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 […]
Winning the West: HCN @ the DNC
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 […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Dear friends
WELCOME, COBUNPaonia native Cobun Keegan is HCN’s summer high-school intern. Before he heads off to Colorado Springs to begin his freshman year at Colorado College, he’s getting some reporting and general publication experience with us. He hasn’t picked a major yet, but is interested in environmental studies, political science, international relations and linguistics. In May, […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
If you build it, will they come?
Big Water (nee Glen Canyon City), Utah, sits west of Lake Powell in the middle of the desert. It’s not the most obvious place for a town — in fact, there wasn’t anything there at all until a man camp for dam workers was constructed in 1950. In the 1980s, it was reborn as a […]
Posted inWotr
Going backwards: building an oil refinery in South Dakota
In South Dakota, politicians and business leaders are cheering a massive oil refinery planned for the state’s southeast corner. If built, it will be the first oil refinery constructed in the United States in more than 30 years. There are, of course, good reasons why oil refineries aren’t being built anymore. In South Dakota, however […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Under the asphalt a rumor thrives
This summer, with the crack of Indy’s bullwhip still echoing through theatres, it’s natural to indulge in a little romanticism about buried treasure. Even when — or especially when — said treasure lies below a worn-out asphalt parking lot in downtown Grand Junction, Colo., within easy reach of jackhammer and trackhoe. The booty in question […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Living deep in place
Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic AlaskaSeth Kantner240 pages, hardcover: $28.Milkweed Editions, 2008. Shopping for Porcupine is a book that weaves between worry and worship, to borrow a phrase from its author, Seth Kantner. The autobiographical essays collected here offer a glimpse of Kantner’s life in his native north Alaska, portraying a harsh landscape […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Another kind of hero
The Legend of Colton H. BryantAlexandra Fuller202 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Penguin Press, 2008. On Valentine’s night in 2006, Colton Bryant fell to his death off a gas rig in the snowy, windswept vastness of Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin. To most of us, his death was as anonymous as his life; he was just another roughneck […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
An unlikely Shangri-la
Little room is left for new development at the West’s established resort towns, so entrepreneurs are turning second-tier ski hills into private enclaves for the jet set. But will the new resorts fly?