High Country News September 14, 2009
Feature
Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35
A writer looks into the history of the people who lived on the Colorado mesa she now calls home.
Living on Glacial Time
Climate change is altering the lands we call home in ways we'd never imagined.
Editor's Note
"To feel at home, stay at home."
This essays and book reviews in this special issue of High Country News revolve around the question: What does it mean to be at home in the West?
Dear Friends
Fall break
HCN's fall break; a High Country News potluck picnic; visitors; giving due credit for a photo.
Two Weeks in the West
Our best idea
A family trip out West in 1959, when he was 9 years old, inspired Dayton Duncan to make a new documentary series with Ken Burns, called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
Conversation
The sky is a crowded attic
Novelist Andrew Sean Greer talks about how the West’s vast landscapes transformed his life and his fiction.
Timothy Egan's Western odyssey
New York Times correspondent and National Book Award winner Timothy Egan talks about his enduring love for the West.
Uncommon Westerners
When reverence isn't enough
Writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore talks about water, family and the sacredness of landscapes.
Bicycles, books and beer
Todd Simmons founded a bookstore, a journal and a publishing company in Fort Collins, Colo., on little more than a shoestring and a dream.
Book Reviews
Books for lonely times
When you're camped all alone in the wilderness, there is nothing like a book to bring you comfort.
Bordering on injustice
Jimmy Santiago Baca's novel A Glass of Water compassionately describes the lives of Mexican immigrants.
A life unwound
In Michelle Huneven's novel Blame, a woman tries to deal with her guilt after a drunken-driving accident.
Why some men are the way they are
Three new short story collections -- Nine Ten Again by Philip Condon, Where The Money Went by Kevin Canty, and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It -- feature working-class men coping with damaged lives.
Confronting life's essentials
Two recent memoirs -- Siesta Lane by Amy Minato and Lift by Rebecca K. O'Connor -- raise questions about the meaning of home, for both humans and falcons.
Essays
Coming home to the cosmos
A wandering writer comes home to Utah after chasing meteorites around the world for years.
Multimedia
A conversation with Michelle Nijhuis
Photos and an interview with the author of "Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35"
Parks Climate Challenge: North Cascades 2009
Nineteen high school students traveled to Washington's North Cascades this summer to witness and learn about climate change.
Letters
Pass on gas
The lodgepole hegemony
Beef: It (should be) what's for dinner
A win for the gipper?
The unbearable lightness of baby feet
Lawsuits of last resort
Evidence
Peril in the parks
Search and rescue operations in Western national parks are often provoked by the mishaps of young men unprepared for their adventures.
Sidebar
Book lust, Western-style
This fall looks to be a great season for bookworms, and HCN lists a number of new books either written by Western writers or somehow related to the West.
