Dear Friends

ELECTION DAY On election day, the phones at High Country News headquarters grew silent and the office seemed as still as a tomb, so we were delighted to chat with a visiting sculptor-pilot from Telluride, Colo. Richard Arnold told us he’d been a longtime reader, but what brought him to Paonia was the Zimmerman Foundry. […]

YOU KNOW MORE THAN WE DO If you’re flipping through this paper in search of election results, stop. Due to a fluke in our print schedule, we’re sending the issue to press on Oct. 29 — four days before election day — but it won’t hit your mailbox until Nov. 8, almost a week after […]

A lesson the First Amendment Writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams came to western Colorado in early October for the 24th annual meeting of the Western Colorado Congress. She spoke to a packed auditorium about the “open space of democracy.” Williams, who just published a book by the same name, talked about the differences that […]

CONGRATULATIONS Betsy and Ed Marston, HCN’s longtime editor-publisher team, are grandparents. On Sept. 18, in New York City, the Marston’s daughter, Wendy, gave birth to a 7-pound, 9-ounce baby girl, Maude Rose Marston Lehmann. Maude is bound to be one above-average kid; Wendy is a freelance writer and editor, and her husband, Ben Lehmann, works […]

End of summer swarms During the tail end of August, as the last cobs of sweet corn were cut and sold, and local farmers began transforming their fields from verdant rows of uniform green to mazes for kids to run through, visitors flocked to High Country News. Colorado subscribers included Bobbie and Roy Wright from […]

THE HCN FAMILY GETS A LITTLE BIGGER — AND MUCH CUTER The summer has been a fruitful one — and not just for farmers growing sweet corn, cherries, peaches and tomatoes. Within only 15 days, we were graced with two new members of the High Country News family. On July 30, Lydia Kestrel Puckett was […]

A presidential visit Readers Nicki Leniton and Brett Nelson, schoolteachers who live in Carbondale, Colo., came by the High Country News office in mid-July driving a Ford Crown Victoria and towing a 12-foot-tall effigy of George W. Bush. The two are part of a nationwide effort by the nonprofit True Majority (founded by Ben Cohen […]

Visitors The letters have been pouring in to HCN, and so have the people — folks like Minneapolis subscriber Larry Weisner, who is traipsing across the West, and Flagstaff subscriber Jeff Latham, who is on the initial leg of a motorcycle trip to Alaska. Colleen Nunn, who works in the Western History/Genealogy Department at the […]

The good news The High Country News board of directors came to Paonia in late May, to mull over the finances and plan for the future. The numbers for the first quarter of 2004 look good: Our expenses are below budget, and our income is above budget, thanks largely to a grant from the Hewlett […]

New Interns Zach Smith arrived in Paonia just in time to escape the blistering summer heat of Santa Fe, N.M., where he wrote for the Santa Fe Reporter and volunteered for the Audubon Society, teaching elementary school kids the basics of geology and birding. A Denver native who has lived in six states and studied […]

Visitors Spring weather has brought a stream of friends and luminaries to the High Country News office in western Colorado. Lyman Orton spent an afternoon with us. He and his sons own the Vermont Country Store, famous for its old-timey black-and-white catalogs, featuring everything from rubber galoshes to cheddar cheese. The store now puts out […]

Visitors A rite of winter here is climbing out of bed to tune in to the morning avalanche report, which is usually delivered with aplomb by Knox Williams, the head of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. We were pleasantly surprised when Williams and Vince Matthews, the director of the Colorado Geological Survey, showed up on […]

Heat wave It’s hard to believe that just over three weeks ago we got a call from nearby Telluride, Colo., saying an avalanche had wiped out the town’s power supply. Kelly Hearn, managing editor of The Telluride Watch, told us that the area’s main power line was buried under 20 feet of ice and snow, […]

An important anniversary On Sept. 3, the Wilderness Act will turn 40 years old — an anniversary that comes as the Bush administration’s shift away from wildlands protection has highlighted just how political wilderness can be. And that’s exactly what the Wallace Stegner Center’s Ninth Annual Symposium is all about. “Wilderness: Preserving Nature in a […]

Gunning for the big screen Adam Jackaway is a man who likes to make big statements with small tools. Last winter, with war looming in Iraq, he shouldered his snow shovel and tromped out into a Boulder, Colo., park. There, he sculpted a massive peace sign in a blank field, recruiting others to help, and […]

Congratulations! The crew at High Country News extends a hearty welcome to the newest member of the clan: Paolo Bacigalupi and his wife, Anjula Jalan, arrived in the world at 3:24 a.m. on Jan. 25 — and has hardly allowed his parents a wink of sleep since. Paolo reports that Arjun set a record a […]

Give and Take Inside this issue of High Country News, you’ll find a flier for our newest book, called Give and Take: How the Clinton Administration’s Public Lands Offensive Transformed the American West. It pulls together our best coverage of the national monument spree engineered by Clinton and his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, along with […]