The residents of very small Red Lodge, Mont., struck a blow, this month, for keeping their town a town. The forces for sprawling suburbanization are still all there: rising real estate prices, a major expansion at Red Lodge Mountain ski resort, and an influx of amenity-seeking newcomers attracted to the town’s setting, 60 twisting miles […]
Keeping the heart in the center of town
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Heard around the West
You can be feminine and far fetched, or is it petite and a patriot? The shy editor of a newsletter called Marilyn the Patriot Matchmaker, admits, “I’ve always liked the kind of guys who’ll get me shot.” Enter this female foe of the New World Order, Marilyn, no last name given, who wants to link […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Denying the warts on the West’s service economy
Once upon a time, in 18th-century France, the king and his court had pet economists known as “physiocrats.” The nobility liked their physiocrats very much. Not only did they bow and scrape in a very respectful way, but they told the king and counts and dukes that all wealth comes from the ground. The aristocracy […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
The shotgun wedding of tourism and public lands
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – They came from across the country and around the West to celebrate the shotgun wedding of tourism and the public lands. The potential Lords of the New West, the bosses of tourism agencies and industry lobbying groups, and the managers of federal lands and parks, arrived in limousines and chartered […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Wildlife plan teams with controversy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – About a decade ago, wildlife officials in Idaho began to realize that there were more wolverines in the Sawtooth Mountain area than they had thought. How many more and how should they be managed? Well, that would take some study, which costs money. And as is the case in many states, Idaho’s […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Cow coup: Wyoming governor usurps federal grazing group
CASPER, Wyo. – It was not yet high noon, but the showdown over grazing between Wyoming’s governor and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had begun to unfold. Around a table sat the 15 members of Wyoming’s Resource Advisory Council. They were the very same ranchers, industry representatives and conservationists who had been meeting for over a […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Rain and clearcuts make fatal brew
UMPQUA, Ore. – In their octagonal house on a remote forested slope 30 miles northwest of Roseburg, Rick and Susan Moon and their next-door neighbor, Sharon Marvin, sat in the path of disaster Nov. 18. Above them in the gathering dark, curtains of rain were working away at the mountain, swelling a small creek and […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Dear friends
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. […]
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 […]