Keeping a tradition alive in western New Mexico.
Photos
Posted inArticles
In North Dakota, booms past and present
A photographer returns home to examine changes to the landscape.
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
How mining transforms the West’s ranching communities
Photographs of people and places in flux.
Posted inArticles
Photos of a standoff
Armed militia members join a Nevada rancher to protest a cattle roundup from public land.
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Will the Colorado River reach the Gulf of California once more?
Photographs of the historic water pulses.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Geoduck fishermen switch to urchins off Washington’s coast
China banned West Coast shellfish after finding traces of toxins.
Posted inArticles
A city beyond the fog and under one roof
Photographs of isolation and community in Whittier, Alaska.
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Bison roundup at Rocky Mountain Arsenal refuge
At least 20 animals were removed from the herd to let habitat recover.
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
Snapshots of a forest two years after a megafire
Southwestern forests have become burdened by wildfires that burn much hotter than those that preceded nearly a century of fire suppression. These so-called “high-severity” fires have been stoked not only by plentiful fuels, but by dried-out vegetation and hot, dry weather. The 2011 Las Conchas Fire, which burned through 156,000 acres in New Mexico’s Jemez […]
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Kids will be kids
Photographer Rebecca Drobis looks for universal images of youth on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
A California Hotshot photographs his life fighting wildfires
Get a rare peek into what it’s like at the fireline.
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Veteran photographer shines light on US immigration
Death and deportation at the US-Mexico border, and lives after crossings.
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
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Researchers go to Utah to experience another planet: Mars
In March, photographer and science enthusiast Jim Urquhart ventured into the Utah desert to join a team of researchers at the Mars Desert Research Station. He came back with a collection of surreal images both extra-terrestrial and intriguing.
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Photographing migrant foragers
Eirik Johnson’s photographs document the life and landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives. He’s been featured on National Public Radio and in Orion and Audubon Magazine, among others. Johnson’s series of images on the region’s logging industry, Sawdust Mountain, was recently published by the Aperture Foundation. High Country News assistant designer Andrew Cullen, […]
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First impressions: an Easterner’s new life in the West
Photographer Andrew Cullen used Instagram to document his summer 2012 move from Maine to Colorado, capturing Western scenes of surprise, wonder, and delight. Click on the gallery view to see the images full size.
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The West, in pictures
SAGE Magazine, a student-run environmental magazine at the Yale Forestry School, recently ran a photo essay of Western images submitted from students and people around the region. Here, we showcase a selection of these photos, which include beautiful wildlife photography and poignant illustrations of humans’ relationship to the natural world.
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Photojournalist Lisa Hamilton explores rural California
For her project, Real Rural, photojournalist Lisa Hamilton traveled throughout California, interviewing and photographing scores of rural people.
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Spring-cleaning the acequia: A photo essay
On an April morning in northern New Mexico’s upper Pecos Valley, before the sun lit the packed dirt streets of El Cerrito, Ricardo Patricio Quintana walked the irrigation ditch. He began above the first compuerta, a scrap-wood gate that lets water into one family’s field. Every six feet, he scuffed a mark in the dry […]