I happen to live in a tiny Utah town, population approximately 175, with plenty of “move-ins.” I’ve yet to meet a “move-in” who wants to create massive changes there (HCN, 12/16/11 & 1/9/12, “Stranger in these parts”). In fact, the majority of them moved there precisely for what the place offers: community, beauty, and a […]
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Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Captivity, clarified
We would like to provide a more thorough insight into our facility, the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center, than was presented in “Possessing the Wild” (HCN, 11/14/11). The author’s description of our tour guides “tossing treats into wolves’ enclosures to hear their jaws snap shut” was a misinterpretation. We do not put our animals on […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
The suburban squeeze
I find the perilous journey across Wyoming’s energy fields to be far less harmful to the well-being of pronghorns than the rampant development along Colorado’s Front Range and elimination of their habitat entirely (HCN, 12/12/11 & 1/9/12, “Perilous Passages”). Try finding a pronghorn anywhere south and west of Greeley, in a huge range that they […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Viva la revolución!
I read with interest “Growing a Revolution” in the Nov. 28 issue by Jennifer Langston. While that approach certainly has great merit, there are other approaches to getting local food to local neighborhoods that can be equally successful. I am on the board of trustees of St. Luke’s Health Initiatives in Phoenix, and we have […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
High Country News welcomes new interns
Two new editorial interns just joined us for six months of “journalism boot camp” at our Paonia, Colo., office. Danielle Venton was born in Petaluma, Calif. Early backpacking trips sparked her curiosity about the natural world, which eventually led her to study biology at Humboldt State University. Unlike her classmates, Danielle couldn’t settle on just […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Fearful of Agenda 21, an alleged U.N. plot, activists derail land-use planning
In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Greenhouse gas sources, emitters and effects
All of the top emitters listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s inventory of greenhouse gas producers, released early this year, are coal-fired power plants. Western coal, in particular from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, contributes significantly to those emissions. And though our region’s inhabitants feel fewer of the impacts of burning it, we’re not in the […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Residents of Montana’s High Plains are angry – but not at the real threats
I was born in eastern Montana, on a dusty stretch of nearly riverless high plains north of the Bull Mountains. I came of age there, in a country that has never not been true frontier, in the late ’80s — during the farm crisis, that notoriously bad old time in rural America. In much of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The warming properties of greenbacks
WASHINGTONMoney may not buy you happiness, but burning it might help keep you from freezing to death. A snowshoer who became lost in a blizzard on Mount Rainier told The Seattle Times that he survived by digging a snow tunnel and then burning everything he could find, from socks and Band-Aids to his toothbrush “and […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
A mom-and-pop oil company prospects for gas in central Wyoming
In 1954, the Empire State Oil Company drilled a gas well in central Wyoming. The well turned out dry but showed some gas in an unexpected shallow formation. It wasn’t worth much at the time, so Empire plugged the well and abandoned it. A geologist named John Wold, however, believed the area merited further exploration. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Salt Lake City, UtahDriving around Salt Lake City on a pleasant day last June in a plain white city government car, Doug Dansie pauses at the corner of two streets, 1300 South and 300 East. This is a residential neighborhood where old trees tower over the houses. But there’s no house on this particular corner […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
No ski for you
MONTANAThe owners of Montana Snowbowl near Missoula really, really don’t like criticism. So after a skier complained, they refused to sell him a season ski pass, or even daily tickets at a reduced rate during the pre-season. Jim Sylvester says that he put a comment in a handy suggestion box at the ski area, noting […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
The logging town of Darrington, Wash., fights to save a fire lookout
On a blustery summer night, the Red Top Tavern in Darrington, Wash., is nearly empty. A neon Hamm’s beer sign illuminates a picture of a local logger reclining in the bucket of an excavator with the caption “Redneck Hot Tub.” Above it hangs a crosscut saw, just like in every bar in every other Northwest […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Detente in the rancher v. environmentalist grazing wars?
If you’ve been trolling the news recently, you might think that ranchers still reign supreme over the federal estate, despite the fact that the number of cattle and sheep on public lands has declined by more than half since the 1950s. In November, for example, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
How much time does Congress spend discussing the issues you care about?
Ten months before the election, news outlets are already jammed with political jabber. One way to put it in perspective is to chart the attention Congress has paid to your particular issues over time. Capitol Words, an online visualization tool created by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, assembles the daily contents of the Congressional Record […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Huntsman: not worthy
Obama should ditch Vice President Joe Biden for Jon Huntsman in the 2012 presidential campaign? It is hard to believe that High Country News would suggest such a move (HCN, 12/26/11 & 1/09/12, “A Westerner for the White House”). First of all, Huntsman resigned as ambassador to China to run against the president who appointed […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Shadow Wolves track down smugglers on the Arizona-Mexico border
The technologies border police use to protect our boundaries range from the historic (mustangs trained for mounted patrols) to the futuristic. (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency plans to nearly triple its fleet of unmanned surveillance Predator B aircraft.) But nothing can track a smuggler quite like a human being. The Shadow Wolves, a […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Move over, Ed Abbey
Craig Childs is a treasure, and his essay in the last issue is but another jewel (HCN, 12/26/11 & 1/09/12, “Stranger in these parts”). I have been enjoying his words for a decade and have now come to realize that he is my favorite Southwestern writer since Ed Abbey. I think that Ed, whom I […]