Browse High Country News issues

Can 'hamster power' -- distributed generation and small-scale renewable energy projects -- save the West, and the world?

A small band of enthusiasts wants to re-engineer Western waterways with the help of a humble, hardworking professional: the beaver.

Bull riding explodes from its rural Western roots to become a modern spectacle along the lines of NASCAR.

Obama’s new political order, backed by the legal acumen of Judge James Redden, may help the Northwest’s salmon survive and end the era of the Lower Snake River dams.

On Wyoming's Wind River Reservation, Stanford Addison – a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler – helps Indian boys through their difficult teenage years.

Writer Annie Proulx takes an unsentimental view of Wyoming’s little-known and somewhat scarred Red Desert.

Westerners have a knack for new and innovative thinking, as this special issue of HCN shows.

If Eric Kuhn is right about the Colorado River, then the state faces a dry and difficult future of fighting for water.

A writer tries to dig up the buried history of Colorado’s Rocky Flats weapons plant, now home to a controversial wildlife refuge.

An obscure legal ruling muddied U.S. water-protection standards, leaving Western intermittent streams and rivers unprotected.

Blood quantum – the complicated system that determines membership in most American Indian tribes – could threaten the future survival of those tribes.

High Country News examines the Bush administration's effects on the Western environment and considers what can be done to heal the damage.

When Julene Bair sold the family farm, she severed her lifelong connections with a sense of place and her own childhood.

Southern California wants to use desalination to increase its water supply, but critics think the idea should be taken with a grain of salt.

Ranchers and environmentalists in Wyoming are still squabbling over wolves as the animal bounces on and off the endangered species list.

Type: The Mormon Church works to ban gay marriage in California, even as gay people in places like Rexburg, Idaho, come out of the LDS closet.

A long time ago, the earth warmed considerably; now, scientists study fossils to find out what happened – and what it might mean for us today.

Jared Farmer speaks in praise of Utah’s neglected “low country” landscapes – places like Utah Lake.

In the quest for the ultimate firefighting machine, the BLM in Nevada has turned to some very big, very strange, and very foreign vehicles: Unimogs from Germany and Tatras from the Czech Republic.

Steve and Marc Jenson have ambitious plans to turn a failed ski resort near Beaver, Utah, into a private enclave for the ultra-rich, but not everyone is thrilled about the idea.

Barred owls are driving threatened spotted owls out of their Northwest forest territory. Is it time to shoot them?

The Grand Old Party will either find a new life – or court self-destruction – in the West today, where moderates and hard-liners are battling over conservation issues.

For years, Native Americans, fishermen and farmers have battled over the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California, but finally a complicated truce is in the works.

Jeffrey Lockwood believes that the modern West could use an infusion of old-fashioned Cowboy Mythology.

The women in Stefanie Raymond-Whish’s family have a history of breast cancer, and the young Navajo biologist wants to know whether the uranium on the reservation might have something to do with it.