Readers respond with unique encounters and uneasy revelations in the region.
Travel
Posted inDecember 26, 2016: Obama and the West
Putrid spillage; New Mexico fisticuffs; the year, in quotes
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Posted inNovember 14, 2016: The Long View
The deeper meaning of trails
Insightful new books in the well-worn genre of trail literature.
Posted inMarch 7, 2016: The Parks You Don't Know
Protecting the Oregon Trail from the development it helped create
Dedicated volunteers fight to preserve one of the trails that brought settlers west.
Posted inArticles
Should this national monument become a national park?
An Idaho town hopes changing Craters of the Moon to park status will boost its economy.
Posted inSeptember 14, 2015: Close Ties in Big Landscapes
Claustrophilia: Do wide-open lands bring us closer together?
A writer finds that Colorado small-town life and Mongolian mishaps strengthen her human connections.
Posted inArticles
Author Craig Childs talks about his ‘barbaric’ children with KDNK
In the Alaska backwoods, Childs tested the boundaries of the belief that kids should play in the wilderness.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
A wanderer’s guide to Western public lands
Cow patties, extraterrestrials and binoculars can help you figure out where you are.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
An outsider’s guide to insider Portland
Dispatch from a dryland alien in the rainy Northwest.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
Children in Alaska’s wild country
As parents, we watch our kids walk into vast new worlds — like it or not.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
International tourists in Western states, by the numbers
Where they’re from, where they go and where they spend their money.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
Raccoonboy’s guide to urban wilds
When in doubt, climb; fences are made for hopping.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
Readers’ foreign travel tales
Winners of the High Country News essay contest for our annual travel issue.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
The West in 72 hours
Asian tourists look for space, spectacles and a decent bowl of noodles.
Posted inApril 10, 2015: Strangers in a Strange Land
On the road with America’s sightseers
A photographer looks at three decades of tourism.
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
A Taxonomy of Landscape
A Taxonomy of LandscapeVictoria Sambunaris, essay by Natasha Egan, short story by Barry Lopez. 126 pages with 36 page booklet, hardcover: $60. Radius Books, 2014. To create A Taxonomy of Landscape, Victoria Sambunaris traveled America’s interstates and backroads alone for months with a 5-by-7-inch wooden field camera, driven, she says, by “an unrelenting curiosity to […]
Posted inGoat
Glacier tourists to get a dose of climate education in Alaska
What a melting glacier can teach cruise ship passengers.
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Lay of the land
How to Read the American West: A Field GuideWilliam Wyckoff384 pages, paperback: $44.95.University of Washington Press, 2014. Too hefty to be carried in a hip pocket or even a daypack, William Wyckoff’s How To Read The American West is a field guide unlike any other, with a focus on patterns, variations and the distribution of […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
The death of backpacking?
Younger people don’t seem interested in this outdoors tradition.
Posted inGoat
On the Wilderness Act’s 50th, a backpack into the Weminuche
Author ponders Wilderness Act on its 50th birthday.