Dear Friends

Summer visitors Rick and Lucy Daley stopped in on their way to the Desert Museum in Tucson, Ariz., where he will be the new director. Rick is former director of the Denver Botanic Gardens, while Lucy was director of international students for the University of Colorado, Denver College of Business. Artist Phil Undercuffler came by […]

Call for water If you called the Paonia office in mid-July to order five copies of HCN’s collection of water articles, Water in the West, please call again. We have the soft-bound collection of articles and the back issues you also asked for all packed. But we don’t have your name and address. We apologize […]

Skipping an issue … There will be no July 20, 1998, issue of High Country News. Twice a year, HCN skips an issue so that staff can skip town, or at least avoid the office. The next issue will be dated Aug. 3, 1998. A day in the life … It is the week before […]

A “genius” in Arizona Composers, artists, writers and historians have all won those coveted John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius’ grants, but Bill McDonald, 46, is the first rancher to receive a hefty $285,000 for his efforts to preserve huge stretches of undeveloped land in southern Arizona. McDonald, along with other ranchers, such as […]

Celebrating the high life Mountain men had their rendezvous; today’s lovers of adventure in wild country have the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival. Film is the draw, but many come for the company available at this most intimate of festivals. Mountaineer legends and environmental heroes like Paul Watson, Bradford and Barbara Washburn, Paul Petzoldt and Galen Rowell […]

Salt Lake City potluck The High Country News staff and board will converge on Salt Lake City Saturday, June 6, to hold a potluck. These HCN events are held three times a year around the region; they are long on good food and good conversation and vanishingly short on ceremony and speeches. This one will […]

Busting out When High Country News moved into its new quarters in early 1992 (New Year’s Day, to be exact), we assumed the 3,600 square-foot building would serve us forever. After all, we had come out of 1,000 square feet. But when the architect who designed the building happened to be in Paonia, we asked […]

Prairie paper wins a Pulitzer The 37,000-circulation Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota may have lost its building to flooding and fire in 1997, but this month the daily won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. The paper never missed a day of publication and circulated for free when its readers were forced to evacuate […]

Questions and visitors Gregory Reis of Lee Vining, Calif., writes that he was in a plane flying near New Mexico’s Aztec Ruins National Monument when he saw mysterious “rectangular cleared areas all over the place.” What might they be? he asked us. Intern JT Thomas called around until he found Rich Simmons, a staffer with […]

A class act Circulation staffer Kathy Martinez recently traveled to Las Vegas to attend the USPS National Postal Forum; there she learned that HCN is a very small fish in a very large ocean. According to Kathy, “When I told one postal official how much we spend on postage a year, she just turned away […]

Old and Older Aspen Although Aspen has become mythic as a place where great wealth collides with glamour and fame (and occasionally with trees), beneath the hoopla there beats the heart of a small Western town. That town was on display Jan. 31, when Aspen honored its own: environmentalist Joy Caudill, architect Sam Caudill, ski […]

A landmark potluck Three times a year, High Country News holds a board meeting and potluck somewhere in its 1 million square-mile territory. The potlucks especially always have lots of good company and good food. But – and this is no reflection on Socorro or Bozeman or Seattle or Salt Lake City or Cheyenne or […]

Visit from a stalwart Once upon a time, substantial chunks of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado were to be the scene of massive industrial development. Oil shale, aka the “rock that burns,” was to be mined and crushed, with the resulting hydrocarbons liquefied and then refined, freeing the U.S. from servitude to the Middle East. It […]

Reading into 1998 The bad thing about taking a break, which we accomplished by skipping the Jan. 5 issue, is coming back to a towering stack of accumulated papers from Western cities and small towns, as well as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Weekly. As we troll for story leads, […]

Into the desert HCN staffers Rita Murphy, Jason Lenderman, Sara Phillips and Peter Chilson and about 175 other anti-nuclear protesters walked onto the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site Nov. 9. Without fuss, security guards escorted everyone right into a barbwire detention pen because it is unlawful to enter the test site without permission. Staffers […]

Thinking out loud Patricia Nelson Limerick, the bane of the Old West’s historians – those (usually) white men who said white folks brought civilization as they rolled over a mostly empty, heathenish continent – came to Grand Junction, Colo., recently. During the afternoon she talked informally with members of the Western Colorado Congress, a coalition […]