Our 7 favorite features of the year
Did you miss one of the stories that explored the lesser-known West?
This year, High Country News’ writers and editors were busy keeping up with nonstop news developments in our region. But as the year comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to pause and reflect on some of the stories that stuck with us long after they published, providing perspective on our complicated and ever-changing region. Here we share this year’s best deep dives into lesser-visited corners and communities of the West. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did:
Busting the tree ring
Contributor Ben Goldfarb tells the tale of a Washington man at the center of a timber-poaching gang. Harold Kupers wanted to help investigators — but he probably didn’t think it would backfire and lead to an investigation that would land him in jail.
River of healing
Writer Florence Williams tags along on an Idaho outing along a “River of No Return.” The experience proved deeply transformative for many women veterans, damaged by their service in the military, who found solace in nature.
Prison Town
Correspondent Sarah Tory takes a look at the ties that bind struggling rural towns in the West to the immigration incarceration economy. She tells the story of Abdul Khan, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. Khan fled violence in Ghana before his fate became intertwined with one such place: Adelanto, California, a struggling town on the edge of the Mojave Desert that has hitched itself to America’s booming incarceration economy. Go even deeper with the numbers and policies behind the immigration-incarceration economy.
How a rural clinic sparked a small-town addiction crisis
Assistant Editor Paige Blankenbuehler’s investigation from tiny Craig, Colorado, uncovered a private practice that spurred a complicated drug crisis. That crisis continues to outpace the available resources for addicts, the health care community and law enforcement.
The teenage whaler’s tale
Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.
What happens when the church comes for your kids?
This feature explores a small corner of the region: A fundamentalist empire in the town of Short Creek on the Arizona-Utah border that’s feeling pressure from the encroaching modern-day West. There, parents kicked out of the community try to retrieve their children from the confines of the church.
So what if we’re doomed?
HCN Editor-in-Chief Brian Calvert delves into the choices we must make as we begin to face the consequences of the Anthropocene, reckoning with the grinding anxiety of climate change and the grief of losing our most precious species. How we cope with these fears will define us, he argues.
Note: This piece has been corrected.
