The northwest branch of the Chicago River was my watercourse as a boy (“Pilgrim at Shit Creek,” HCN, 7/22/13). It was also polluted, but it was all we had. We rafted it, wading mostly. Since then I’ve gone back in a canoe and found all manner of wildlife — from foxes, deer and coyotes to […]
Communities
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Tools ‘R’ Us
Dirt Work: An Education in the WoodsChristine Byl256 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Beacon Press, 2013. Tired of school, broke and eager for a change, Christine Byl took to the woods with a National Park Service trail crew. Through 16 summers of manual labor in Alaska and Montana — maintaining, repairing, designing and building bridges, ditches and trails […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
A review of Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico portrait
Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico portrait photographs by Craig Varjabedian, essays by Marin Sardy, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Hampton Sides, 140 pages, hardcover: $50, University of New Mexico Press, 2012. Contemporary landscape photography often looks too pristine and over-saturated to feel authentic. But Craig Varjabedian’s monochromatic images of New Mexico transcend that. In place of […]
Posted inGoat
Impressions of a county fair: heifer rituals, deep-fried pickles and all
It’s so noisy at the fairBut all your friends are thereAnd the candy floss you hadAnd your mother and your dad. — Neil Young, Sugar Mountain. His face was like leather, so much so that the only expression that showed up behind the utterly opaque mirrored sunglasses was a sort of perma-smirk that reminded me […]
Posted inWotr
Time to let go of the “Redskins” mascot
“Stupid political correctness is killing us!” was one longtime local’s response after the school superintendent of Teton County, Idaho, sacked the “Redskins” as the school’s mascot. As a fifth-generation resident and Teton High graduate himself, Superintendent Monte Woolstenhulme said he figured that the move would distress some people. Yet nothing could have prepared him for […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
The Blue Window
Journeying from redrock desert to an icy wasteland: an essay.
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
The Bakken oilfields: ‘No place for a woman’
One woman’s effort to survive the Great Recession in booming North Dakota.
Posted inGoat
Paonia’s Great Chicken Dump raises the question: what to do with all those old birds?
The news infiltrated the High Country News mothership like a cute animal video (which editors Sarah Gilman and Betsy Marston are particularly fond of) and spread through the North Fork Valley faster than a stomach flu. Soon, from the barstools of Revolution Brewing to the ratty couches of the HCN intern house, the Great Chicken […]
Posted inWotr
Pioneer league baseball is a slice of heaven
One of the best things about summer is watching these teams strive for major league.
Posted inGoat
‘Camping 101 on steroids’ gets minority kids into the outdoors
On a recent Sunday morning, a dozen young boys splashed gleefully in an alpine stream in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. Wearing rubber boots and wielding fine-meshed nets, they reached into the icy water, rolled rocks aside, and scooped up the flotsam released into the current. Then they dumped the contents into plastic trays held […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
En-lightning statistics
Over two days in mid-July, an elderly Colorado woman, 10 farmworkers and three Montana hikers were hit by lightning — and lived to tell about it. Lightning fatalities in the U.S. have decreased by 75 percent since 1968, partly because of better medical access, more education and safer buildings, but largely because fewer Americans farm […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Fracking fashionistas
Oil and gas workers once had few options for on-the-job fashion: standard street wear or heavy-duty firefighting gear. Flame-retardant clothing was bulky, expensive and hot, but the alternative — jeans and T-shirts — proved dangerous in environments where explosions and fires can be all in a day’s work. In 2010, the Occupational Safety and Health […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Ghost of a chance
We Live in WaterJess Walter192 pages, softcover: $14.99.Harper Perennial, 2013. In 13 sharp, witty stories, Spokane’s Jess Walter captures the gritty, quirky and heartbreaking lives of a variety of Pacific Northwesterners. Walter convincingly inhabits each character he creates, from a hungry meth addict wheeling an enormous TV toward a hoped-for pawnshop payout to a blue-collar […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Flume fever: a monument to gold mining history is reconstructed
A hanging flume, attached to a canyon wall, captures the imagination of locals and heritage tourists alike.
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Reading to maturity
Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and MisbehaviorBrandon R. Schrand221 pages, softcover:$16.95. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Brandon R. Schrand’s second book, Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior, retraces the Idaho author’s life through his obsessive love of literature. Each personal essay is paired with notes about a book that influenced […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Smokey the Bear gets cuddly
THE WESTTwenty-five years ago, river guides who’d mastered the art of steering boats through the Grand Canyon decided to start a magazine. It would celebrate the history of the ancient place and its band of young Colorado River runners, reveling in the job’s excitement and occasional tedium and revealing the sometimes-deadly hazards of ferrying tourists […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Arid lands bibliopedestrianism
I’ll admit that those of us who live in remote desert places tend to be idiosyncratic, though it is unclear to me whether the weird are attracted to the wild, dry country or if we are instead sculpted by it. And when you live in relative isolation—and in a physical environment that conspires with that […]
Posted inGoat
Seven days to fund an anthology of Ed Quillen’s wise, curmudgeonly writing
Want to help ensure that the West will never forget one of its wisest and most unique voices, writer Ed Quillen? Consider chipping into this Kickstarter project to anthologize his work. Ed died last year on June 3, at his home in Salida, Colo. “For nearly 30 years, Ed had written about the region’s communities […]
Posted inGoat
Are the West’s energy fields the last bastion of upward mobility?
Imagine, for a moment, a child born in Gallup or Tohatchi or Church Rock, NM. We’ll call him Jonny Gallup. He’s an average, healthy kid, but life’s not easy. His mom works at a mini-mart gas station, and his father does odd jobs but has a tough time finding anything stable. Combined, they usually make […]
Posted inGoat
Drones touch down in the American West
Once reserved for American military use in places like Pakistan, unmanned aerial vehicles — better known as drones — are becoming increasingly common here at home, as our pro-drone editor Jonathan Thompson wrote about earlier this year. But even as public concern mounts over the Obama administration’s use of the stealthy aircraft, everyone from scientific […]