Every spring, Grand Canyon boatmen meet for an educational seminar — and a rousing good time.
Little doses of danger
Parenthood scares a fearless outdoorswoman
Ghosts of Wyoming: A haunted past and present
Ghosts of WyomingAlyson Hagy170 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2010. Reading Alyson Hagy’s new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, is a bit like poring over a stranger’s photo album, some pictures grayed and dusty, the images gone faint, others recent and still vivid. Each deft vignette contains its own bounded narrative, but taken together,…
A California Bestiary: Beauty of the beasts
A California BestiaryRebecca Solnit and Mona Caron64 pages, hardcover: $12.95.Heyday Books, 2010. In the tradition of illuminated medieval manuscripts, A California Bestiary presents 12 literary and visual portraits of fauna native to that state, from the extinct (California grizzly), to the emblematic (California condor), the ubiquitous (California ground squirrel), and the preciously obscure (mission blue…
Changing of the editorial guard
A couple of issues back, you may have noticed that High Country News was advertising for a new editor in chief. Jonathan Thompson has decided to leave HCN and Paonia in June and head out on a new adventure with his family, leaving the Four Corners region in which he has spent his first 40…
Eggstraction
Meet 317 and 318, a young couple in California’s Pinnacles National Monument. They are two of only 91 California condors flying free in the state – and only 349 left on Earth. This spring, the birds had no sooner laid an egg in their nest than National Park Service biologist Gavin Emmons rappelled down and…
Fair trade?
As a native-born Nevadan living in Humboldt County, Nev., I have seen firsthand both sides of the mining issue (HCN, 4/26/10). Twenty years from now, we will be asking what we have to show for all the mountains of tailing piles, open pits with poisoned water, miles of roads cut into the landscape for test…
It takes a district: Utah landowners control groundwater use
Escalante Valley citizens plan to save their declining aquifer
No more horseplay
I’d like to see HCN correct the grave misinformation in “Eligible Mustangs” and treat the subject with the accuracy and respect it deserves (HCN, 4/12/10). First and foremost, the Bureau of Land Management sets the “Appropriate Management Level” for wild horses on our ranges and decides when to call horses “excess.” However, this is based…
One Way to Save the Wolf? Hunt It.
Montana wildlife managers deem the first wolf season a success, for both hunters and hunted
Scapegoats on the range
It is clear to me that it is time for HCN to do a meaningful update on the wild horses and burros (HCN, 4/12/10). There is solid science that supports wild equids as having evolved on this continent and nowhere else. On Feb. 12, 2009, Jay F. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., and Patricia M. Fazio, Ph.D., testified…
Small wonders, big world
An argument for conservation
Wanted: horse sense
Some radical wild horse advocates just keep repeating the same lies over and over, hoping people start to take their lies as truth (HCN, 4/26/10). The biggest lie is that horses are native to North America. The EPA defines introduced species as “species that have become able to survive and reproduce outside the habitats where…
Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News; hello, Mrs. Li
How one journalist coped with a great Western paper’s demise
Urban habitat
Building an inner-city base hasn’t been easy for the Audubon Society
Culture of the Canyon
A Grand Canyon river trip is a revelation
The Secret Lives of River Guides
Grand Canyon boatman culture converges at “spring training”