After more than a decade of mild winters, we residents of this high-altitude town in southern Colorado got a dose of the genuine article. Not since “Remember December,” when it snowed every day in December 1983, had anyone seen this much snow. But stories from old-timers, those remnant miners who stayed on here long after […]
A hard winter makes you think
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Thinking like a fish
Chad Hanson used to wonder what music trout would listen to if they could: Brookies might like bluegrass, browns might prefer classical, while rainbows, he thought, would dig grunge tunes from the Pacific Northwest. But he was wrong, he learns. And as Hanson looks for an answer to what might seem like a silly question, […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Reasons to stay
“Wyoming,” Charlotte Bacon writes, “made you feel that an articulated reason to stay was a good thing to develop.” In Bacon’s new novel, Split Estate, that nebulous feeling drives Arthur King to leave New York City with his two teenagers, Cam and Celia, after his wife, Laura, commits suicide. He rashly moves the family west […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
The park service has the power
The “Unnatural Preservation” article, like nearly everything else in HCN, is generally excellent (HCN, 2/04/08). However, the authors miss, I think, an important element of the National Park Service management philosophy, and thus distort their conclusions about the agency. While the Park Service still holds onto the general thrust of the policy toward its natural […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Managing complexity
I feel the issues in “Unnatural Preservation” were presented in a very dichotomous way, that is, scientists versus managers, now versus never, all versus nothing (HCN, 2/04/08). Yet there are plenty of examples where we are addressing the gray area by trying different things at different scales, creating multidisciplinary collaborations, and envisioning alternative future landscapes. […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Higher wages and health hazards
The prospect of “high wage” mining and energy jobs is one reason Western communities might welcome extractive industries (HCN, 2/18/08). Indeed, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data confirm that mining and construction pay well, averaging $20 per hour, while workers in the “Leisure and Hospitality” industry make just $10 per hour. So does the […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Pinko politicians
“Havana goes West” by Nathaniel Hoffman felt like something out of a socialist trade journal (HCN, 3/03/08). In Cuba today, no more than three people are allowed to meet on the street or they can be locked up by the police. Nobody changes jobs and nobody changes where they live. Opposition writers and journalists are […]
Posted inArticles
Where the rubber leaves the road
Updated April 17, 2008 As of July 1, you might want to think twice about driving your ATV off designated trails in Colorado. That’s when HB 1069 – signed by Gov. Bill Ritter, D, on March 20 – goes into effect. In what might be the strongest attempt yet to keep off-road vehicles from ripping […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Heard Around the West
WYOMING Spring really is around the corner, says longtime “Far Afield” columnist Bert Raynes in the Jackson Hole News&Guide. With keen eyes, he’s observed some of the season’s earliest manifestations: “Coyotes in pairs and in groups … Ravens in mock pursuits. Bald eagles carrying nest materials, horned and great gray owls calling, dippers in noisy, […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
The legacy of the 10th Mountain men
South of Vail, Colo., in a mountain meadow framed by 14,000-foot peaks, deep snow hides the ruined foundations of Camp Hale. In the winters of 1943 and 1944, 15,000 men equipped with rifles and skis swarmed the surrounding terrain, training for alpine combat in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. When I drove by in February, […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
The loneliness of the redneck environmentalist
I don’t have that many friends. I’m not a bad guy; I call my mother, eat my broccoli, and pay my taxes. But I’m a country-music-listening, PBR-drinking, rusty-Jeep-driving good ol’ boy – and I love the environment. I grew up rural in the Rocky Mountain West and Midwest, where farming and ranching still reign. It […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
A message to our grandchildren
‘The lifetime crusade of your days must be to develop a new energy ethic to sustain life on earth.’
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
My Crazy Brother
A personal look at the West’s suicidal tendencies
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Wyoming’s day in the spin
Talk about surprising: The Democratic presidential candidates actually paid some attention to Wyoming. With only 522,830 residents, according to last summer’s Census Bureau estimate, Wyoming has the smallest population of all 50 states. Furthermore, no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the Equality State in 44 years, not since the Lyndon B. Johnson landslide of 1964, […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Native Intelligence
Lili Singer turns Californians on to backyard bounty
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
3:10 to Baghdad
To prepare for combat halfway around the world, the military looks to Yuma’s desert laboratory
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Conservation easement conundrums
Colorado and other Western states crack down on abusers
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Two weeks in the West
Remember when that little shack down the road (every Western town has them – real rustic “fixer-uppers” oozing “charm,” “character” and mouse feces) sold for a few hundred grand? Well, today even spanking-new McMansions in some Western burgs won’t fetch that kind of money, thanks to an increasingly uncertain housing market and banks’ stiffer lending […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Dear friends
POETRY CORNER We usually focus on hard-hitting news about the West, not sonnets and blank verse. But to lighten things up, we thought we’d share a couple of poems we recently received from readers. Subscriber Susanne Twight-Alexander of Eugene, Ore., sent us verses inspired by her reading of Home Ground. The book, edited by Barry […]
Posted inMarch 31, 2008: My Crazy Brother
Breaking the silence of suicide
Why is High Country News writing about mental illness and suicide? Many of you are probably asking yourselves that question right about now. After all, suicide has nothing to do with public lands, natural resources, endangered wildlife or environmentalism. And of course it has nothing to do with Western culture. Or does it? The West’s […]