Here come


the hunters


Though the health department made our meat-locker neighbor shroud its backdoor hoist with a giant tarp, staff can't help noticing all the carcasses swinging by. Elk and deer, so far, we can report, but no black bear. All have been killed by the hunting elite that likes to make things tough for itself by using only bows or old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles. Don Emmons of Paonia tells us it takes 30 seconds to reload his muzzle-loader, "though if I see an elk, it can take five minutes, because I'm so excited." The ones who have to get closest to down big game get first crack; coming soon to our town will be the rifle folks, who nowadays also bring an all-terrain vehicle.





Droppers-in


Betty Jacobus, a "faithful subscriber," came through Paonia while escaping the summer heat of her home in Tucson, Ariz. Lynn Fritchman, from Boise, Idaho, stopped by to renew some gift subscriptions and also recommended a book about mining called Big Trouble, by J. Anthony Lukas, published by Touchstone Press.


Freelance writers Hal Clifford and Lou Bendrick said hello after watching border collies run sheep through their paces at Meeker, Colo. Irony abounded at the event, they said. Though the contest is booming, Meeker has been so depleted of working ranches that next year bands of sheep may have to be imported.


Heading back to Moab, Utah, readers Marsha Morrison and Stuart Barker said hello after camping at Trappers Lake near Meeker.





Three cheers for two interns


Jared Farmer, an intern at High Country News from three summers ago, came by with great news. A book he'd begun writing while still a teenager in Provo, Utah, Glen Canyon Dammed, has just been published by the University of Arizona Press. Jared was on his way to California, to work on a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. At 25, he might be the youngest former intern to publish a book.


Good news also came to us from former intern Pete McBride, who lives in Old Snowmass, Colo. National Geographic has sworn him to secrecy about content, he says, but the magazine with a gazillion subscribers has just bought a story from him that he will illustrate with photographs. It was at High Country News, he tells us, that he began to think of himself seriously as a photographer and journalist.





King of the hill


Tom Jenkins of Englewood, Colo., recently sent us the photo below and a description of how he came to encounter this native near the top of 13,370-foot Mount Guyot on the Continental Divide in Colorado. Close to the peak, he and his son, Martin, looked up to see a large and very white animal heading their way. "I've seen marmots and pikas while climbing 100 or more mountains over the years," says Jenkins, a journalist, "but this was a surprise." The animal was a Rocky Mountain goat, and it stopped once to look at them with "mild curiosity, at first, followed by boredom." The animal proceeded toward them on its "nonskid hooves," when, Jenkins says, he suddenly realized, "We would have to move out of its path or be bumped." After the hikers scrambled off the ridge, Jenkins says, they watched, stunned, as the goat headed down, supremely confident and unhurried.





New fall interns


After her second road trip across the country in less than a year, new HCN intern Ali Macalady is glad to be back home in Colorado. In 1998, she hit the road after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, and spent six months with a fire crew in western Montana. The dry weather last summer, she says, kept her busy digging fire lines in Montana and as far away as Florida.


Once snow snuffed out the fires, she moved east to work as an intern at Vermont Public Radio, writing "briefs' about politics in Vermont and New Hampshire for the local news broadcast. A summer job with the Vermont Land Trust in Woodstock, Vt., gave her a change of scene. There, she learned a lot about dairy cows and maple sugar production, while talking with farmers and other landowners about the benefits of giving up the development rights to their properties.


Though she liked life in New England, Ali says, she knew she had to make it west in time for antelope season. A native of Golden, Colo., she has hunted deer, elk and antelope with her family for years, and this fall she lucked out with tags for all three animals.


New HCN intern Karen Mockler says she misspent years in school before coming to High Country News. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she studied fiction writing at the University of Arizona, and went on to teach literature at Creighton University in her hometown of Omaha, Neb. Then five years ago, she won a fellowship to study ecology at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colo. There she trapped rodents and fell in love with the beautiful red-backed vole.


She blames the paper for her last bout with academia. "Reading it inspired me to go back to school to study environmental journalism at the University of Colorado," she says. There, last December, she took her second master's degree, then moved to a ramshackle house in the Sonoran Desert. Her neighbors were roadrunners, javelinas, pack rats and rattlesnakes.


After her internship in Paonia, she plans to return to desert living, but how she'll support herself remains a mystery. Formal education, though, is out: "I have enough degrees to last a lifetime."


Meanwhile, she's enjoying western Colorado's back roads. After dodging jumping mice and tarantulas on the desert floor, she finds the high country soothing; the one bear she saw was easy to spot and ambled out of her way.


* Betsy Marston for the staff