High Country News

'Yes' to desire and an end to fear

Charles Bowden's new book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, reiterates the bad news of today but declares that times are changing.

by Laura Paskus, Nov 08, 2009
A deliberate life in the Rockies

On the Wild Edge is David Peterson’s account of the two decades he and his wife, Caroline, have spent living close to nature in a cabin in the mountains of southern Colorado

by David Morgan, Oct 16, 2006
A eulogy for the West that was

In Requiem for the West, Roger Brown laments the loss of soul and solitude in the small mountain towns of the Colorado Rockies

by Paul Anderson, Jan 23, 2006
A life in the wild

Carter Niemeyer's memoir Wolfer is the entertaining story of a government trapper who loves wildlife - especially serious predators like wolves.

by Hal Herring, Aug 21, 2011
A life measured in cordwood: A review of Into the Heat: My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws and Men

Cindy Bellinger's memoir, Into the Heat: My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws and Men, introduces us to a determined, 60-something, chainsaw-wielding Western woman.

by Gussie Fauntleroy, Feb 19, 2012
A very brief conversation with a Jet Fighter

A long solitary hike through an empty, pristine desert is interrupted by a close encounter with an F-16 fighter plane

by Craig Childs, May 01, 2006
Are you an Indian?

In his memoir, Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life, Jim Kristofic remembers the challenges and joys of a tough childhood spent on the Navajo Nation.

by Annie Dawid, May 15, 2011
Dry-hiking in a desert awash with history

A 61-year-old hiker and two middle-aged friends take an epic hike through Arizona in David Roberts’ new book, Sandstone Spine

by Lee Ross, Oct 16, 2006
Filling empty pages: A review of When Women Were Birds

In her latest memoir, When Women Were Birds, writer Terry Tempest Williams tries to solve the mystery of the cloth-bound journals her dying mother left her -- all of them completely blank.

by Devon Fredericksen, May 27, 2012
Finding hope in a new land

Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America is the story of Rose Castillo Guilbault’s childhood journey from Mexico’s Sonoran Desert to a new life in California’s Salinas Valley

by Stephen J. Lyons, May 15, 2006