It was one small group who blew the rock in the Salt River Canyon (HCN, 10/10/25). The guy who lit the fuse was too incompetent to get himself or his customers past an irreplaceable, completely natural challenge. It broke my heart, even though my rafting is defined by the inner tube. No one has a […]
‘Please stay in the kiddie pool’
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
Guide, not gospel
Eureka! As I read the article “Once More Unto the Breach” and glanced at the bookcase behind me, it hit me — I had most of (Michael Kelsey’s) books (HCN, 10/10/11)! But I had never connected the dots. The first, Guide to the World’s Mountains, had steered my climbing itineraries overseas, and ultimately led me […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
The river (too) wild
We wouldn’t want to engineer every river, but rivers are transient, anyway (HCN, 10/10/25). Making one rapid consistent with the rest of the run makes sense. As a climber, I’m a little tired of the argument that placing enough bolts on a route to prevent someone dying is “dumbing it down.” I’ve seen people die […]
Posted inGoat
Oh deer
For the last 10 years, Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc. — an environmental and statistical consulting group — has been studying the mule deer that winter on the Pinedale Anticline. Over the first four years of the study, But the latest data, just released in a new report [pdf], makes those increases look like a temporary […]
Posted inRange
River course restored after recovery diversion
The Arkansas River is back on course after a diversion last week to recover the body of Kimberly Appelson, a 23-year-old Breckenridge woman who fell out of a raft on July 11 and had been missing ever since. It happened two miles north of Buena Vista at a spot known as Frog Rock Rapids. Beneath […]
Posted inBlog
Buying “green” in the rural West
I recently took a little unscientific field trip to a Walmart Supercenter near my home in Mesa, Arizona. I chose Walmart partly because of its prices but also because it is widely available in rural areas in the West, where shopping choices are often limited. My “research” questions: Would the prices for ‘greener’ products be […]
Posted inRange
Of grizzlies and tortoises
The towering grizzly bear and diminutive desert tortoise have something in common, and it’s not good: both animals are struggling for survival. “The population of grizzlies in the continental United States was 50,000 at time of Lewis and Clark, and it’s down to 1600 animals today for some of the same reasons the desert tortoise […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
What to do with the dead?
MONTANA The funniest picture in Montana Magazine’s profile of coffin-maker Willy von Bracht shows him and an assistant putting the cover on a casket painted to look exactly like a giant box of Marlboro cigarettes. This was a “personal project” of von Bracht, whose lively sense of humor informs his business, Sweet Earth Caskets and […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
‘The last word is action’
Boulder clean-energy activist sees declining coal supply as a boon
Posted inWotr
Voting at the dump
In my bluish precinct in thoroughly red Idaho, we vote at the dump. We troop to a doublewide manufactured home that serves as the landfill office, out by the edge of the Caribou National Forest. “Saves the middleman,” my late husband liked to say. Our whole county makes a blue showing in most elections, thanks […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A house like a buffalo
A carpenter muses on dismantling and recycling tumbledown buildings
Posted inWotr
When voting, listen to the grass
When I say I’m from the High Plains, people often tell me how bored they were on their last drive through eastern Colorado or Kansas. I agree. The Plains are boring now that most of the land has been farmed into a drab patchwork of corn, soybeans and wheat. But no land was ever as […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Once I caught a fish thi-i-i-i-i-s big
UTAH There he was, an eight-point buck, stranded on a narrow ledge five feet above Lake Powell. What could two law enforcement officers — one from Utah, the other from the Glen Canyon National Monument — do? They didn’t want to tranquilize the mule deer, so after making it leap into the water, the two […]
Posted inRange
Denver mayor accused of trashing rural residents
The Colorado governor’s race took another twist last week with the front-runner and Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, getting accused of “trashing” rural residents. The accusation came from his principal challenger, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, who entered the race in August as the nominee of the American Constitution Party. The Republican candidate, Dan […]
Posted inBlog
Obama admin speaks on diversifying the NPS
Boldness hasn’t been an appropriate adjective for the Obama Admistration’s approach on environmental issues. The White House seems better known in green circles for allowing Van Jones to be squeezed out of a job, failing to take aggressive strides on passing a climate bill, lifting a moratorium on oil drilling, lowballing information about the extent […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
How I ran for a U.S. Senate seat, and what I learned
Investigative reporter John Dougherty writes about his surprising Arizona campaign
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Writing in tradition
From the HilltopToni Jensen179 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2010. In From the Hilltop, her first short story collection, Toni Jensen relies on her Métis heritage (a mixed Indian and European cultural group from Canada and the Northern U.S.) to explore contemporary Indian life off the reservation. It is not surprising that her writing […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Solar spree
In early October, the Interior Department gave its blessing to three solar energy projects in California’s sun-saturated Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley, and one in the Nevada desert. The approvals — the first ever on federal public land — came five years after the agency opened public deserts in the Southwest to solar development. A […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Hello, and goodbye
High Country News welcomes new assistant editor Cally Carswell. Cally has spent the last nine months here as a multimedia fellow after completing an internship; now, she’ll continue her excellent work reporting and writing stories, editing articles, and producing video and audio as a permanent staff member. Born in New Mexico but raised in Chicago, […]