September’s massive flood devastated the front range town of Lyons, and recovery efforts there and in other affected communities are ongoing – even as a partial government shutdown threatened to pull National Guard members from essential work repairing roads and bridges. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s Eric Skalac talks […]
Colorado
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason’s four-year road trip
Bringing poetry to an entire state, one county at a time.
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
BLM teams with researchers to protect midget faded rattlesnake
Summer snake hunting in western Colorado is a race against the sun. The reptiles emerge early from their dens to soak up dawn’s dull warmth. But once the hillsides hum with heat, they’ll split for the shadows. “We better get going,” says biologist Josh Parker of Georgia’s Clayton State University when I meet his small […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Economy, distrust complicate allocation of tribal settlement money
When the Obama administration announced in April that it would pay 41 tribes some $1 billion to settle a lawsuit over federal mismanagement of trust funds, many saw it as a sort of stimulus package for Indian Country — a chance to invest in long-term development and infrastructure, such as schools, clinics and roads. “The […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Farmers agree to tax those who deplete groundwater
Amid drought and climate change in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, farmers vote for a new approach to rein in their overpumping of groundwater.
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Do subdivisions designed for conservation actually help wildlife?
For millennia, Colorado’s Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn’t occur until the last half of the 20th century. That’s when the big ranches began to […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West […]
Posted inWotr
Saying good-bye to the ranch
All my childhood memories take me back to my family’s guest ranch in a remote area of northwest Colorado. Without this place, what would I have to remember? There are the good memories of riding through uncut hay meadows and racing toy boats down our backyard stream, all set beneath the looming peaks of the […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
County kickbacks
Though Westerners tend to idealize frontier independence, rural county governments often rely on Uncle Sam. Federal payment programs meant to compensate counties for lost cash from tax-exempt public lands distributed about $900 million nationwide in 2009. One of these programs — the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) — was barely renewed in […]
Posted inWotr
A wild area gets a reprieve
Lovers of wild open spaces in northwest Colorado recently received some long-awaited great news. The Bureau of Land Management’s Little Snake Field Office announced that it would close 77,000 acres of the magnificent Vermillion Basin to oil and gas development. The agency’s decision came as a result of a well-publicized public process. Nonetheless, Moffat County […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Stewardship award for HCN
Stewardship award for HCNHigh Country News is this year’s recipient of the Jane Silverstein Ries Award. The award, presented annually since 1983 by the Colorado Chapter of the Association of Landscape Architects, honors “a person, group or organization that demonstrates a pioneering sense of awareness and stewardship of land-use values in the Rocky Mountain region.” […]
Posted inOctober 26, 2009: The newest Westerners
Refugees unsettle the West
Meatpacking, Ramadan and other cultural collisions in Colorado
Posted inWotr
Blame it all on my crazy biology teacher
With fall in the air, I get this funny feeling that my homework isn’t done. It is true I was one of “those” students who tested patience, strained policies, broke rules and spent quality time on a chair in the hallway. I guess it was a natural aptitude, like yodeling. My parents urged me to […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35
A home of mysteries and restless souls
Posted inWotr
One man’s salt must not burden another man’s water
The era of massive federal reclamation projects is long over, yet a changing climate will demand more work from less water. And so a new movement — watershed management — has quietly taken the place of building the big dams. Visit the tiny town of Mancos near Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado to […]