Digging in Winter finally fell on Paonia after fooling us for so many weeks with sunny days and skittish snow. The ski areas are happy about their feet-thick bases, and local water supplies, though still in snowpack, seem robust. But it isn’t cold yet, with that dry, biting cold we’ve come to expect in December. […]
Dear friends
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Amen!
La Iglesia in Emma offers Latinos a home in a foreign land
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘I have a 1996 Dodge Caravan … I’m a family guy’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Standing in the waiting room of the INS building in Denver, the federal official read the names of the newest citizens of the United States – Irene Lopez Fernandez, José Chavez Flores, Arturo Ramirez Mendoza. They were all pleased, but no one smiled wider […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘I don’t want to live in a community of rich white people. It’s boring’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Filmmaker Shelley Weiss moved from Los Angeles to Oakley, Utah, nine years ago. An avid swimmer, she quickly became a regular at the Park City Racquet Club. Over the past few years, she has heard racist comments there about the growing number of Mexican […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘They’re good workers. And they’re all we’ve got’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kay Humann is the office manager at High Country Linen in Jackson, Wyo. Accustomed to running the computer and the phones in the front of the building, she worked in the hot, steamy laundry 16 hours a day for a week after the Aug. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
‘The way they treated me, I don’t like it at all’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Thirty-one-year-old Agustin Perez of Driggs, Idaho, came to the United States in 1982 to make $4.50 an hour working for a potato farmer in nearby Ashton. He got his green card in 1990. When we interviewed him he was in the midst of remodeling […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
El Nuevo West
The region’s new pioneers buoy the economy and live on the edge
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
No name for art
-The reason I draw the designs is to make the past and present come together. It’s like mixing colors.” * Jordan Harvier, age 13 Bruce Hucko’s new book, Where There is No Name for Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children, is like Harvier’s quote. It blends black-and-white photographs of young artists, interviews and colorful […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
The High Uintas need help
Salt Lake City environmentalist Dick Carter is at it again, this time founding a new nonprofit, the High Uintas Preservation Council. After the Utah Wilderness Association – the group that tried to forge a compromise in the state’s wilderness debate – closed shop last spring, Carter took a few months off to hike. But the […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Locally owned in Great Falls
-The toughest part of reporting for a newspaper is talking to people that you know are lying to you.” * Lauran Dundee, community weekly publisher The Great Times, a weekly newspaper with offices in downtown Great Falls, Mont., was born Sept. 18, 1996. “It’s based on the old-fashioned concept of what a paper should do,” […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Wear what you sow
South Dakotan Michael Melius sells jewelry you plant – -Seed Beads’ loaded with seeds of increasingly rare native grasses and wildflowers and strung on scraps of linen thread. It was the simplest packaging Melius could think of. “I had tried to sell seed mixes in packets with little success, I think, because that packaging implies […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Even in Quiet Places
It is a secret still, but already your tree is chosen. It has entered a forest for miles and hides deep in a valley by a river. No one else finds it; the sun passes over not noticing. But even while you are reading you happen to think of that tree, no matter where sentences […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Roll on, Columbia
It’s easy to sum up the view of two new books on the Columbia River, the Nchi-Wana in a native tongue: It was wild, dammed, polluted and mutilated. Pulitzer Prize winner William Dietrich tells a fascinating tale in Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River as he leaves no aspect of the river untouched. Beginning with […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Rein in those planes
Anyone who has had their solitude blasted by the sudden scream of low-flying military jets while hiking in the West will want a copy of the 24-page Citizen’s Guide to Opposing Military Airspace Expansion. While the military has downsized its airfleet almost by half since the demise of the Soviet Union, it continues to seek […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Coyote Angels
Bart Koehler, director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and a co-founder of Earth First!, always took time out from fighting for environmental issues to sing about them. Now he and his Coyote Angels band have released a CD featuring songs about the wild life of the West. Some, dedicated to green greats such as […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Belonging to the West
-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.” * Eric Paddock I moved to the West because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the West – […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
County trashes waste plan
Elmore County, Idaho, residents voted overwhelmingly this past election to allow the continued shipment of out-of-state nuclear wastes to a site 200 miles to the east of them. But they are putting their foot down on a plan to place the state’s largest landfill in their backyard. The planning and zoning commission decided to deny […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Where’s the fish?
Maps from Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources show more than a thousand miles of the state’s streams contain no fish. But they’re wrong. This distinction is important because state law requires that loggers and developers leave protective corridors of vegetation for erosion control next to fish-bearing streams. But biologists fear the mapping mistakes have […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Checks are in the mail
Home siding by Louisiana-Pacific Inc. sold as a cheap alternative to cedar turned out to be more expensive than expected. When it swelled, buckled, soaked up water, rotted and even grew a mushroomlike fungus in wet weather, customers began frantically calling the company about their Inner Seal siding (HCN, 8/21/95). Now, Louisiana-Pacific says it will […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Judge tells EPA to hurry up in Idaho
Conservationists won a major court ruling this fall in their two-decade-long battle with the state of Idaho and the Environmental Protection Agency to implement and enforce the Clean Water Act. In a sharply worded opinion, federal district judge William Dwyer, of northern spotted owl fame, chided the EPA and the state for failing to develop […]