High Country News - Most Recent

Staying put

These days, Ana Maria Spagna travels only in her imagination, as she and her partner, Laurie, stay home and care for their elderly, dying and much-loved cat, Daisy.

Remembering Rrrrrip City!

The essays in Matt Love’s anthology Red Hot and Rollin’ take a lively and nostalgic look at Oregon in 1977, the year the Portland Trailblazers won their one and only NBA championship.

Men, machines, memories

In Five Skies, novelist Ron Carlson tells the terse and occasionally poetic stories of three emotionally damaged men working in Idaho for the summer.

We’re in a land of Lincoln

For better and for worse, the West of today was created by Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party.

Heard Around the West

Jackson Hole needs a brand-new slogan; trees vs. solar power in environmentalist California; trees vs. the view in Lake Tahoe; Arizona’s “extreme commuters”; drunk driver protects his beer; Barry McCahill loves SUVs even though he doesn’t drive one.

Following the tracks

Catherine Fink recalls long adolescent days spent wandering along Colorado railroad tracks, singing at the top of her lungs and discovering the world.

Death of a mine

Utah’s Lisbon Valley Mine was supposed to be a hugely profitable copper producer; instead, it went belly-up in just two years.

The short life of Lisbon Valley

A brief timeline traces the brief history of Utah’s Lisbon Valley Mine.

A Rico renaissance

The tiny mountain town of Rico, Colo., finds its post-mining economy threatened by a possible mining resurgence.

Mining the West

A potpourri of maps and graphics illustrates the complex nature of hardrock mining in the West today.

Power from the underground

Geothermal power heats up in Reno, Nev., as the West begins to pay more attention to its underground energy resources.

Two weeks in the West

HCN looks at the various problems of Western wildlife, including Northern Rockies wolves, porcupines, fishers, pikas, and more; and Rocky Mountain National Park tests elk for chronic wasting disease and also gives out birth control.

Men with boots

The transformation of once-scrappy mining towns like Silverton, Colo., and Superior, Ariz., into trendy tourist havens is bound to leave the locals with mixed feelings and some nostalgia.

Reluctant Boomtown

A copper-mining company is courting Superior, Ariz., but the former mining town – now re-inventing itself as a modest tourist haven – is unsure whether it really wants a new marriage with extractive industry.

Heard around the West

Jim Stiles asks about perfect moments; rent-a-pet; Douglas Bruce behaves like a jerk; Forest Service meeting gets nasty in Montana.

Standing outside, late, in a charcoal forest

Die with me

Three new books about the West’s Indian wars – Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land, Kingsley Bray’s Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, and Robert W. Larson’s Gall: Lakota War Chief – seem to romanticize a violent past.

Time to call the gas industry’s bluff

Randy Udall says Colorado needs to act now to collect severance taxes from the natural gas companies that are making a fortune from the state.