Downtown Santa Fe’s uniform aesthetic is no coincidence. It’s protected and propagated by city codes: Windows must be modestly sized, edges rounded, exteriors colored an earthy adobe blush. The resulting faraway mystique charms hordes of tourists. But the electric farolitos and “fauxdobe” make others groan: “Enough already!” with the “Disneyfication,” one architect told a local magazine […]
Three days in southwest New Mexico
Posted inGoat
Pipeline plans
Moving water from one part of the West to another – it’s a time-honored tradition, a way to channel the bounty of rivers in less populated areas to drier regions with greater populations. We’ve reported on many of these projects, like the San Francisco Bay/Delta that supplies southern California, and the Central Arizona Project that’s […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Western travel tips
If you decide to go running on a BLM backroad near Bisbee, Ariz., consider taking a couple of large friends or some dogs as insurance against getting chased (twice) by emaciated-yet-speedy longhorn Mexican bulls. —Sarah Gilman, associate editor Park the car and take public/mass transit. I know this sounds crazy, as we’re talking about the land […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Ray Ring’s Nevada route
The travel route the author took when touring around Reno, Nevada.
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Cally Carswell’s New Mexico route
The travel route the author took when visiting New Mexico
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Neil LaRubbio’s Montana route
The travel route the author took in Montana
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
The Atlas of the Industrial West
Ever wanted to tour a wind farm, a giant dam or an oil and gas field? This map will help. Click on the icon of the industrial site nearest you for a bit about the site and tours, if offered, along with a link to more information. Purple = oil & gas; Aqua = dams […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Shooting at The Gun Store in Las Vegas
On the last day of my first trip to Vegas three years ago, my older brother and I faced a conundrum: What do you do in Sin City when the sin’s been had and only the city is left? Go to Caesar’s, maybe, and lose another $50 bucks at craps, or, schmuck-like, watch the Bellagio’s […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Our first travel issue
When the suggestion that High Country News do a travel-themed edition first came up, there was a lot of skepticism. After all, who needs more fluff about the “Top 10” thisses, and the “Best Secret” thats? We focus on serious issues — the West’s cultures, economies and environmental problems. Right? Right. And that’s why you’re […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
High Country News skips an issue
We’ll be skipping the July 9th issue. (We publish 22 issues per year.) Instead, we’ll be picking western Colorado cherries, celebrating the Fourth of July, welcoming new interns and working on exciting new stories. You’ll see the next edition of HCN around July 23; in the meantime, enjoy the sweet lazy days of early summer, […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Faraway, favorite and less-than-famous places
We asked our readers and staff to send in some of their favorite places in the West. Here’s a sampling of their responses. Add your own in the comments! California’s Alabama Hills — Not only was this rolling desert stippled with boulder outcrops the setting for Tremors, my family’s favorite cult film, in which giant […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Land art of the West: An interactive map
Land art is not by any means a purely Western phenomenon. Big, monumental sculptures, along with smaller, more ephemeral works, can be found throughout the world. But the big land art movement really was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the West, when Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter DeMaria and others came […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
A review of Elevating Western American Art
Elevating Western American Art: Developing an Institute in the Cultural Capital of the Rockies Thomas Brent Smith, editor. 320 pages, hardcover: $34.95. Denver Art Museum, 2012. The Denver Art Museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art hosts an impressive collection of historic and contemporary paintings, textiles, prints and sculptures. Elevating Western American Art celebrates the […]
Posted inRange
Putting the West on a low-carb(on) diet
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House The day after the University of Colorado Law School’s annual summer conference — “A Low Carbon Energy Blueprint for the American West” — had ended, I was walking in downtown Fort Collins, when something above the foothills caught my eye. The dense white puff looked like a blooming […]
Posted inWotr
Bison deserve a home on the range
You sleeping relick of the pastif I but had my wayI’d cloth(e) your framewith meat and hidean(d) wake you up to day. – C.M. Russell, 1908 Montana cowboy artist and favorite son Charles M. Russell penned those wistful words underneath a sketch he made of a sun-bleached buffalo skull poking through prairie grass. But that was 104 years […]
Posted inWotr
Safari Club and the NRA aim to gut wilderness
This April 17, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, which promised “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting.” Actually, this bill takes an ax to the 1964 Wilderness Act. Over 30 House Democrats voted in favor of H.R. 4089 because they did not want to be seen as “anti-hunting.” Now, our U. S. […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wearing hummingbirds
THE WEST Back in the late 1970s, Doug Weinant, a just-retired range boss in the Crawford country of western Colorado, had the reputation of being a genius with hummingbirds. He and his wife, Alma, who lived in a remote mountain cabin, would put out a bunch of sugar-water feeders in the spring, and dozens of […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Hidden in plain sight: A review of The American Wall
The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of MexicoMaurice Sherif 224 + 160 pages, two volumes, hardcover: $150.University of Texas Press, 2011 In its ungainly proportions, Maurice Sherif’s The American Wall mimics its massive subject, the U.S.-Mexico border fence. The “book” is actually two giant volumes enclosed in a slipcase. Heft one […]
Posted inArticles
The Excursions Episode
Just in time for summer travel season, we’ll spend this episode of West of 100 wandering the West. Journalist Scott Carrier and poet Alex Caldiero visit the Sun Tunnels, a far-flung art installation in the Utah desert. High Country News editorial fellow Neil LaRubbio gives us a peek into the world of modern hoboes. (Neil is producing […]