Feature

Got warriors?

On Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, Stanford Addison – a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler – helps Indian boys through their difficult teenage years.

The Growth Machine is Broken

Phoenix land-use planners want to use a chunk of state trust land as a laboratory for future, more sustainable real estate development.

Surprise!

Surprise, Ariz., exemplifies the Arizona real estate collapse along with what many see as the rise and fall of the car-dependent Western exurb.

Editor's Note

It's the economy -- and growth and the environment -- stupid!

The economic collapse – with its attendant slowdown in mining, drilling and development – gives Westerners a chance to pause and rethink the way we use the land.

Dear Friends

A Paonia love story

David Anderson is High Country News new advertising rep; skiers and farmers visit; Matt Klingle wins book award; corrections.

Two Weeks in the West

Champions go both ways

The Obama administration appoints environmentalists to some important positions in the Interior Department and other agencies. Also: The West faces a growing shortage of food-supply animal veterinarians.

Uncommon Westerners

The collected Sierra Nevada

Meteorologist Hal Klieforth has collected a lifetime of knowledge – and a museum’s worth of artifacts – from years spent exploring the Sierra Nevada.

Book Reviews

Renewing a battered land

Richard Manning looks at the prairie and considers its future in Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape.

A conflict of values

Michael J. Yochim writes the primer on the Yellowstone snowmobile conflict in his admirably balanced Yellowstone and the Snowmobile: Locking Horns over National Park Use.

Essays

The vitality of language

A mother introduces her newly adopted child to the birds at a raptor rehabilitation center and teaches her their names.

Letters

Conservation before compromise

A shortage of leadership, not water

The mythic Westerner

Let's paint Wal-Marts

Land of contradiction and mystery

How it Works

Coming to blows

Tribal infighting is delaying a wind farm planned for Gray Mountain on the Navajo Reservation.