Dear Friends

Life in a petri dish July in Paonia is time for cherries, apricots and early morning irrigation. It’s time to crank up the swamp coolers and charge down Grand Avenue to jump into what’s left of the North Fork of the Gunnison River. But most of all, it’s the season for visiting far-flung friends and […]

Summer break To give everyone a chance to catch up on their reading, hit the trail, ride a bike, paddle a river or – you get the general idea – High Country News will skip the next issue. We’ll return July 31, 2000. New to the board Last issue’s Dear Friends column on the Albuquerque […]

Welcome, Beth Not wanting to admit that her hometown, Staten Island, N.Y., is known best for its garbage, new intern Beth Wohlberg would rather refer to the most recent city she has lived in – Missoula, Mont. But Staten Island, home to the largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills, gave her an urge for […]

Eyewitnesses visit Abe Jacobson and Carol Griffiths Jacobson were driving an unusual rig when they dropped by in May. Two kayaks and a canoe rode atop their van, which was stuffed with paddles, snowshoes, skis and just about every other outdoor toy you can imagine. This was no ordinary vacation, they explained; they were refugees. […]

Errare humanum est … Reader Robert Stuart asks: “I wonder if columnist Jon Margolis misquoted the statement ‘oderint, dum metuant’ – ‘let them hate, provided that they fear.’ I thought this statement was made by Caligula, not Cicero …” In a story Feb. 14 we referred to a “Sandia National Forest.” Gary Schiffmiller tells us […]

Spring visitors Glen Miller, a retired geologist from Grand Junction, came by to say hello and to talk about how guilty he felt because he’d let his subscription lapse. We’re always interested in why people drop their subscriptions, but he couldn’t tell us. “It just happened,” was as close as he could come. We could […]

Interns go far Sometimes we think the most important thing High Country News does is provide a way station for interns. For most of them, it’s a stop after college and a series of less-than-satisfying jobs, before they decide what they will ultimately do. We had this thought most recently at the March meeting of […]

Reaching out Chris Setti’s work is a lot like that done by High Country News. He attempts to cover about 600,000 square miles of the West (Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming) with a few hundred square miles of resources. So when he stopped by our office a few weeks ago, we […]

For the record In the gentlest way, J. Robb Brady, former editor of the Idaho Falls Post Register, corrects a statement in our front-page coverage of breaching dams on the Lower Snake River (HCN, 12/20/99: Unleashing the Snake). Paul Larmer had written that the Idaho Statesman had been the first newspaper to advocate breaching the […]

In a union town It was probably the wrong place to hold the annual High Country Foundation budget meeting, if only because it led to so many bad jokes about balancing the budget at the craps table. Nevertheless, approximately 25 board members and staff of this organization converged on the San Remo Hotel, just off […]

It’s not easy It’s not easy to move a pile of radioactive rock that sprawls across the equivalent of 118 football fields in the floodplain of the Colorado River (HCN, 5/26/97). Not easy, but possible, as Bill Hedden of Castle Valley, Utah, has just shown (see page 4). Hedden, who is Utah Conservation Director for […]

Y2K Why bother? Try as we might, staff at High Country News encountered no major glitches as 1,000 years petered out. On the first day of the new millennium, a staffer leaving Philadelphia spotted airline monitors all flashing the date 1900, and closer to home in Paonia, we can report that six houseguests were victimized […]

On to the millennium As is our wont, we will skip an issue this winter, both to give readers a chance to plow through that accumulating stack and to give us time to regroup for the next 1,000 years, give or take a few centuries. The next issue will be dated Jan. 17, 2000. Good […]

A first If you wait long enough, 15 minutes of fame comes to every person and place. Paonia, Colo.’s, came in Nov. 22, when the nation’s most highbrow magazine finally got around to featuring this small town. The recognition is long overdue. Even though The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, was born just over the […]

Hail to a hiker Congratulations to an indomitable woman named Gudy Gaskill, who decided 25 years ago that volunteers could – and would – build a 470-mile trail around Colorado’s mountaintops. There was help from then-Gov. Richard Lamm and the Forest Service, but what really drew people from ages 14 to 80 was Gudy herself […]

Signed, sealed and (maybe) delivered The staff at High Country News does the trivial part of producing a newspaper: We contact writers and photographers, we edit, we lay out, we haul the papers back from the printer, we slap on 21,000-plus address labels, and then we truck the ton or so of forest product over […]

Here come the hunters Though the health department made our meat-locker neighbor shroud its backdoor hoist with a giant tarp, staff can’t help noticing all the carcasses swinging by. Elk and deer, so far, we can report, but no black bear. All have been killed by the hunting elite that likes to make things tough […]