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 […]
Communities
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 […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Jury convicts a grave robber
After a trial full of grisly detail, a jury found Oregon resident Jack Lee Harelson guilty of looting an Indian burial cave in Nevada. Although the crime was too old to prosecute under the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the state of Oregon convicted him on state charges of theft, abusing a corpse and tampering […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Lack of enchantment
Santa Fe’s boom goes flat
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe’s boom goes flat. “The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him.” – Retired East Coast businessman It took several years for […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
One man’s good move
My father is impeccably urban. Except for a stint at boarding school in New England and a few summer jobs in the country – he was fired from one for accidentally hoeing the heads off a half-mile-long row of cabbage – he remained in New York almost his entire life. His tastes, his habits of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Facts take a beating on the range
A New Mexico State University press release saying part of the controversial Diamond Bar allotment was not overgrazed has critics crying “pseudoscience.” The allotment straddling two wilderness areas has been home to squalls among ranchers, the Forest Service, the university, environmentalists and politicians for years (HCN, 7/24/95). In the wake of persistent disagreements, the Forest […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
The Northwest’s new economy
THE NORTHWEST’S NEW ECONOMY When the Pacific Northwest’s timber and aerospace industries started declining, some people predicted the region would become the next Appalachia. Instead, the region is thriving, says University of Montana economist Tom Power, whose conclusion is endorsed by 34 other Northwest economists. Growth in earnings, employment and population in Idaho, Montana, Oregon […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Do-it-yourself preservation
With just a handful of federal agents patrolling millions of square miles of the West, it’s not surprising that looting and vandalism of Indian artifacts are rampant. But with budget cuts portending even less money for enforcement, where will help on the ground come from? One answer is from volunteers, people who give their time […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Green fellows
Environmental journalists with at least three years’ experience are invited to apply for a fellowship year at Harvard University. The two selected Nieman fellows – one U.S. and one international – will take undergraduate and graduate classes. They will also meet with distinguished figures from journalism, business, education, the arts and public service. The fellowships […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Southwestern writers hit the airwaves
-Every writer has one thing they want, need to work out desperately in their writing … I seem to be dealing with transformation, a way to make sense of, to rectify, a terrible, beautiful history.” * Joy Harjo Joy Harjo, a Creek poet, screenwriter, and saxophonist, is one of 13 Southwestern authors featured in Writing […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Revving up rural schools
Without the drama of guns and gangs, the popular media usually leave rural education in a time warp of little red schoolhouses and outdated textbooks. But rural schools, which house one-quarter of the nation’s students and teachers, turned decades ago to interdisciplinary studies, multi-grade classrooms and community- based learning – all “innovations’ being introduced in […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Saving the ranch
Can private conservation stave off ski-town sprawl?
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
John Fetcher
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. John Fetcher started his working life as an engineer in Philadelphia before buying a ranch with his brother in the Elk River Valley in 1949. In the 1950s he and three partners began developing the Steamboat Ski Area, which they sold […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Rancher’s new cash crop will be scenery
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. Private conservation efforts in places such as the Elk River Valley may be able to preserve the look of the land. But if ranchers become tenants on property owned by wealthy people from somewhere else, what happens to the culture? “There’s […]