sits on the saddle of a low hill with an arroyo on either side. It did not occur to us when we built the house many years ago that the hill on which we built undoubtedly served as a place of refuge when the arroyos became torrential […]
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
Will an illegal BLM study seal southern Utah’s fate?
I’m writing a book on the Colorado Plateau and it has been one of the joys of my life. The library work has been fascinating but the best research has been with a backpack and a boy. Philip, then 13, and I headed out from Boulder, Colo., for southern Utah just after his classes ended, […]
Posted inJuly 24, 1995: Making a mountain into a starbase
The university aimed for the stars and hit Mount Graham
The sins of land-grant universities are usually those of inertia. The land-grants are old-fashioned. They’re politically cautious. They’re financially dependent upon the powers-that-be in their states. Young faculty with new ideas often hold their tongues rather than speak their minds. There’s a culture of countrified politeness among land-grant faculties that can be stultifying. Watching for […]
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
Xerox copiers and black helicopters
In early June, Congressman Scott McInnis, a Republican from Colorado, materialized at the Interior Department building in Washington, D.C., and demanded immediate entrance. Unfortunately for the course of history, he had forgotten his photo I.D. and it took him and the reporter he had in tow 10 minutes to get past the guards. (His forgetfulness […]