Feature

Old but Faithful

Former Park Service supervisors Bill Wade and Rob Arnberger formed the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees to defend the national parks from what they see as the Bush administration’s ill-conceived changes

Editor's Note

Whistling in the park

Whistleblowing is not as romantic as Woodward’s "Deep Throat" makes it sound, but the retired public servants who make up the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees are doing valuable work, blowing the whistle for the sake of the national parks

Dear Friends

Dear friends

Rick Craig wins Nelson Algren Award; visitors; Bill Frank Jr. and John Echohawk win Wallace Stegner Award; HCN is looking for good writers

Uncommon Westerners

Have knives and hooks, will travel

Taos County’s new Mobile Matanza is a rolling livestock butchering unit that travels to the region’s far-flung family ranchers

Writers on the Range

They should shoot horses, shouldn't they?

Wild horses are not native to the West, and they do not deserve our protection

News

River Redux

Six decades after Friant Dam killed off the San Joaquin River’s spring-run chinook, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Friant Water Users Authority are working with the federal government to restore both the fish and the river

Environmental change

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., does an about-face and moves to protect New Mexico’s Valle Vidal from oil and gas drilling

Book Reviews

Travels in a sublime wasteland

In Sunshot: Peril and Wonder in the Grand Desierto, writer Bill Broyles and photographer Michael Berman explore the gritty desert on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Dancing to Biederbecke in Montana

In The Willow Field, his first novel, memoirist William Kittredge serves up an old-fashioned potboiler

The art of an alien landscape

In Westernness: A Meditation, poet and scholar Alan Williamson examines what it means to live in the West through the eyes of the region’s writers and artists

Essays

Dina's Place

An 8-year-old named Dina leads the author down to her own "special place" by the Big Sioux River on the Indian reservation that is home to the troubled child

Heard Around the West

Heard around the West

True-blue Montana libertarian Stan Jones; neighbors helping neighbors steal cars in Arizona; "vanishing culture" vampires; only one flag allowed in Pahrump, Nev.; tampering with food in New Mexico; and the Forest Service is bipolar

Letters

So where does that leave Marie Antoinette?

The Jefferson state bird is not the spotted owl, either

Pie in the sky, a la carbon

A river dribbles through it

Two Weeks in the West

Two weeks in the West

Colorado Lynx are in trouble; oil and gas bounty hunter is rebuked; Energy Department tests new larger containers for radioactive waste; saving money and salmon; Measure 37 cold war continues; public library use in the West; and snowmobile data

Sidebar

A director from central casting

Mary Bomar, the brand-new director of the National Park Service, worked her up through the agency’s bureaucracy