If you’re attending the Democratic National Convention, and you can get past the Stormtrooper-looking police in riot gear, and past the people selling Obama buttons for $3 a pop, and you can keep plugging along even after running across the guy riding his bicycle with a giant flag reading: “You are going to Hell”, or […]
Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less?
Posted inDnc 08
The Las Vegas of Politics
Denver, this week, feels a bit like Vegas. Okay, the lights aren’t so bright. And I haven’t run into any slot machines, yet. Or, for that matter, giant fountains spewing water into the dry desert air. Still. You know how, along the Vegas strip, there’s guys flipping those little cards at you, emblazoned with pics […]
Posted inDnc 08
The entrepreneurs
A crowd stood at the corner of Blake Street and the 16th Street Mall on Monday, flanking a pushcart overflowing with t-shirts. A painfully cheery young man named Toby wore one that was blazoned with the Qdoba Mexican Grill cartoon cactus. On the front it said “Burritos for Obama.” Other t-shirts offered up quesadillas and […]
Posted inDnc 08
Walking for Obama
This summer, I walked in the Paonia Cherry Days parade on the Fourth of July— past many of my former classmates, teachers and community—carrying a hand-painted “Obama’08” sign. The experience filled me with excitement and determination, not to mention a keen sense of my own vulnerability in this small, mostly Republican community. I spent most […]
Posted inAugust 25, 2008: Hot Wheels
McCain: T.R. or W?
The GOP nominee often invokes Teddy Roosevelt, but his conservation record is closer to a more recent president’s
Posted inDnc 08
WELCOME TO DENVER!
Downtown Denver, Aug. 25, where there are nearly as many journalists as there are riot-gear-clad cops. The High Country News team has just arrived. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Posted inWotr
The NRA needs someone like me
Like every hunter worthy of the name, I want to protect our hunting heritage so men and women many years from now can experience the same love, awe and respect for wild animals that I’ve been privileged to know. But the two bedrock requirements for that to happen are the health of animal populations and […]
Posted inGoat
Winning the West: HCN @ the DNC
What’s a Colorado journalist to do when, for the first time in a century, the Democratic National Convention comes to your state? The first impulse of the newshound: Go to Denver, of course, and get yourself a scoop (not to mention free food). Then comes that slightly bitter aftertaste when you realize that there are […]
Posted inWotr
The way it looks in rural Oregon in this shaky economic world
A few years ago, local realtors in Joseph, a town of 1,000 in northeastern Oregon, were clamoring for houses and properties to put on the market; now, “for sale” signs are everywhere. Yet real estate deals in Wallowa County are stalled because the boom times in Bend, Ore., have come to a grinding halt. Four-dollar […]
Posted inArticles
Braving the political winds
EPA official Robbie Roberts took a stand against unbridled energy development
Posted inGoat
The Roan lease price was high, but not high enough
The auctioning of the Roan Plateau’s nearly 55,000 acres of gas leases netted a record $114 million last week, as the BLM put “the most biodiverse lands in Colorado” up for sale. The highest per-acre price was $11,800, for leases below the rim of the Roan; the average was about $2100 per acre. Unless a […]
Posted inGoat
Smoke Trails
Have you noticed? Each year with the coming of fire season comes also a slew of guest commentaries and editorials in western newspapers promoting the idea that the current fire, smoke and destruction are the result of environmentalists’ lawsuits which have locked up the forests resulting in a build up of brush and tees that […]
Posted inWotr
Democrats borrow from Madison Avenue
It’s like a supercharged dream: You find yourself sliding into the driver’s seat of a sleek, brand new car. Slap it into gear and you zoom ahead, through a spectacular wild-looking Western landscape. You take the curves faster than seemed possible, maybe around Utah’s eerie redrock spires, or between Rocky Mountain snowcaps, past waterfalls and […]
Posted inGoat
Kiss your tail goodbye, desert pupfish
The Bush administration is preparing to deliver a sucker punch to the Endangered Species Act. A new proposal would hand over the responsibility of protecting endangered species from federal projects like dams and highways to the federal agencies themselves. Under current law, agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Corps of Engineers […]
Posted inGoat
Celebrating local history
Organizing events is not one of my strong points; it’s work enough to organize words. Nonetheless, for most of the past 14 years, I’ve been more or less in charge of Anza Day in Poncha Springs, Colorado. Actually, it’s such a small event that it should be called “Anza Two Hours,” but it still takes […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Two weeks in the West
From sprawling estates in Colorado’s tony Roaring Fork Valley to parched ranches on Montana’s high plains, conservation easements protect millions of private acres of open space in the West. Next to all that, a 2002 decision by Johnson County, Wyo., to terminate an easement it held on the 1,043-acre Meadowood Ranch just east of Buffalo […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Of populists and political fusion
The last time the Democratic Party held its national convention in Denver was exactly a century ago, in 1908. That was also the first time the Democrats convened west of Kansas City. The presidential nominee that year was no novelty, though; for the third time, William Jennings Bryan, once known as “the boy orator of […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Downtown an old – and new – way to live
The sun rises over the mountains and floods my room with light. I lie in bed and listen to the cooing of conspiring pigeons on the roof. I’ve lately moved from Cody, Wyo., to Salmon, Idaho. Cody, like other towns surrounding Yellowstone National Park, has become an expensive place to live, especially for a freelance […]