The last name of a man in the dues ledger of the South Slavic Socialist Organization, No. 136, startled me — “Putz.” I glimpsed it not long ago in old documents at the “Slovenski Dom” in Rock Springs, Wyo., a town where politics once mingled with lodge fraternalism in the Old West. It’s because my […]
When frontier socialism thrived in Wyoming
Posted inGoat
‘It helps to be irritating’
Colorado’s North Fork Valley – where High Country News makes its home– recently received news that had many residents cheering and hugging on Paonia’s three-block main drag and at the local brewery. On Feb. 6, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would defer the sale of more than 20,000 acres of controversial oil and […]
Posted inRange
Sally Jewell’s Adventure of a Lifetime
President Obama’s nominee for heading the Department of Interior, Sally Jewell, is noteworthy not for who she is, but for who she is not. She is a mountaineer, an ultra-marathon runner, a CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, and a former bank executive and oil company engineer. She appears to be some kind of […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Will the Badlands become the first tribal national park?
Oglala Lakota leaders hope to transform their bombed-out Badlands and help lift the tribe out of poverty, but it won’t be easy.
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
In a rural Colorado valley, old-fashioned print news lives on
On any given Tuesday, if you venture past the creaky door and the piles of paper and boxes and photos, you’ll find Dean Coombs marinating in the smell of hot lead, dust and the slow decay of old newsprint, tending an ancient printing press that emanates a rhythmic whir-swoosh. Coombs, with an unkempt gray beard, […]
Posted inGoat
Bakken tech boomlet?
Viewed from space at night, North Dakota’s sparsely populated Northern Plains appear to harbor a mysterious mega-city. But really, the burst of lights on the prairie is natural gas burning in the state’s oil patch. Enough energy is wasted through natural gas flaring each day to heat half a million homes daily. Flaring is not […]
Posted inWotr
Living in a caboose, supporting the railroad
I’ve lived for close on 20 years in an old heavyweight Burlington Railroad caboose. It’s grounded in Gilpin County, Colo., close to the Continental Divide, near milepost 41.77 on the Union Pacific Railroad’s Moffat tunnel sub –a subsidiary line leading up to the tunnel and through it. I may have slept in that old baby […]
Posted inGoat
Powering down
If you want to know why the biggest electricity supplier in Montana, Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL), is trying to sell off its 15 power plants, you have to go back in time — back before 2001, when California had rolling blackouts and Enron was pulling the strings of a shaky electricity market. You have […]
Posted inGoat
Can the West have its own Energiewende?
If perchance you are a Westerner and you find yourself rushing across the German countryside in a train one day, there are a few things that are so unlike the West that they are likely to catch your attention: *The fact that you are indeed rushing smoothly across the countryside in a train, not a […]
Posted inWotr
Never underestimate the power of prejudice
Last year, both New Mexico and Arizona celebrated the centennial anniversaries of their becoming states. But why did it take them until 1912 to join the Union? The answer isn’t pretty; it reveals a pattern of racism and discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics and Catholics in the West. For New Mexico, the long road to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tonopah, Nev. and its “Fighting Muckers”
Utah “Remember,” says photographer Greg Woodall, “when enviros and liberals were the ones who were ‘anti-this and anti-that’?” Courtesy Greg Woodall. UTAH What’s in a name? If the name is Dixie State College, based in St. George, Utah, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Recently, as the college began moving closer to becoming a university, locals […]
Posted inGoat
Staring down the fiscal cliff
For evidence of the effects of political deadlock in Washington, look no further than a Jan. 25 memo from National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis instructing park directors to prepare for deep spending cuts. The memo, leaked to the media by the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, tells park directors not to hire any […]
Posted inGoat
Mexican wolf recovery #fail
At the end of 2007, we published a story by investigative reporter John Dougherty called “Last Chance for the Lobo,” about the “bloody mess” that had become the Mexican wolf reintroduction in New Mexico and Arizona. There were so few wolves left when the recovery effort started that many born in captivity were inbred. Ranchers […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
How to clean up abandoned mines — without landing in court
Peter Butler’s late October tour of abandoned hardrock mines began high on Red Mountain Pass near Silverton, Colo., off a highway so narrow that, in places, its shoulder crumbles off cliffs. Butler, a water wonk with springy silver curls, is the co-coordinator of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a local watershed group, which has been […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Jonathan Thompson on gun control
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talks with Jonathan Thompson about his story “Which way will the West go on guns?”
Posted inGoat
Views of Chu
We’ve posted before about the mass exodus of cabinet secretaries Obama is facing (typical for a second-term president). One of the more notable vacancies is that of Energy Secretary – Steven Chu has announced he’s stepping down. When he took office in 2009, HCN senior editor Ray Ring gave his thoughts on Chu and other […]
Posted inWotr
Killing wolves is part of the bargain
On Dec. 6, a Wyoming hunter killed one of Yellowstone’s most famous wolves, 832F, outside the park’s boundaries. It was a legal kill, yet within 48 hours, news organizations across the country ran stories mourning the wolf’s death and treating it like, well, the loss of a family friend. Wolf advocate Marc Cooke of Montana’s […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Chicken pastorale
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. American folk musician and hillbilly existentialist Greg Brown offers some mid-song patter referring to Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem “On Weariness” (“Cierto Cansancio”), in which Neruda memorably wrote […]
Posted inGoat
Growing our gas
How cool would it be if we could turn wood trimmings, straw, or other common plant products into gasoline? It’s possible — the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol has been proven, but scaling it up commercially hasn’t happened yet, in large part because we haven’t figured out how to create large quantities of the stuff […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Whose land is this?
On Memorial Day 2004, a friend and I drove into the South Unit of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, located within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on a former gunnery range. We stopped at the visitor center, a dilapidated trailer at one end of a crumbling parking lot, but it was closed. No matter, we […]