To listen to the audio interview you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed and Javascript enabled. Lisa Jones talks about Northern Arapaho horse whisperer and healer Stanford Addison, the subject of her book, Broken.
Wind River revelations
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Got warriors?
A quadriplegic horse gentler helps reservation boys through their dangerous teens
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A conflict of values
Yellowstone and the Snowmobile: Locking Horns over National Park UseMichael J. Yochim328 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University Press of Kansas, 2009. Even as another winter recedes, Mike Yochim’s new book on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park will remain in season. It’s an instant classic — the first comprehensive examination of a notorious nationwide controversy, packed with facts […]
Posted inGoat
Despite vandalism, road stays closed
Back in mid-March, I wrote about a wonderful development on one of my favorite local dog-walking routes. The federal Bureau of Land Management had blocked motor vehicles from this half-mile stretch of old bad road along the Arkansas River just east of Salida. I predicted that the closure sign would get knocked down, the blocking […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The collected Sierra Nevada
Meteorologist Hal Klieforth has spent his life exploring and documenting California’s ‘Range of Light’
Posted inWotr
Suffering and solace
“He died just like that. He didn’t suffer,” the woman said, speaking of a deceased pet. “Not like your cat.” I was stunned by her words: cruel, thoughtless and dead wrong. But she wasn’t the only one to make such a pronouncement. In the months my husband and I provided hospice for our tabby cat […]
Posted inGoat
When it blows, the snow goes
Last night, I flew home to Colorado to find that my car had changed color. During my weekend away, a wild dust-and-rain storm had rolled over Grand Junction, covering my car — and the rest of town, it seemed — with bright orange splotches of desert dirt. “Yep, half of Utah blew through here,” said […]
Posted inRay
Idaho-style reality TV
Just a quick grin here. Rocky Barker, a veteran Idaho Statesman writer and friend of mine, plays with this news: … The Idaho Department of Commerce is planning on picking a Seattle family for an all-expense-paid trip to Idaho for fishing, rafting, hiking, horseback riding and the like — in exchange for (the family) starring […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
It’s the economy — and growth and the environment — stupid!
Just over a year ago, I traveled around Arizona’s copper country, talking to folks about the new mining boom. I learned that, thanks to soaring copper prices, the gaping pit mines were bound to get even bigger and deeper, along with their attendant environmental costs. Not everyone was pleased, but most saw it as inevitable: […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A Paonia love story
In March, we hired a new senior advertising representative, David Anderson. With 20 years of experience in marketing and sales and an upbeat personality, he helps fill our advertising pages, which contribute an essential chunk to our annual budget. David enjoys golf, live music, and spending time with wife Stevi and young son Skylar. The […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The vitality of language
My husband and I have volunteered at a raptor rehabilitation center for years, and when we decided to adopt a toddler, the center’s staff threw us a baby shower on the lawn outside the kestrel’s cage. They presented our new daughter, Maia, with bird-embossed T-shirts and a stuffed toy turkey vulture. We ourselves received a […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Renewing a battered land
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie LandscapeRichard Manning 238 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2009. In 1874, when most of the West was still held in common, a simple invention — barbed wire — pushed the region toward a long-held national ideal: privatization. With amazing swiftness, ranchers began to enclose their lands and […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The Growth Machine is Broken
On Phoenix’s fringe, a huge piece of state land could become a smart-growth playground, or the same old sprawl.
Posted inHeard Around the West
And window seats for all
Thanks to geolocators the size of a dime — small enough for a bird to bear — scientists have documented that songbirds such as thrushes can cover as many as 311 miles in a day. One female martin flew an incredible journey of 4,660 miles in only 13 days, all the way from the Amazon […]
Posted inArticles
When good times go bad
A video journey through Phoenix’s unusually busy food banks
Posted inGoat
Of Gods and Sea Kittens
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world — the paragon of animals! ~ William Shakespeare In the Sacramento Bee today, Republican Rep. George Radanovich of California’s 19th District accused environmentalists […]
Posted inGoat
After the crash
The housing/growth boom of the last decade was a wild ride for the West, feeling a bit like a euphoric all-night meth binge. Only the drug in this case was easy credit and an unshakable belief that the good times could never end. Nearly three years after the housing bubble reached its bursting point — […]
Posted inWotr
The persistence of a golden time in the West
In the evening a strange thing happened; the 20 families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. — John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Long before Tom Joad and his family set out for […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
So, this bobcat walks into a bar…
A different breed of cat starred in a barroom saga in Cottonwood, Ariz., that’s “sure to become legend,” reports the Arizona Republic. The tale begins with a woman stopping her car at 10:30 p.m., after thinking she’d hit something. She had — a bobcat — which proceeded to pounce on her and rake her face […]