HCN BOARD MEETING The fall meeting of the High Country News Board of Directors, held in Missoula, Mont., focused on the rapidly changing world of publishing, especially the growing prominence of the Internet as a news source. Web master Paolo Bacigalupi walked board members through our Web site, hcn.org, and explained our strategy for turning […]
Dear friends
Posted inOctober 30, 2006: Peace Breaks Out In New Mexico's Forests
Peace Breaks Out In New Mexico’s Forests
Out of the angry thickets of the past, environmentalists and loggers cut a new path
Posted inWotr
These are my public lands, partner
“Somebody owns it,” my father said, sweeping his hand across the Pocono Mountains zipping by the windshield. I was a young boy when he told me this, and I can remember being puzzled by how someone could own a mountain. If you grew up in Pennsylvania as I did, you understood that just about everything […]
Posted inWotr
Self-styled conservatives are the cheapest generation
I was brought up to believe that we had a moral obligation to leave our corner of the world better off than we found it. In recent years, I am haunted by the notion that the people we have elected to represent us — many of them self-styled conservatives — may be the first in […]
Posted inWotr
The right way to be green
The midterm elections are approaching fast, and as usual the environment is considered a Democratic issue. I had no problem with that when I was fighting strip mines in Ohio in 1973; environmentalism was synonymous with leftist politics. In the early ’80s, when a friend told me someone named Dave Foreman was forming an environmental […]
Posted inWotr
When bison gawk back, it’s smart to back down
Each time I visit Yellowstone National Park, I watch people ignore park regulations (and common sense) that say you should keep a distance of at least 25 yards from a bison. It’s almost as if folks think they’re in a giant petting zoo. Maybe the video I saw once of a man being gored by […]
Posted inWotr
Character in politicians is vastly overrated
It seems that a Colorado candidate for Congress, Angie Paccione, really filed for personal bankruptcy in 2001,as, according to the administrative office of the U.S. Courts, did 1,452,029 other people. Why should anyone care? Because Marilyn Musgrave, the two-term Republican incumbent Paccione is running against, has informed the world about the bankruptcy in a radio […]
Posted inWotr
Feeling crowded around here? It is!
One statistic jumped out of the morning paper and jolted my brain. The news was that America’s population will hit 300 million sometime during the third week of October. But it wasn’t that landmark figure that jarred my morning reverie. It was this: The United States population has grown from 200 million to 300 million […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
What we love will save us
In troubled political times, go to the mountains.
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Heard around the West
THE BORDER Life in southern Texas can get pretty boring if you’re a 20-something National Guardsman sent to patrol the dusty border with Mexico. Three guardsmen recently found life so dreary that they picked up their weapons, jumped in their vehicle and headed out for a joyride. They failed to find much action until they […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
A deliberate life in the Rockies
If you’re feeling assailed by civilization — its cell phones, computers and telemarketers — David Petersen has an antidote for you. But be forewarned: It’s strong medicine. It’s taken Petersen more than two decades to acquire his hard-earned lessons, and the going hasn’t always been smooth. In 1981, he and his wife, Caroline, left behind […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Dry-hiking in a desert awash with history
At 61, mountaineer and academic David Roberts can’t resist the chance to rack up another first. Comb Ridge is a jutting sandstone escarpment that runs from Kayenta, Ariz., to Blanding, Utah. One hundred miles long from end to end, the ridge was one of the few remaining hikes that no one had completed. But Roberts […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Brave ‘yellowbellies’ served the West well
During World War II, more than 250 American men — mostly Quakers and Mennonites — stood up for their pacifist beliefs, declared themselves conscientious objectors, and volunteered for a different risky service. They became pioneer smokejumpers, parachuting onto the front lines of wildfires in the Rockies. Smokejumping had only been invented in 1939, and it […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
When a gas pipeline blows, you get out fast
My family and I live in Clark, Wyo., on the Montana-Wyoming border. I used to tell people that I lived on the edge of Yellowstone country. Nowadays, though, I admit that I live in an industrial zone — the kind of place where things can get dangerous and sometimes go very wrong. Early in the […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
No wheels in wilderness
Greg Hanscom penned one of the more eloquent and poignant discourses that I have ever encountered on limiting access to mountain bikes in wilderness areas in his Sept. 18 editorial. As a fellow longtime mountain bike rider, I must say that he is not just speaking for himself on this issue. Joe Oliver Carmel Valley, […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Hikers and bikers unite!
I began mountain biking in Santa Cruz in 1984, riding in the Coast Range from Big Sur to the Bay Area. In the years that followed, I was baffled and dismayed by the rancor of the hiker/biker conflict. For me, and the friends I rode with, mountain biking was simply another way to explore the […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
A taste of your own medicine
In response to the Sept. 18 cover story, “Going Big,” just hop on your mountain bike and pedal on a well-known 4×4 outback road, where the four-wheelers exceed the speed limits, kick up dust, mud, rocks, and try to enjoy the same road with your bike. This experience is the same for any hiker in […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Bikers must police our own
Patrick Farrell’s Sept. 18 cover story, “Going Big,” presented a fairly accurate picture of the current challenges facing the mountain-bike community. As an active mountain-bike trail advocate since 1989, I have witnessed the gradual acceptance of mountain bikes as part of the trail equation by land agencies and most trail users. The upstart downhill/ freeride […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Bikers have blown it
I’d like to answer the rhetorical question on the cover of the Sept. 18 issue: “Mountain bikers, long vilified as unruly renegades, are finally winning respect — and access to more trails. But does a new generation of gonzo riders threaten all that?” My response is: I certainly hope so. Nothing pictured on the cover, […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
Stop locking bikes out
Although mountain bikers are essentially silent, as well as not motorized, not polluting, muscle-powered, and most importantly, appreciative of Nature and wild places, environmentalists like HCN Editor Greg Hanscom have from the beginning thumbed their noses at us. In his Sept. 18 editorial, Hanscom says we “should stay out of wilderness politics,” because there ought […]