Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. Tom Huerkamp’s vision of the Delta Correctional Facility as a center for scientific research matches the state of Colorado’s goal when it began using the site in 1964. “The state’s noble experiment,” as a local newspaper called it at the time, […]
How Colorado’s hunters lost 90 acres to 300 prisoners
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
Crime is big business, on both sides of thelaw
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. You may have heard the joke: By the year 2000, everyone in the United States will either be in prison or working for one. But prisons and the jobs and spinoff businesses they create are no joke. Prison-construction budgets nationwide topped […]
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
Poor, rural places are magnets for prisons
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. New prisons aren’t getting built at the scene of the crime. A 1991 federal survey found that 390 prisons were located in rural and small-town settings, housing 44 percent of all state and federal prisoners. More than 200 of those prisons […]
Posted inJune 26, 1995: Colorado's prison slayer
Colorado’s prison slayer
One man’s quest to unshackle a rural economy
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Dennis Brownridge replies
Christa Sadler has repeated park officials’ claims about what the proposed plan would do. However, a careful reading of the entire document and unpublished supporting studies, and hard questioning of park staffers, reveals that the plan is “not as advertised.” Addressing some of Ms. Sadler’s specific interpretations: * The plan would not encourage people to […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
There’s more to the story about crowded Grand Canyon
Dear HCN, Dennis Brownridge brought up some interesting points in his article about the National Park Service’s “Proposed Action” of their Draft General Management Plan for Grand Canyon National Park (HCN, 4/3/95). Unfortunately, his treatment of the subject was, while not necessarily wrong, at least remarkably biased, and did not begin to offer the whole […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Endangered Species Act defender issues call to arms
Dear HCN, Thank you for publishing the edition covering the (endangered) Endangered Species Act, (HCN, 5/15/95). I work as a biologist, surveying and trying to mitigate detrimental effects to threatened, endangered, and sensitive species and their habitats. There is a great deal of misunderstanding concerning the effects of the act’s enforcement, with people continuing to […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Who needs ski resorts anyway?
Dear HCN, I very much enjoy your excellent paper, even if quite a few of the articles sadden me as they chronicle the transition of an honest working man’s West into a characterless, la-de-da, recreational theme-park West. But “The New West’s servant economy” truly shocks and depresses me (HCN, 4/17/95). That these ski resorts, catering, […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Rants and raves about cutting government agencies
Dear HCN, Jeff Burgess rants and raves (HCN, 3/20/95) about the grazing fees for ranchers being too low (yawn). It always makes me laugh when I read this as federal land in no way compares to private grazing rentals. Lessees must develop water, cost share fencing and do a host of other things that are […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Deconstructing the rural West
Patrick Jobes has written a profoundly pessimistic analysis of the fate of the West’s attractive, or amenity, towns in the April/May 1995 issue of Western Planner. Fortunately, the article by the Montana State University sociologist is so densely written that its full, depressing impact may hit only those who reread it several times. Based on […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
A humming good race
A humming good race This summer, the Rockies will host a kinder, gentler type of car race – one without roaring, polluting engines. The first annual Sun Sprint of the Rockies solar and electric car-race, a 500-mile run from Aspen, Colo., to Moab, Utah, is set for July 11-21. Racers will travel about 50 miles […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Family inspiration
Family inspiration Fictional and real-life families are the focus of this year’s Fishtrap gathering of writers in northeastern Oregon, July 3-9. Orphaned in Eden: The Search for Family in the West features workshops and discussion groups with literary agent Lizzie Grossman, novelist Craig Lesley and poet Naomi Shihab Nye, among others. Workshops will examine fictional […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Leave no trace
Leave no trace By promoting “light on the land” recreation, a new nonprofit group aims to protect wilderness areas. Funded in part by a grant from the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, Leave No Trace Inc. will work with manufacturers of camping gear and federal-lands staffers to educate backcountry users about minimum-impact recreation. “Since the outdoor […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Having it all
Having it all Can a city like Boulder, Colo., really have it all? Is it possible for a community to have open space, a sound economy, adequate schools, a healthy environment and affordable housing, all at once? A June 22-23 workshop, sponsored by the Boulder Housing Authority, will address those issues and invite participants to […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Rescuing Colorado’s rivers
Rescuing Colorado’s rivers The rivers of Colorado have a new advocate. The nonprofit Colorado Rivers Alliance aims to protect and restore Colorado’s rivers and hopes to gain members from all streams of life, including environmentalists, farmers and politicians. Although the group’s mission is broad, it has more specific intentions as well, such as re-establishing riparian […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Eight is enough
Eight is enough After losing their father to an illegal shooting outside of Red Lodge, Mont., eight wolf pups and their mother are in a holding pen in Yellowstone National Park. After some agonizing over the decision, federal biologists decided to move the single-parent family to the one-acre enclosure. For now, the mother receives fresh […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Paying for lost salmon
Paying for lost salmon Each member of Washington’s Colville Confederated Tribes recently received a federal check for $5,989 to compensate for land taken to build the Grand Coulee Dam 62 years ago. But despite the money the Indians received, the land and the rich salmon fishery that the dam destroyed are still missed. Martin Louie […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Grazing reform ‘reformed’
After waging a defensive battle for more than two years, public-lands ranchers and their allies in Congress have gone on the offensive. The Livestock Grazing Act of 1995, introduced May 25 by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., would kill Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s two-year effort to reform grazing practices on 270 million acres of land overseen […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Learning the trick of quiet
Some 50 years ago a bachelor farmer paid tribute to his mother by giving land to Idaho in her name. The park, named for her – Mary Minerva McCroskey State Park – is only 4,400 acres balanced on a narrow ridge called Skyline Drive. No one would ever mistake it for wilderness. Logging clear-cuts border […]
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Heard around the West
The Oregon Natural Resources Council has recruited 40 or so “cow cops” to observe public land grazing, and some ranchers are not pleased. In a letter to federal agencies, the Grant County Stockgrowers’ Association said it “will regard so-called inspection of our allotments as an act of trespass’ and call in real cops to arrest […]