The Magazine

Spanish-speaking, often underestimated immigrant workers keep the West’s ski resorts running in the face of INS raids, discrimination and other trials.

Well-organized and well-heeled, off-road vehicle users constitute a large and powerful group aiming to stake its claim to the West’s public lands.

Idaho’s beautiful Silver Valley and Lake Coeur d’Alene build a new resort economy on a toxic stew of mining waste.

Colorado’s Animas-La Plata project – the last of the big BuRec projects, and the most mired in controversy – is tackled by opponents and proponents who seek consensus.

The use of initiatives and referenda – direct democracy – to change the law for environmental reasons faces a challenge when big money enters the picture.

Environmentalists join with political consultants to try to find a way to woo fickle Western voters.

In Idaho, Democrat Walt Minnick, a multimillionaire, former timber executive and environmentalist, mounts a quixotic campaign against Republican Sen. Larry Craig for Senate seat.

The EPA’s Toxic Releases Inventory report documents the annual industrial pollution of land, air and water in the U.S., with six of the top 10 polluters located in the West.

The controversial salvage logging rider, signed by President Clinton a year ago, has been harassed throughout its short life by loud and growing protest – including civil disobedience.

A collection of essays explores the quirky, the mundane and the surreal of our unique West, from coffee-hauling llamas to Navajo tacos and more.

The merger of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads creates a monopoly that may leave some of Colorado and Utah’s working towns without rail transport for their coal.

The first-ever manmade flood of the Colorado River through Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam is intended to help repair the river in Grand Canyon – and perhaps to signal the end of the “technocratic utopia” dream.

Catron County, N.M., the home of the county independence movement, is a study of contrasts – its people heavily dependent on the federal government and its land and rivers dying.

A special issue celebrates the thousands of educators who are working to teach people about the West. But it also raises some questions: Who are they reaching and where should the lessons be learned?

Utah, which once boasted exceptionally rich populations of reptiles and amphibians, now does nothing to stop their rapid disappearance.

As a last resort, Westerners start talking to each other, in consensus-building groups that seek to find common ground in the land.

Yellowstone National Park Supervisor Michael V. Finley stirs controversy and conflict as he fights to save America’s oldest national park.

Rancher Sid Goodloe battles pinon-juniper and uses a variety of controversial methods to restore his ranchland in New Mexico.

Gambling at Arizona’s Fort McDowell has taken the Yavapai Indians from poverty to wealth in just three years.

In a changing West, the land-grant universities’ cooperative extension programs must rethink their mission.