Dear Friends

PARTY IN PAONIA You’re invited to a High Country News potluck party for readers, board members and staff. As a special treat, some of our former interns will also be in town for the first-ever HCN intern reunion. Join us on Saturday, June 9, 6 p.m., at the town park in Paonia, Colo. Please bring […]

VISITORS It’s not often that we get an international visitor. A journalist from Tokyo, Japan, dropped by in late March. Takashi Kikuchi, who writes for Festival magazine, was in western Colorado to cover The String Cheese Incident, a bluegrass/calypso/funk jam band from Boulder, Colo., that has toured in Japan. Takashi came to Paonia to see […]

THERE’S LIFE AFTER HIGH COUNTRY NEWS We’ve recently gotten exciting news from some former HCN interns. Patrick Farrell (summer 2005) just landed a job as a video journalist at the New York Times. Katie Fesus(fall 1996) now teaches English at Lake Tahoe’s Sierra Nevada College and directs ARC (Adventure, Risk, Challenge), an outdoor adventure and […]

VISITOR, SINGULAR Spring is coming to our valley, but visitors are still far and few between. Wilf Bruschke of nearby Montrose, Colo., came by recently to check us out and start a new subscription. BURY ME GREEN Singer/songwriter John Winn of Grand Junction, Colo., tells us his latest CD, Wild Stallion, contains a song titled […]

VISITORS Denis Brunke, a longtime subscriber from Logan, Utah, stopped in to say hello. He was taking the scenic route back home after visiting a friend in nearby Snowmass. An HCN reader since the days of Tom Bell, Connie Brown of Lander, Wyo., visited us. She was in the area to study yoga with teacher […]

High Country News Northern Rockies Editor Ray Ring has won the 2006 George Polk Award for Political Reporting for his story, “Taking Liberties,” an in-depth look at a secretive libertarian campaign to cripple land-use planning in six Western states. One of the most prestigious prizes in American journalism, the Polk Award was established at Long […]

VISITORS Richard Heede stopped by in early January to fill us in on his Snowmass company, Climate Mitigation Services, which can pinpoint a particular company’s contribution to climate change. In 2003, Heede completed an inventory of ExxonMobil’s emissions between 1882 and 2002. Now he’s expanding the study to the world’s 85 top corporate greenhouse gas […]

WINTER BOARD MEETING High Country News board members and staff traveled to Berkeley in late January to do some work, enjoy a little sunshine, and — with help from some old friends — put on a show for our Bay Area readers, present and future. Our idea of a show is, of course, fairly serious: […]

FOUR MONTHS OF INDENTURED SERVITUDE This winter, Erin Halcomb is trading in her chain saw for an HCN intern’s computer. Erin, a Colorado native, spent the past five winters in Oregon, thinning trees and teaching environmental education. During the summers, she worked as a fire lookout. Erin first came to Oregon in 2001, when she […]

HCN TAKES A HOLIDAY Thanks to all of our readers and friends who attended our annual holiday open house on Dec. 6. As we always do this time of year, HCN staffers are taking a two-week break to sing carols, swill wassail and celebrate the holiday with family and friends. The next issue of HCN […]

CONGRATULATIONS, RICK CRAIG Former HCN intern Rick Craig (Summer ’91) of Missoula, Mont., recently won top prize in the Chicago Tribune’s 24th annual Nelson Algren Awards. The awards honor previously unpublished short fiction works by American writers, amateur or professional. Nelson Algren, “the voice of America’s dispossessed,” is best known for his novels The Man […]

HCN Holiday Open House If you’re in the Paonia area on Wednesday, Dec. 6, please join us for our holiday open house. From 5 to 7:30 p.m., you can meet HCN staff and other readers and enjoy refreshments. Our office is located at 119 Grand Ave. ANOTHER HCN WIN HCN Contributing Editor Michelle Nijhuis has […]

CHANGING OF THE GUARD High Country News is bidding goodbye to editor Greg Hanscom and welcoming new editor John Mecklin. Mecklin got his start in journalism in 1978 as a reporter for the twice-a-week Williamson County Sun in rural Texas. Later, as a reporter for the Houston Post, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and Iraq […]

HCN BOARD MEETING The fall meeting of the High Country News Board of Directors, held in Missoula, Mont., focused on the rapidly changing world of publishing, especially the growing prominence of the Internet as a news source. Web master Paolo Bacigalupi walked board members through our Web site, hcn.org, and explained our strategy for turning […]

MONGOL STOPOVER Seventeen Mongolians, including environmentalists, politicians, journalists and representatives of the mining industry, showed up on HCN’s doorstep in late September as part of a tour around Colorado. The tour, organized by the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, was intended to “establish a foundation for trust and relationship-building between participants” in order to yield “viable […]

WELCOME, EVAN AND FLETCHER New HCN intern Fletcher Jacobs arrived in town only to find that the “off-the-grid” solar-powered house he’ll be living in for the next few months was recently struck by lightning. Until the home’s electrical system can be repaired, it’s back to flashlights and candles. Fletcher spent the last two years in […]

BIKERS, FILMMAKERS, ENGINEERS, CHEESEMAKERS Billie Stanton, editorial writer for the Tucson Citizen, left a business card in our door on a recent weekend: “I was here; you were gone. But keep up the good work.” Sorry we missed you, Billie. Filmmaker Dave Gardner and his daughter, Stephanie, of Colorado Springs, Colo., stopped by as part […]

CONGRATS, MATT AND PAOLO HCN staffers recently took home two more writing awards. West Coast correspondent Matt Jenkins received the 2006 James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism for his story “Squeezing Water from a Stone” (HCN, 9/19/05: Squeezing Water from a Stone). Judges had high praise for Matt’s story about the implications of Las […]