On any given Tuesday, if you venture past the creaky door and the piles of paper and boxes and photos, you’ll find Dean Coombs marinating in the smell of hot lead, dust and the slow decay of old newsprint, tending an ancient printing press that emanates a rhythmic whir-swoosh. Coombs, with an unkempt gray beard, […]
Departments
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tonopah, Nev. and its “Fighting Muckers”
Utah “Remember,” says photographer Greg Woodall, “when enviros and liberals were the ones who were ‘anti-this and anti-that’?” Courtesy Greg Woodall. UTAH What’s in a name? If the name is Dixie State College, based in St. George, Utah, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Recently, as the college began moving closer to becoming a university, locals […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
How to clean up abandoned mines — without landing in court
Peter Butler’s late October tour of abandoned hardrock mines began high on Red Mountain Pass near Silverton, Colo., off a highway so narrow that, in places, its shoulder crumbles off cliffs. Butler, a water wonk with springy silver curls, is the co-coordinator of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a local watershed group, which has been […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Jonathan Thompson on gun control
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talks with Jonathan Thompson about his story “Which way will the West go on guns?”
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A world of plague and hope: A review of The Bird Saviors
The Bird SaviorsWilliam J. Cobb320 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Unbridled Books, 2012. In William J. Cobb’s lyrical novel The Bird Saviors, a mysterious virus strikes the residents of Pueblo, Colo. Some blame wild birds for spreading the disease, which leaves victims incapacitated for weeks or eventually kills them. Employees of the Department of Nuisance Animal Control, including […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Water is (still) for fightin’: A review of Durango
DurangoGary Hart246 pages, softcover: $15.95.Fulcrum, 2012. Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s seventh novel, Durango, is timely, as many Westerners agonize over drought and the energy industry’s use and abuse of water. Hart’s novel, however, takes us to another front in the water wars, the decades-long dispute over damming southern Colorado’s Animas and La Plata rivers […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A lament for B.C.
Seldom have I read an article in HCN that brought a tear to my eye, but the Dec. 24 issue on the new British Columbia mines did just that (“The New Wild West“). Our family has vacationed in British Columbia and southeast Alaska many times over the past 50 years. It is perhaps the most […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Boring?!
After reading “Outward (re)Bound” (HCN, 1/21/13), I couldn’t overcome a chilly feeling in response to a student’s description of his three-day solo trip in the Rocky Mountains as “so boring.” I was saddened by this student’s inability to find entertainment in one of the most spectacular mountain ranges in Colorado, and wondered if his response […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Independent — or subsidized — journalism?
“An Industry Funded Education” in the Jan. 12, 2013, issue should have been called, “An Industry Funded Article.” We’re informed that the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University — bankrolled by a “self-proclaimed ‘environmentalist who hates the environmental movement’ ” — gets big funding from the extractive industry but faithfully maintains scientific objectivity. So […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
The buck stops everywhere
My response to Sarah Gilman’s opinion piece “If not here, where?” is: Nowhere. Although oil and gas exploration and recovery has advanced technologically, the basic concept of burning carbon for heat, light and more recently transportation is archaic. And now it’s evident that the resulting climate instability threatens the survival of human civilization. The series […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Tree tales
I read Brendon Bosworth’s article on Fallen Leaf Lake with great interest (“The forest at the bottom of the lake,” HCN, 12/24/12). With my dive partner, John Foster, a retired California state archaeologist, I sampled sunken trees from nearby Tahoe and Donner Lake, mainly in the 1980s. In South Lake Tahoe, 16 rooted snags in ancient underwater […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A new normal for snow
Idaho hydrologist Phil Morrisey has been fielding some complaints lately. Although the Natural Resources Conservation Service — the federal agency he works for — reports normal snowpack, skiers say they’re schussing through thin powder. And they have a point, Morrissey says: The agency just started using a new standard for measuring average snowfall — and […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Whose land is this?
On Memorial Day 2004, a friend and I drove into the South Unit of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, located within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on a former gunnery range. We stopped at the visitor center, a dilapidated trailer at one end of a crumbling parking lot, but it was closed. No matter, we […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Which way will the West go on guns?
Amid all the talk, legislative proposals and presidential decrees inspired by the recent shootings in Connecticut and Colorado, perhaps the most significant was the announcement in early January that former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was starting a gun-control lobbying organization. Americans for Responsible Solutions seeks to raise $20 million by the next election cycle […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Love wins
On the first day marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples in Washington state, Laurie and I headed to our rural county courthouse.
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Welcome, new interns!
Two new editorial interns just arrived at our Paonia, Colo., office for six months of intensive training in reporting, writing and (sometimes seemingly endless) rewriting. Sarah Jane Keller may be new to Paonia, but she’s no stranger to the territory. After growing up in rural Maryland, she made a leap to the West nine years […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A review of An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps
An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps 1550-1941. Peter L. Eidenbach, 184 pages, hardcover: $45. University of New Mexico Press, 2012. In this colorful collection of maps, archaeologist and historian Peter L. Eidenbach presents the Land of Enchantment as seen by early conquerors, naturalists, surveyors, and railroaders. Geologically speaking, New Mexico has been mostly static […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Art finds a place alongside science at New Mexico research station
Everywhere, cardboard was scattered across metal counters and test tube racks. Natasha Ribeiro, an exuberant photographer with a blonde pixie cut, displayed one of the finished products: a box with a tiny hole and a slot for photographic paper, sealed with black tape. “A pinhole camera!” she exclaimed. “There are enough supplies for everyone to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A twittering elk in Boulder
COLORADO Believe me, we’re as sick as you are of reading about Boulder, Colo., on this page. But, still, it might make a good reality show location, except that most viewers would doubt the reality of even a reality show set here. In early January, for instance, according to the Daily Camera, a man entered […]