Dear Friends

The Christmas lights are going up around Paonia, the snow is piling up in the high country, and it’s time once again for the staff of High Country News to take a break. This will be the last issue you’ll receive for a month. The first issue of ’04 should hit your mailboxes Jan. 19. Happy holidays from all of us.

A HEARTFELT THANKS

We accidentally left Peggy Rosenberry off our list of contributors in the 2003 annual report. Peggy has been a subscriber for years, and a great supporter of our efforts. Many thanks, Peggy, and apologies for the omission.

FAMILIAR NAMES

If you thought that the writer who penned last issue’s cover story on the struggle over Idaho’s Owyhee Region seemed familiar, you were right. Robyn Morrison worked as HCN’s development director from 1999 and 2002. She created our development department from scratch, at a time when our expenses were quickly outgrowing our income, and spearheaded the Spreading the News Campaign, which brought in $1.2 million for our new media programs.

Robyn left the development department to research collaborative land-management efforts as part of a partnership between HCN and the Montana-based Red Lodge Clearinghouse. HCN is no longer affiliated with Red Lodge, though we continue to exchange ideas, and the clearinghouse continues to post our stories on its Web site. Robyn has moved on, working as a freelance writer, and doing a stint as director of our local environmental group, the Western Slope Environmental Resource Council. We’re sure you’ll be reading more of her stories in the future.

The author of this issue’s cover story, Rosemary Winters, may also be familiar. Rosemary, a native of Salt Lake City, Utah, started researching her story about Mormon environmentalists as an HCN intern last summer.

ON THE COVER

The image on the cover of this issue is by Utah artist Maryann Webster, an anti-nuclear activist and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who plays a prominent part in the cover story. The “Mutant Garden” diptych, she says, pictures Adam and Eve in a nuclear landscape; the apple represents the knowledge of splitting the atom. In the background, you can see mushroom clouds, a nuclear power plant, mutant animals and the B-29 bombers that dropped atomic bombs on Japan during World War II — planes that took off from an Army Air Base in the Utah-Nevada border town of Wendover.

HOLY COW, IT WORKS

Dave Schipper of West Olive, Mich., read Betsy Marston’s Heard Around the West Column about the brochure for city folks thinking of moving to the country (HCN, 9/29/03: Heard around the West), and thought he’d send us a sample. The brochure contains a “scratch and sniff” patch on the back page that really does emit the eau de manure. Half the staff is already thinking about moving to the city, just to get away from the thing.

• Dear Friends