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 […]
Writers on the Range
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 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
Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front: Sell It or Save It?
… And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay? Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away. — John Prine The early years of my life were spent in southern West Virginia. Dad […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
This budget cut is destructive
Business isn’t being conducted as usual on Capitol Hill these days, and no better example exists than the perils besetting the Land and Water Conservation Fund The fund, created in 1965 at the height of the Great Society, was designed to finance federal purchases of land for recreation and habitat enhancement, and to give states […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A tough law meets tough foes
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. In his classic 1940s essay, “Round River,” Aldo Leopold made the case for conserving biological diversity: “saving all the parts’ of the natural world. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote. That […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A war of ideologies, with endangered species as weapons
Big Bill Rose, my brother Tom’s redheaded boyhood friend, works for Union Pacific and lives in a mountain canyon west of Denver. Tom and I were visiting him some years ago, and the talk came around to Two Forks Dam. This proposed behemoth, since canceled, would have flooded the nearby canyons and mountain villages. Bill […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Armed, crazy and lost in the Wild West
Back in December, I covered some Western militia meetings as part of a nationwide report on the militia movement. In the wake of recent events, those gatherings have taken on a more sinister glow. What struck me at the time was that every person I randomly interviewed was a recent transplant to the Northwest. It’s […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
If rain doesn’t fall, the money will
LAS CRUCES, N.M. – Drought returned to the West last summer, with a little help from the federal government. Ranchers from Oregon to New Mexico – their herds grown too abundant as a result of a well-intentioned drought relief program – let grass-starved cows and sheep strip parched rangelands bare. The emergency feed program, run […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Montana State University to local environmentalists: Get lost!
In an editorial in their monthly newsletter, which I’ll call the Big Sky Cow Pie, the Montana Stockgrowers Association branded me the “Ralph Nader of the West.” It was not meant as a compliment. I’m not exactly sure what set them off. Perhaps it was something I’d said while president of the National Wolf Growers […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
It’s deja vu yet again, says Bruce Babbitt
Washington, D.C. – On Dec. 24, 1992, while most Americans were eating Christmas Eve dinner, the four Marstons were listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. The occasion was Bill Clinton’s nomination of Bruce Babbitt to be secretary of Interior. To be honest, the occasion was NPR reporter John Nielson’s taped interview of […]