I’ve grown up and moved away. I live in a city now instead of a little town. My grammar is better, my table manners hardly offend at all and I’ve been seen at art galleries and concerts. Yet still there are people who patronize me when they find out where I grew up. That was […]
Communities
Posted inMay 16, 1994: Babbitt is trying to nationalize the BLM
Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the AmericanWest
To Catch Wild Ducks,Geese or Birds AliveSoak wheat in strong alcohol.Scatter where they are in the habit of feeding.Take them while they are drunk. * Early recipe book titled Cookbook private collection, ca. 1880 Coon Cake Take what flour you have, mix with water, shorten with coon oil and fry in coon fat. Army Coffee […]
Posted inMay 16, 1994: Babbitt is trying to nationalize the BLM
Court rains on title to Colorado land grant
The “little cloud” on the title of the Taylor Ranch in Colorado’s San Luis Valley remains, thanks to a landmark Colorado Supreme Court ruling in favor of Costilla County residents. On May 2, the court said there should be a trial to determine whether the constitutional rights of residents were violated in 1960, when landowner […]
Posted inMay 2, 1994: A struggle for the last grass
Rancher fined for vandalism
A retired Escalante, Utah, rancher pleaded guilty to “enhancing” 21 Anasazi petroglyphs at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area with a pocket knife. Rancher McKay Bailey agreed to pay restoration costs and forfeit his 1990 Ford pickup for violating the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act. In exchange for his guilty plea, the government recommended a […]
Posted inMay 2, 1994: A struggle for the last grass
Lycra is as ‘authentic’ as denim
It has become commonplace to attack and ridicule the socio-economic changes that are taking place in the Rocky Mountain West. With disgust and caustic humor residents lash out at the new “cappuccino cowboys,” the brightly colored, lycra-clad mountain bikers, the 20-acre ranchettes, the trophy homes of newcomers, and the network surfers on the information highway. […]
Posted inApril 18, 1994: The salmon win one
Talk wild
This summer some 330 high school students will build trails in parks and national forests as volunteers for the Student Conservation Association. But their minds require a workout, too. The non-profit SCA needs people to visit backcountry crews and spend time talking to them about natural resource issues. Previous “Educators Bureau” speakers have shared information […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
Movable metaphor for the West now a video
The three Pinedale, Wyo., artists who transformed cows into ambulatory art last year now have a video commemorating the event. Thanks to a $4,000 federal grant, Duane Brandt, an art teacher at Pinedale High, along with his wife, Pip, and Sue Thornton, painted the words of a Wyoming pioneer on the backs of 74 pregnant […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
An alleged massacre comes under fire
As the story goes, Shoshone-Bannock warriors scalped and murdered nearly 300 men, women and children near Almo, Idaho, in 1861. Now, several historians call the massacre mere campfire folklore. Brigham Madsen, a retired University of Utah professor who recently researched the killing, says no newspapers or U.S. military records in 1861 mention the massacre, and […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
The West is hard at work, destroying its past
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau? The Colorado Plateau is internationally famous for its canyons and spectacular natural beauty, but it also contains the largest concentration of prehistoric ruins, rock art and artifacts in the world. Those traces of its past are being lost, […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
Clifton, Arizona: A town no one knows
CLIFTON, Ariz. – We must have stuck out as an exotic bunch of dudes driving through this remote mining town of a couple of thousand people in southeastern Arizona: One student from South Korea, one from Japan and one from Germany. It was Christmas break at Arizona State University, and we had ventured out to […]
Posted inMarch 21, 1994: On the borderline
There’s gold, and no controls, in Mexico’s hills
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, On the borderline. QUITOVAC, Sonora – On a warm winter day, Esther Velasco Ortega greets visitors from a chair in the front yard of her cinderblock house. One of her visitors is Gary Nabhan, an ethnobotanist who buys saguaro fruit jelly from her every […]
Posted inMarch 21, 1994: On the borderline
Border doesn’t block dirty air and water
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, On the borderline. Because much of the U.S.-Mexico border is already considered a “free trade” zone, additional impacts due to the North American Free Trade Agreement are hard to gauge. U.S. and Mexican environmentalists had hoped NAFTA would help their communities by strengthening regulations […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
No home on the range
The Great Buffalo Herd Monument is extinct – at least on public land. The brainchild of a New York artist, the Mt. Rushmore-type monument would have placed 1,000 copper, moving, moaning bison on a high sage- and pine-covered plateau called the Beaver Rim south of Lander, Wyo. But when the agency which manages the land, […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
Quake’s shakes move masses
At least one business sees a silver lining in the recent Los Angeles earthquake. The Nevada-based Greener Pastures Institute, which helps “urban opt-outs’ find their footing in the unfamiliar terrain of the rural West, is getting a lot more phone calls. The Institute’s newsletter circulates to about 2,000 people, two-thirds of whom live in Southern […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
Cows crowded out
Bob Niccoli, a life-long rancher in Crested Butte, Colo., says the decision to sell his ranch and leave town just got easier. Niccoli protested a proposed development near his ranch in early January. He asked Gunnison County planners to require developer Dan Gallagher to build his 12 houses 100 feet back from a riverside cliff […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
No change on the range
When you’re right, you’re right, and when Philip Fradkin worked for the Los Angeles Times from 1964-1975 as that paper’s first environmental reporter, and for Audubon from 1976-81 as that magazine’s first Western editor, he often batted 1,000. Fradkin recalls those days in his book of collected essays, Wanderings of an Environmental Journalist: In Alaska […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
E-Mail for the rural West
The West’s great distances, geography and weather often isolate its communities. That can make for a high quality of life but difficult communications. The Helena, Mont.-based computer non-profit WestNet hopes to overcome those barriers by providing a computer-based bulletin board service. With a computer and a modem, anyone – from ranchers and loggers, to Native […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
Let’s not heap injustice upon injustice
SAN LUIS, Colo. – The ownership of the Taylor Ranch in Colorado’s San Luis Valley has been a bone of contention for the past 34 years. However, the story of the land has a longer history and the feelings about it run deeper because the Taylor Ranch is not just another piece of mountain real […]
Posted inMarch 7, 1994: Pay as you waste, says EPA
Can San Luis resist ‘regional chaos’?
It was a Colorado state helicopter that turned Maria Mondragon-Valdez around on the subject of the 77,000-acre Taylor Ranch. Originally, she supported a proposal for a split purchase of the mountain tract she and other San Luis Valley residents call La Sierra, and which they believe was stolen from their community in 1960. The proposal […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 1994: Draining the budget to desalt the Colorado
Why Why? A stark, no-frills retreat from the world
Two highways meet in a “Y” at Why, Ariz. This remote crossroads some 30 miles from Mexico seems an unlikely vacation spot, but for the past three years I’ve made it my winter retreat. At first glance, Why doesn’t seem like much. There are a couple of dozen simple houses, a few dirt streets, two […]