I never got over Hilt. It is as real to me now, when it no longer exists, as it was when I was 3 years old, or 6, or 12. I see it, sometimes, with an aching intensity that will not go away, so that the little valley beside Cottonwood Creek comes back to me […]
A ‘nature girl’ remembers a dying lumber town
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Tourist tales from the New West
I knew I was in trouble the first morning of our cruise. We were headed up the Columbia and Snake rivers on a Lewis and Clark bicentennial expedition, and this well-dressed widow sat down beside me at breakfast. Her diamond ring was the size of an unshelled peanut, and her hair matched the silver flatware […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Giant sequoias could get the ax
In a national monument, the Forest Service wants to cut trees to save them
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
How much is wilderness worth?
Utah’s anti-wilderness moves could cost it the outdoor industry’s allegiance
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Dear Friends
A new supporter Once a year, High Country News dedicates almost an entire issue to essays. We hope this issue gets stuffed into the backseat of a few cars for the summer road trip, tucked into backpacks, or packed in dry bags for a little reading on the river. We’ll be back with more news […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Essays for thought
For the past 33 years, High Country News has lived up to its name, focusing on the news. Though we’ve concentrated on the environment, we’ve also covered Western culture, politics and economics, because you can’t separate the environmental issues from the arenas in which they play out. Besides, the context is part of what makes […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Ground Zero
A near miss in the Craters of the Moon puts the fight for the land into perspective
Posted inWotr
Cheers for Arizona’s governor and a Hopi warrior
The successful effort by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to rename a Phoenix mountain after an American Indian woman killed in Iraq needn’t have turned into a nasty fight. Gov. Napolitano wanted to honor an Arizona citizen, Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a member of the Hopi Nation, because she was the first American woman to die in […]
Posted inWotr
Why I do what I do, the way that I do it
I hate corpo-jargon, the trying-to-be hip phrases that aren’t. But the first words in my mind as I pull off Quartzite, Arizona’s main drag into the gritty parking lot of Reader’s Oasis are: “I am definitely working outside the box.” The big-box bookstores, that is. Reader’s Oasis is a metal shed, a half-dozen tables, a […]
Posted inWotr
Let’s not succumb to the temptation of biopharming
It’s hard to take issue with a technology that might have been able to save my parents’ lives. But that’s what I’m going to do. I’m talking about biopharming, the process that makes medicine from crops. Take a corn plant or a tobacco plant; inject it with a protein-making gene from humans or animals; harvest […]
Posted inWotr
To restore the West, go big and go native
It’s always disconcerting to have a myth blown apart. Like when you find out your favorite sports star, who you know to be a morally upstanding person, abuses his wife. The world wobbles; food doesn’t taste as good; you just want to fall asleep and wake up when everything is back to normal. That’s what […]
Posted inWotr
The bittersweet comings and goings in a small town
Most schools have a Homecoming weekend. Red Lodge, Mont., celebrates a different kind of coming home, on Memorial Day. On the last weekend in May, snowplows finish clearing the 10,000-foot Beartooth Pass between Red Lodge and Cooke City. And unless blizzards close it right back up again, which happens with some regularity, people like to […]
Posted inWotr
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
In one of his 16 books on fire, historian Stephen Pyne wrote: “If fire were captured today, it would never make it past the federal regulatory agencies.” Letting fire run free is a huge deal; early man must have wondered if it was worth the trouble. Fire empowered our ancestors not just to cook food, […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Inside HCN
Radio High Country News has released the first of a three-part series on fire in the West. The series includes on-the-ground reports and interviews with the scientists, managers policy-makers and writers who are framing today’s debate over fire policy. Listen online at www.hcn.org/radio. Are animal-rights activists leading the environmental movement astray? Arizona writer Dave Gowdey […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Looking out for the little guys
From its roots as a scrappy, garage-band-style environmental group, the Paonia, Colorado-based Center for Native Ecosystems has become a voice for the kind of endangered species often overlooked by other conservation groups. The center has championed such unlikely species as Graham’s penstemon, a wildflower threatened by oil and gas development, the boreal toad and the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
A book big enough to make waves
Northern Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a big place with big oil reserves. And now it has a big photographic book that explores the collision of conservation and development there — a book that has created quite a stir in Washington, D.C. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, A Photographic […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Adopt a burro!
In your photo gallery, you picture a llama guarding sheep (HCN, 3/31/03: Springtime on the ranch). I have to offer an alternative suggestion! All you cowmen and especially sheepmen, facing losses from coyotes, consider placing a solitary burro in your flock or herd. Burros cost about one-tenth the price of a llama, if you were […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Revolution? What revolution?
Regarding your editorial, “Republicans wave guns, but where’s the butter?” (HCN, 4/14/03: Republicans wave guns, but where’s the butter?): This editorial emotionally bemoans “BLM and Forest Service lands being hammered by gas drilling,” “environmental laws being weakened,” “national monuments being squeezed” and “land that BLM and Forest Service are supposed to manage is being destroyed.” […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Mountain-bikers stink!
I am out walking, enjoying the peace and quiet, the beauty of the land around me, when all of a sudden I hear, “On your left!” and one or more bikers huff and puff their way around me, leaving the stink of their sweating bodies behind. My sense of peace is ruined by people too […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Bikes have never been legal in wilderness
As a former wilderness manager for the feds, I’d like to speak to the issue of bikes in wilderness areas (HCN, 3/3/03: Get off and walk — wilderness is for wildlife). Bicycles were never permitted in the National Wilderness Preservation System by the 1964 Wilderness Act or any subsequent designation legislation. It’s understandable, however, why […]