Category Archives: Commentary

On a summer morning in southern Idaho, the day breaks early, before 6 a.m. The air is stale, never fully cooled from the heat of the day before.

My neighbor is famous.
She has 50,000 followers on Facebook and a recent post on her page there had 4,200 likes, 250 comments and 400 shares within a day.

Residents of the Westside Mobile Home Park in Durango, in southern Colorado, called it a miracle: They now own the land their homes sit on, their rent will not go up, and they proved that the housing cooperative they’d founded had staying power. 

Communities in the West can stand up to giant outside corporations if they want to win a renewable energy future, but it isn’t easy. They can do it only if they manage to agree about what they have in common.

There’s something different about the state of Idaho that’s beyond the adjective “quirky.” My husband and I may have lived here for a decade, yet we’re still learning what makes an Idahoan.

Just outside Durango, Colorado there’s a trailer park called Westside that I’ve been driving by all my life. Yet, residents there live with the fear that at any time their homes could be taken from them. Now, the worst has happened.

Seven Western states and their leaders — all depending on water from the Colorado River — remain divided.

Yellowstone National Park turns 150 years old this month — a milestone truly worth celebrating.

The local restaurant delivery is nice, however nothing beats banana cream pie, pan bread and sausage gravy, or Indian tacos made in someone’s home.

Eighty-year-old Roger Hill used to go fishing on the Arkansas River in Colorado. But he sometimes had to duck baseball-size rocks thrown at him by landowners who insisted he was trespassing.