When I arrived in 1976, Deadwood, S.D., was 100 years old and still a living gold camp. I was 22, married and fresh out of suburban Minneapolis. Deadwood felt like home from the moment I set foot here. It wasn’t an easy place to live. You weren’t considered a local until you made it through […]
Communities
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Score one for local control
For awhile it seemed as if one of the most potent weapons available to local counties and towns in Colorado would be ripped out of their hands. Conservative legislators and water developers wanted to gut state law 1041, which allows local communities to develop stringent land-use regulations to control everything from water projects to airport […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Just a little advice
JUST A LITTLE ADVICE A county commissioner in Colorado thinks he can help newcomers adjust to the rural parts of Larimer County. John Clarke has written a seven-page primer, The Code of the West, which includes some useful tips. About utilities: even cellular phones won’t work in all areas; Mother Nature: expansive soils can buckle […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Arid art
Arid Art An Englishman from Cornwall in the west of England, Tony Foster is fascinated by the American West’s wilderness of eroded rocks and deserts, including Death Valley in California and the slickrock onion domes of Utah’s canyonlands. An exhibit of his latest work, Arid Lands, Watercolor Diaries of Journeys across Deserts, can be seen […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
What does the West need to know?
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. In a burst of energy early this century, land-grant universities sent extension agents to America’s rural counties. Their mission: to modernize and civilize those counties by teaching the latest in breeding cows, […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
What is cooperative extension?
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. The West’s extension agents cover some ground: They counsel Colorado wheat farmers whose crops are being nibbled by antelope, broadcast advice […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Playing politics or helping the range?
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Back in 1978, ranchers around the West felt the first tremors of grazing reform. Under legal pressure from environmentalists, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management found much of its rangeland in bad […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Talking ranching through its bleakest hour
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Reno, Nev. – The hall of the University of Nevada’s College of Agriculture is lined with dusty black-and-white photographs of former professors, peering knowingly from below their cowboy hats. Hudson Glimp seems […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Helping a busted mining town back to its feet
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Anaconda, Mont. – Rose Nyman is wearing an apron and shuttling back and forth between the kitchen, where she has a lasagna in the oven, and the dining room, where she pours […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Taking a stand for New Mexico’s small farmers
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Edmund Gomez worked for years on the Dulce, Colo., ranch his great-grandfather homesteaded in 1887. When his family sold the ranch […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
My God! Healthy trees!
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Cottonwood, Idaho – Sister Carol Ann Wassmuth of St. Gertrude’s Monastery wants to be reincarnated as the monastery porcupine so she can keep an eye on the progress of the 1,000 acres […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Montana’s outback goes on-line
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. A midwife in Wolf Point needs to know the latest practice for treating pregnant women with allergies. A Native American high school senior in Cut Bank wants to know what a laser […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
‘It’s great to ask geeks for advice’
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Livingston, Mont. – Dana Gleason, an avid skier, thought he knew how to make a great backpack. In 1985 he founded […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Monoculture meets its match in North Dakota
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Carrington, N.D. – Half of all North Dakotans huddle in the fertile, prosperous Red River Valley, a stone’s throw from Minnesota. But John Gardner happily does his agricultural research in central North […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
Leaving room for cows and horses
Welcome to our small town, stranger, but don’t try to change our rural way of life. Now, sign on the dotted line. Thanks to a “right to farm provision,” adopted as part of a Utah town’s development code last March, officials can now make new property owners sign such agreements. “It’s a stipulation that this […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
True portentousness on a Wyoming highway
A few months back I was heading along U.S. 30 east of Kemmerer. It was one of those amazing Wyoming spring evenings, a panorama of sky, sage and sun which encompassed me totally, so totally that it took me a few moments to realize I had pulled off the highway and was standing in a […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Small town design
SMALL TOWN DESIGN Conservation and development can go head-to-head in rural America. A new publication describes a two-year project in which landscape architects worked with rural communities to combine the two. The National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service sponsored the arrangement, which placed a landscape architect […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Ski workers look for a home
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Eagle County balks at fourth mega-resort. Imagine Adam’s Rib in operation. Now picture 4,300 new workers scrambling for housing in a county that boasted five vacant housing units last year. “It’s not clear where the new people would go,” says Cathy Heicher, a member […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
$400,000 buys property – and a vote
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Eagle County balks at fourth mega-resort. MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, Colo. – Rich or poor, each American casts a single ballot: one person, one vote. Except here in Colorado’s newest town, where the real estate investors vote and the seasonal workers usually can’t. Mountain Village is […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Catron County wins in court, loses on the ground
Catron County wins in court, loses on the ground They’ve influenced dozens of other counties, been hawked for sale at national conferences and plastered on the front pages of newspapers around the country. Now, Catron County, N.M.” s controversial land-use ordinances have survived a constitutional challenge. On Jan. 16, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit […]