The fire season started with a vengeance this year in the parched Southwest. As of June 16, firefighters had extinguished more than 2,400 fires in Arizona and New Mexico that charred some 230,000 acres. Fire crews from all over the West are camped on the airport lawn in Albuquerque, poised for assignments. “This has been […]
Fire sweeps through the Southwest
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Dear friends
We brake for summer We skip the next issue of High Country News because, we like to joke, everyone needs a chance to catch up on their HCN reading. Some of us here will hike, bike or cheer for kids at summer baseball games, others will head for “meditation camp” in New Mexico, and all […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Canyonlands is a park in name only; in truth only highly organized chaos reigns
They put a park on it in 1964. Canyonlands National Park. People struggled to define its borders, to leave in Indian Creek, or to exclude Lavender Canyon, should the Orange Cliffs be inside or outside? A congressional hearing was held. Meanwhile rocks off the Orange Cliffs broke loose and moved from BLM land into proposed […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Heard around the West
At least once a day, High Country News is mistaken for the local High Country Shopper. In the Shopper you can find goats, chain-link fence, slightly used wedding dresses and the like for bargain prices. Depending on your blood sugar level, the headlines for ads in the Shopper can seem anything from commonplace to hallucinatory […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Country Doctor
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Mark Unverzagt, a doctor in Reserve, N.M., took up Melinda Garcia’s challenge and became key to the formation of Concerned Citizens for Catron County. The group, comprised of some 18 ranchers, local politicians, Forest […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Psychologist
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Melinda Garcia of Albuquerque has been a clinical and community psychologist for 25 years. She has led three day-long sessions in Catron County for Forest Service employees and their families: one on the high […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Forest Ranger
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Mike Gardner has worked for the Forest Service in Catron County for 15 years, first as a wilderness ranger on the Gila National Forest, then as district ranger in Luna, and since 1988 as […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The Businessperson
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt “You’re not going to get people to tell you what’s going on here for the record, because they’re afraid of retaliation,” one Catron County businessperson told High Country News, speaking on condition of anonymity. […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
The County Attorney
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Jim Catron is a fourth-generation New Mexican and a distant relative of Thomas Benton Catron, the land baron for whom Catron County is named. He lives in La Joya, N.M., and is county attorney […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
GLENWOOD, N.M. – In 1962, Hugh B. McKeen’s rancher parents brought him back to their native Catron County after 15 years in crowded, hectic Southern California. Catron County was then, and still is, everything that urban America is not. Lying four to five hours by car from Albuquerque and Phoenix, it has no local newspapers, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Spreading the gospel
Outdoor education teaches people to know and care about the West
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Salmon find a friend
Endangered Snake River salmon recently found a northern ally in their battle against Columbia River dams. Republican Gov. Tony Knowles of Alaska announced April 28 that his state had begun legal action to join a lawsuit brought by environmental and fishing groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service. The groups sued the agency this spring […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Operation bullsling
The Forest Service really slung the bull this time – eight tons of it. To improve the vegetation and watershed of the Ishi Wilderness in northeastern California, agency officials strapped 13 tranquilized bulls into helicopter cargo nets and flew them out at the end of a 40-foot cable. The cattle were the last of a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
On the fate of Hanford
Dear HCN, I appreciate your Hanford issue (HCN, 1/22/96) since I was born and raised in Othello, a small town to the northeast of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Our farm, which my brother still owns, lies a little more than a mile away from the northern border. Our father was also raised nearby, on a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Climbing ban makes sense
Dear HCN, I am a long-time climber and resident of Wyoming and have worked here as a professional mountain guide for the past five years. I would like to make it known that many climbers and guides of Wyoming support the voluntary closure of climbing at Devils Tower (HCN, 4/16/96). It is unfortunate that many […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Hearing stories, finding family, returning home
It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Heard around the West
The West has no shortage of strange juxtapositions: Gold prospectors and mountain bikers, Utah’s tabernacle and Nevada’s casinos, Denver International Airport and airplanes. But a new pair of strange bedfellows has recently sprung up: The Forest Service and Wal-Mart. The federal agency and the retail behemoth are going to spend the summer jointly promoting environmental […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past […]