This week, we’re featuring a photo by Flickr user VexingArt. It’s not only a nice shot, with plenty of depth and character and that cool old photo look, but it also captures one of those common features of so many Western landscapes: The shot out appliance. To see more High Country News Reader photos, or […]
HCN reader photo: Dead television
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Fall break
We publish 22 issues a year, and our next publishing break is in mid-September. Look for the next installment of HCN around Oct. 12. ROMPIN’ READER POTLUCK… in Paonia. We’re bringing back an old favorite: the High Country News community potluck at Paonia Town Park! This year, our fall board meeting takes place in HCN‘s […]
Posted inWotr
Solace among the Crazies
I’ve always gone to the woods to calm or rejuvenate a spirit too easily rubbed raw by modern life. It shouldn’t have surprised me that this continued into chemotherapy. Cockeyed from surgery and early treatments for ovarian cancer, I thought I was too tired or too sick to feel alive in the woods, but found […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
UnBEARable
An adventurous bear in Snowmass, Colo., didn’t need surgery, just a ladder. Apparently hoping to do some rad riding, he dropped into the town skate park’s bowl. Unable to skate vert, he was then busted down there, with no way out. One can imagine young onlookers confusing him with some shaggy old-school skater, before realizing […]
Posted inRange
Plastic bags plague the Bay
Have you ever wondered what happens to those pesky plastic bags that blow out of trash cans and float aimlessly along city streets and through neighborhoods? Eventually, they find their way to storm drains, creeks, bays and oceans. Once in the water they become toxic food for unsuspecting wildlife or flow to join the Great […]
Posted inGoat
Is the Pioneer doomed?
What a pleasure it was to ride Amtrak’s Pioneer route, which ran from Salt Lake City to Boise, through Oregon to Portland and north to Seattle. The route operated from 1977 to 1997, hooking up with the California Zephyr to service riders in Colorado. I remember one fabulous trip to LaGrande, Oregon, getting off at […]
Posted inWotr
Wolves don’t belong on the firing line
The day before the first-ever official wolf hunt started in Idaho on Sept. 1, I stood on the sidewalk outside the county courthouse in Sandpoint, watching cars stream into town. As demonstrators on the sidewalk waved placards protesting the hunt, people in those vehicles reacted, and I focused on their hands, counting waves and thumbs-up […]
Posted inArticles
Water and the National Parks
What you probably won’t learn about America’s best idea
Posted inWotr
An ecological dilemma
It took the power of two flashlights to discover the source of the metallic screech that had been keeping us up nights. There, on the top of a telephone pole, sat a chunky juvenile great horned owl, plaintively calling for its parents to come feed it. But then my attention turned to the ground below […]
Posted inGoat
Light bulbs and big government
The precise number of people who recently rallied in Washington, D.C., for a national “tea party” is hard to come by. Left-wing reports have it at less than a hundred thousand participants, while some right-wingers put it over a million. Whatever the count, it was refreshing that so many people were concerned about […]
Posted inRange
Taxing the logic of tribal health benefits
WASHINGTON – There is near universal agreement: the Indian Health Service needs more money. At the National Indian Health Board Consumer Conference last week several members of the U.S. Senate and House were critical of the historic under-funding of IHS. These were Democrats, Republicans, some representing Indian country constituents, others from districts with no reservations […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Serpentine Siamese Split
The cow that belonged to the aforementioned tongue didn’t fare very well except, perhaps, as carne asada. But a rather unusual pair of rattlesnakes is doing just fine after a 45-minute surgery at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson. The two snakes were found as one – conjoined just below the head – […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Bicycles, books and beer
How a man with no plan built a community around literature and social activism
Posted inGoat
Relocation is a loaded term
There has been little noise made about the EPA’s relocation of seven Navajo families living near the former Church Rock uranium mine in northwestern New Mexico. Scouring the Internet, I could only find one brief article in the Gallup Independent. The news was brought to my attention last week, when Cally Carswell and I met […]
Posted inWotr
Trapping is one tradition that ought to go
Every 20 years in Montana, more than a million bobcats, otters, wolverines, fishers, pine martens, otters, fox and other furry critters are exterminated from Montana’s forests and streams. Collateral damage includes the endangered Canada lynx, eagles and bears — not to mention all the dogs and cats unwittingly snared in traps. But a ballot initiative […]
Posted inWotr
Conservationists wrong to oppose wolf hunt
Wolves have recovered, and it’s time for more rational management
Posted inHeard Around the West
Animal Farm Gone Crazy
At first glance, it seemed like just another mundane story about horse massacres and the role they will play in starting the next American Revolution. Then we dug deeper and learned the details about the ex-CIA agent and his hog-tied co-worker, not to mention the duck-killing dog. Ultimately, we confronted the dark truth of the […]
Posted inRange
Exempting Native Americans from the mandate
There is growing consensus about a key element of health care reform: a requirement that you must buy health insurance. The idea is that the insurance pools would be less expensive if every American were included – especially younger, healthier workers who for a variety of reasons decide not to buy insurance. The reform proposals […]
Posted inWotr
If you want to support wildlife, support ranching
An old friend of mine once said, “Sometimes Wyoming people would rather fight than win.” He’s right, of course. Even though there are only about 500,000 of us and our state does feel more like a small town with long streets, and even if I don’t know you — though there’s a good chance that […]
Posted inGoat
Sen. Baucus’ healthcare plan
The political comedian Bill Maher this week told President Obama to act on behalf of the “70 percent of Americans who are not crazy” and go ahead with his agenda, instead of trying to please enough Republicans to make a bill bipartisan. The Democratic senator from Montana, Max Baucus, might heed this advice as well. […]