Whenever I feel the need for a strong dose of opinion, I drive up the street to Reedy’s Service Station. There, any time between 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., I’ll find three generations of the Reedy family and their friends, drinking coffee and swapping stories. They’re always happy to tell you what they think about […]
Pieces of the economic puzzle
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
The Gear Biz
The West has become the nation’s playground, but is there a future here for the folks who make our outdoor toys?
Posted inWotr
A corporation’s deadly legacy lives on
“It was a Superfund site,” my friend Nina told me, joking about a house she and her husband nearly bought in the crunched real estate market of the greater Yellowstone area. At first they loved the house and its affordable price. Then an inspector informed them that the building was full of asbestos-laden vermiculite from […]
Posted inWotr
Teddy Roosevelt would have put his foot down
When the young Theodore Roosevelt went West to become a cattle rancher in the late 1800s, he was impressed by the flint of the Western character. In his travels through South Dakota and the Rocky Mountains, he met mountain men and cowboys and Indians so independent and strong-willed that even the robuster-than-robust Roosevelt confessed he […]
Posted inWotr
Culture shock on the Range
When the movie Open Range came to my western Colorado town, my sweetie and I made a beeline for the theater. We waited in line for popcorn with a good number of other folks: old-timers and Forest Service employees and their spouses. They apparently hadn’t had enough open range by the end of the long […]
Posted inWotr
A grizzly attack that was bound to happen
One of the most egotistical notions humans have is that we can “commune” with unpredictable wild animals. News headlines over the last couple of weeks have revealed the depth of our folly. During Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas nightclub act, a tiger turned on trainer Roy Horn. Doctors still don’t know if he will survive. […]
Posted inWotr
Colorado’s thirsty suburbs get the state into trouble
Denver’s southern suburbs have a rich, new-car smell. Emboldened by information-technology employers, Douglas County during the ‘90s was the nation’s fastest-growing county. It also ranked among the nation’s elite in per capita income, education and other measures of affluence. In short, this region of sleek and slinky subdivisions looks and feels an awful lot like […]
Posted inWotr
A South Dakota hero has a great fall
I was probably the only 3-year-old in South Dakota to own a “Janklow Sucks” t-shirt during Bill Janklow’s second of four terms as governor. Janklow served two terms from 1978 to 1986 and two more from 1994 to 2002; in 2002 we elected him to represent our state — which has fewer people than metro […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Ready, set, vote
George Bush and Howard Dean aren’t the only ones gearing up for the 2004 election — grassroots organizers across the country are getting ready, too. A coalition called America Votes plans to link grassroots groups to pump up election-day turnout. Sixteen organizations, ranging from the AFL-CIO and ACORN to the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
In the field with fire
Federal spending on fire suppression is wildly out of control, forests are increasingly unhealthy — and everyone seems to have an opinion about how to fix the problem. A Season of Fire, by Seattle-based journalist Douglas Gantenbein, is one of the latest titles about fire in the West, and refreshingly, he doesn’t glamorize firefighters or […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Calendar
The San Juan Mountains Association will host a conference, Bridges to Cultural Stewardship: Building Respect for People and Places, at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., on Oct. 24-26. The symposium will explore strategies for protecting the region’s diverse heritage and resources. Visit www.sjma.org or call 970-375-9272 for more information. If you can’t make it […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Back down the fireline
In a new book, Fire and Ashes, author John N. Maclean leads readers through three sweaty-palmed stories about human encounters with wildfire. Maclean returns to the ground his father, Norman Maclean, covered in the 1992 book, Young Men and Fire. He joins the last living survivor of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana to […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Energy bill is no good for fish
Your August 18 news story, “Energy bill will likely boost drilling in the Rockies,” characterizes last year’s (and now this year’s) Senate energy bill as good for fish and fish passage. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The article incorrectly says that the energy bill passed again by the Senate “would force hydropower companies to […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Chalk it up to bolt dolts
Mike Ryan’s defense of rock climbing (HCN, 7/7/03: Invasion of the rock jocks) — that “climbers aren’t just dirtbags … it’s mainstream now” and that they now are “doctors and lawyers” (and such, I must add) who by God “drive SUVs and have credit cards” is telling: telling us it’s an elitist avaricious capitalism that […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Don’t demonize climbers
After reading “Invasion of the Rock Jocks” (HCN, 7/7/03: Invasion of the Rock Jocks), one might conclude that rock climbing impacts the environment on the scale of coal mining or desert off-road races. The article does highlight some real issues, but the generalizations are a little too sweeping, the values and motivations of climbers are […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
National monument back under attack
In southern Utah, local officials are escalating their fight against the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On Aug. 25, Kane and Garfield County commissioners and two state legislators sent a letter listing their grievances with the monument to Utah State Bureau of Land Management Director Sally Wisely and national BLM Director Kathleen Clarke, among others. The […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Pygmy-owl may lose protection
Arizona’s cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl may no longer be endangered, according to an August ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The three-judge panel concluded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to prove that 18 pygmy owls in Arizona are distinct from a much larger population of owls in Sonora, Mexico. In […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Urban planners look to farmland to feed industrial growth
Portland — the darling of urban planners — is bursting at the seams, and the growth is forcing policy-makers to expand the region’s prized urban growth boundary. Metro, the agency responsible for keeping development within the boundary, already added an unprecedented 18,600 acres for residential and industrial use last year. But the agency says it […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Contamination uncovered at Energy office
The toxic heavy metal beryllium has mysteriously cropped up in a U.S. Department of Energy complex in North Las Vegas, and investigators believe it may have come from a 1965 nuclear reactor explosion some 85 miles away. In March of 2002, a contract worker at the complex was diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease, which can […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Follow-up
Dig deep, fellow taxpayers: On Oct. 1, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund — a fund, fed by corporate polluters, which cleans up some of the nation’s most contaminated places — officially ran out of money (HCN, 12/9/02: Life in the wasteland). Now, taxpayers will foot the cleanup bill for everything from toxic dumps to defunct […]