Feature

Pillaging the Past

Craig Childs explores the fine line that separates archeology from grave-robbing in the American Southwest.

Editor's Note

Leave it alone

Archaeology is, or at least ought to be, about more than just picking up artifacts to gather dust on the shelves of crowded museum storerooms.

Dear Friends

Dear friends

A panel of experts will debate whether gas development and recreation can coexist in western Colorado; Michelle Nijhuis wins awards; visitors; poem by Cam Scott.

Uncommon Westerners

Keeper of the wildlife

Biologist Les Bighorn, a Dakota Sioux, works to restore the swift fox to its native landscape on the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Reservation.

News

Nuclear crossroads

Even as the federal government pushes for more nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons, cleanup lags far behind on the West’s most contaminated nuclear sites.

Remembering our atomic past

Proposed museums at Hanford’s B Reactor in Washington and Rocky Flats in Colorado would teach Westerners about the scientific triumphs – and the human tragedies – of the region’s nuclear history.

Book Reviews

Forces of nature

Amy Irvine’s memoir, Trespass, describes how she moved to rural Utah after her father’s suicide.

Rolling on the rivers

The essays in Page Stegner’s Adios Amigos celebrate the fragile beauty of Western rivers and the lives of the artists and explorers who journeyed down them.

Essays

Cold dead fingers

Ed Quillen considers Charlton Heston, the Second Amendment, and the rights, wrongs and responsibilities of gun ownership out West.

Feeding time

Will Rounds, who was once a very squeamish vegetarian, describes hacking apart the body of an elk to feed wolves at Mission:Wolf.

Heard Around the West

Heard Around the West

A field guide to obnoxious housing; April Fool’s in Aspen; Ruby the turkey vulture; how to curb immigration; and please, baby boomers, don’t all retire at once!

Letters

Dark nights of the soul

A sister's suicide

Invest in people, not weapons

Up against the wall, redneck enviro

Two Weeks in the West

Two weeks in the West

Development threatens inholdings in national parks and forests; a few wilderness bills move through Congress; oil and mining booms in the West; W.R. Grace sets up trust for its victims; Homeland Security dodges enviro laws for border barriers; coal power