Feature

The Immigrant's Trail

This special issue of High Country News takes an on-the-ground look at the human landscape of illegal immigration in the West

Dear Friends

Dear friends

Carmella Hensyel joins HCN; Research Fund acknowledgements; visitor; former interns hit the big time; Michelle Nijhuis wins journalism award; Jodi Peterson & the Late Show

HCN says farewell to an old friend

Herman Warsh, a beloved former HCN board member and longtime supporter of the paper, is dead

Book Reviews

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

It ain't easy getting old

In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy discards his bitter nostalgia to tell a story set along the border in the 1980s

The puzzle of plate tectonics

In Grand Canyon: Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle, geologist James Lawrence Powell takes a look at the science behind the Grand Canyon, and the scientists who figured it out

Essays

Isn't it time to bury the hatchet?

Tired of the rhetorical arguments that pass as conversation these days, the author proposes it’s time to take a blockhead to lunch – and listen to what he has to say

Repo Manic

The author takes a disconcerting journey with a repo-man friend to repossess a car somewhere in Navajo Country

Heard Around the West

Heard around the West

What makes Mormon crickets run; Cactus Rescue Crew; tree murder; Dick Cheney shoot-alike; gun dealers in the West; Dakota Sioux Scrabble

Letters

Timber crews should ditch tree-farming ethos

We don't need no stinkin' GPS

Tombstone forest

Destruction is not a valid protest

Terrorist sympathizers

Looking good, HCN

Related Stories

Abandonment

Small Mexican farming towns such as Francisco Villa in Sonora are emptied of their young men when the lack of good-paying local jobs sends them north of the border

Perseverance

Illegal border crossers face a dangerous journey filled with heat, dust, flies and thirst, and always the danger of capture and deportation

Apprehension

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Officer John Schaefer is one of only two officers patrolling the 860,000 acres of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a thoroughfare for illegal immigrants and armed drug smugglers

Contradiction

Once in the U.S., immigrants find themselves in a land of contradictions, facing an uncertain welcome, sometimes even from other Latinos

Hope

After 16 years of living in the shadows in Pasco, Wash., Wendy and Erendira Santana finally win legal residency