How do we resemble our fellow Westerners – the black bears? Let me count some of the ways. We like to share dessert. Near Ketchum, Idaho, a 225-pounder broke into a home, opened the freezer and pulled out half a gallon of rocky road ice cream, reports the Idaho Express. When the home’s residents saw […]
Communities
Utah town goes ‘U.N. free’
Controversial law highlights growing culture clash in Utah’s land of Dixie
Neighbors get nasty in New Mexico
Is Deirdre Wolf a martyr or a menace?
Heard around the West
One hundred and ninety million years ago, give or take a few millennia, a meat-eating dinosaur walked to an oasis in a place now close to Vernal, Utah, and bent down for a drink. The 12-foot-tall beast was heavy, and its clawed, three-toed feet sank deeply into what is now wonderfully preserved sandstone rock. Scores […]
Disappearing cowboys get exposure
Each spring, photographer Adam Jahiel leaves his home in northeast Wyoming and treks to the remotest corners of the Great Basin to photograph cowboys on their annual roundups. The seasonal journey has become a 10-year personal quest. Jahiel, whose photos have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic among others, says he is […]
Heard around the West
Oh, Smokey Bear, what have they done to you now? Smokey has a new day job. If you visit the lobby of the Forest Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., you can see the agency’s famous spokesbear, looking, perhaps, like one of the bureaucrats upstairs. The plump bear lounges at a rolltop desk, his feet crossed […]
Heard around the West
Washington, D.C., satirist Mark Russell came to Cody, Wyo., for a fund raiser recently and found so much to poke fun at, he had 700 people in tears from laughing so hard, says Buzzy Hassrick in the Cody Enterprise. All of his material, Russell swore, came from reading the weekly Enterprise, an effort that took […]
Out of the woods, blithe spirit
Oh my! Oh dear! Imagine … 20,000 hippies. Not doing a lick of work. Messing up meadows like animals. Befouling streams like animals. Eating, sleeping, defecating like animals. Fornicating like bunny animals, thumping bongos, tooting flutes, gang-singing old Donovan songs, dancing around without a care in their heads like Jenna Bush in a cowboy bar, […]
Luxury homes torched in Tucson
The fires follow a string of similar arsons in Phoenix
A maverick mayor takes on sprawl
Salt Lake’s Rocky Anderson fights the ‘highways first’ establishment
Heard around the West
With fast-growing lawns in the West sucking down immense amounts of water, Andrew McKean of Helena, Mont., passes on two apropos comments. The first is from University of Utah political scientist Daniel McCool: “Utah doesn’t have a water problem; Utah has a Kentucky bluegrass problem.” The second comes from the side of a bus spotted […]
University wolf study raises hackles
UTAH The Utah Farm Bureau Federation has a bone to pick with Robert Schmidt’s wildlife management class at Utah State University. The class recently studied the biological and economic effects of a hypothetical wolf population in Utah. But when the class took its findings public, the Bureau accused the students of being “pro-wolf” and said […]
Indian rock art under the drill?
MONTANA Crow Indian historian Howard Boggess believes the rock art that graces the sandstone cliffs of Weatherman Draw marks the historic “Valley of the Shields” as a “place of peace” where chiefs and warriors retreated for vision quests. The art likely represents a multitude of ethnic groups who traveled through this historic migratory corridor in […]
Surprise! Boise votes for open space
Support for tax levy breaks an Idaho tradition
A seminal sprawl fight ends in compromise
A historic Arizona ranch will become a retirement community
Heard around the West
Redi Kilowatt has seen the light – and it’s a green one. Once the hyper-kinetic spokesbolt for the electric utility industry, Redi recently preached to the Los Angeles Times. Though still flashing a happy-face grin, these days Redi is decidedly cranky. The power mascot says he was forced to come out of retirement at age […]
A sand-brown world
… and the tourists in the curio shop not knowing what to say for once in their lives, but feeling the ground rolling beneath them, experience something most of them won’t see in a lifetime, up on the shelf the kachina dolls, those little gods of beneficence who’ve stood there so long they’re mad about […]
Takings legislation cracks Oregon’s green foundation
Rural landowners say government is regulating them to death
Heard around the West
James Watt is positively basking in nostalgia these days. For those who don’t recall his bumpy years in Washington, D.C., Watt was the former Interior Department secretary under President Reagan, who pushed for energetic energy development on all public lands. When The Denver Post caught up with Watt recently, he was delighted to talk about […]
Finding home
We were all outside watching the sunset from the casita, which had a high view of the city. From there, the “big picture” was not abstract. It was real, tangible, visible – we could just make out the Burger King sign towering beyond the border fence. The sun was blood red, and then the whole […]
