National parks seem like places of refuge, far removed from urban crime and violence. But for at least the last decade, law enforcement rangers in the National Park Service have been among the federal law enforcement officers most likely to be injured or killed by assault. In 2009, descriptions of violent incidents in national parks […]
Departments
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Rapid runoff
On April 1, it looked like this would be a banner water year for Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which receives just six to eight inches of precipitation annually and relies on snowmelt to fill streams and irrigate crops. Heavy spring storms had bumped the snowpack in the surrounding mountains to 113 percent of the historic […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
So long, Paonia
Earlier this week, I drove through a stretch of barren landscape about 50 miles from our Paonia home, as I’ve done many times before. It’s an unremarkable part of western Colorado. The sparsely vegetated hills contain radioactive waste, an old bombing range, an experimental chicken farm and a lot of shot-up appliances. Soon, hundreds of […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Eccentricity and wildness
My wife and I once drove from Montana to Seattle for a wedding at a farm that hosts such ceremonies. En route, we found a good place to change into our fancy clothes — a thicket alongside the Snohomish River. OK, we’re a little eccentric. But at the river, we met a guy who was […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Summertime slowdown
We publish 22 times per year, so we’ll be skipping the next issue. Here in western Colorado, we’ll be tending our gardens, celebrating the annual Cherry Days festival and the Fourth of July, and working on great stories for upcoming issues — not necessarily in that order. You’ll see the next edition of HCN in […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Compassionate listening, fierce conversation
Voices of the American WestCorinne Platt and Meredith Ogilby; foreword by William Kittredge280 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Fulcrum Publishing, 2009. A chance conversation at a conference in 2004 launched photographer Meredith Ogilby and writer Corinne Platt on an ambitious journey. They resolved to photograph and speak with 49 “heavy lifters” from across the West, people of […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Life in a doomed dome
Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All PossibilitiesRebecca Reider310 pages, hardcover, $39.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2009. The American West has long been home to grand engineering schemes, with planners and boosters eager to manipulate nature to suit their own purposes. Rebecca Reider’s new book, Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities, reveals one […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
A wrinkle in space?
The back-page essay on May 24, “Walking Woman,” had a striking design, but it took some literary license with facts that are obvious to those of us who live in the eastern Sierra. The first sentence grates on grammatical nerves: The Sierra Nevada range is singular, not plural. The Sierras, plural, is correct if you […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Finding radical balance
I very much enjoyed David Wolman’s article on the success of wildlife on military land (HCN, 5/24/10). It’s always welcome to hear of nature thriving. But the assertion that these instances represent a balance between “trashing of, or respect for, the planet” doesn’t follow. If anything, it’s David Brower’s dream: an intact landscape left untrammeled […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Learning lessons in Owens Valley
In Kim Todd’s essay “Walking Woman,” she used the re-watering of the lower Owens River as a reason to visit Owens Valley and rhapsodize about Mary Austin (HCN, 5/24/10). In the re-watering, she finds a hopeful lesson that the truism of environmental victories being temporary and defeats being permanent may not always be true. Had […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Li-ber-tar-i-an, n
If Ray Ring (“Going to Extremes”, May 24) is going to write about politics, especially in the hard-to-label West, he needs to watch his flippant labeling. As an Arizonan and a Libertarian, I am very angered by folks who lump my freedom-loving and consistent positions with the often inconsistent stands of the Tea Party. Most […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
The land less traveled
Your May 24 cover story “Accidental Wilderness” was for me a catalog of former or current projects I have worked on as an environmental consultant. The map on page 15 showing select Department of Defense and Energy Department sites around the West identified seven facilities where I have worked or visited as a consultant, chief […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Bloody Mystery Lingers in the Desert
An unsolved murder increases fears along the Mexican border
Posted inHeard Around the West
A little taste of … something
COLORADOPot dispensaries may be proliferating on Main Streets across the West, but a new sign that weed is going mainstream can be seen in Durango, a college town in southern Colorado that attracts lots of hikers, climbers and mountain bikers. Just turn on Durango’s public-access television channel, and you can watch pot-inspired recipes come to […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Health studies gas up
Colorado launches one of the nation’s first health assessments of gas-drilling impacts
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
New world, new canvas
Ex-priest reconstructs a working-class history from Basque arborglyphs
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Nature illiteracy
Pine grosbeak? How about just seeing a bird as a bird.
Posted inHeard Around the West
Taking matters into their own hands
OREGONWhy would you bring pepper spray to a cooking contest for local chefs in Portland? Well, let’s just say that it was not employed to spice up one of the entrees. Instead, it was used by police to halt what Willamette Week Online described as a brawl featuring “drunken head-butts, chefs being ejected from a […]