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The Colorado River comes alive even as it ebbs

By Char Miller

The Colorado River is revealing its secrets. For decades a World War II landing craft lay submerged 200 feet beneath…

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Hard choices for the Colorado River

By Quinn Harper Mark Squillace

The seven Colorado River states – Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming – face a daunting mid-August…

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Will salmon finally win this year?

By Rocky Barker

For the last 35 years I’ve been covering what we call the “salmon wars” in the Pacific Northwest, writing so…

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Ditches are a vanishing paradise

By Dave Marston

Annette Choszczyk lives in rural western Colorado these days, but when she was a kid, the Highline Canal in Denver…

Photo of North Fork Valley, Co, courtesy of Kenita Burns Moore

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The “Keystone Pipeline” won’t make gas any cheaper 

By Ted Williams

”A report that the Biden administration is weighing greater imports of Canadian oil is putting a renewed focus on the…

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Tips for a new code of the West

By Dave Marston

It’s not always easy living in the rural West, with customs so entrenched that everybody takes them for granted. What…

Image credit: Pat Hunter

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Freedom in the West, but not for women

By Rebecca Johnson

I moved to Wyoming a few years ago for its outdoor recreation, but I also liked the state’s history of…

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How do you you-know-what in the woods

By Molly Absolon

Poop talk makes everybody fidget and giggle uncomfortably. We like our poop to disappear. We want shiny white porcelain toilets…

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We need every tool to fight today’s fires

By Stephen Pyne

We know now that the largest recorded fire in New Mexico history was started by an escaped “prescribed burn,” or…

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The Colorado River Compact Hasn’t Aged Well

By George Sibley

The Colorado River Compact turns 100 this year, but any celebration is damped down by the drying-up of the big…

The public launch ramp at Antelope Point, late March, 2021

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I’m a journalist and an optimist

By Larry Ryckman

Journalism has always been a tough way to make a living. It’s generally offered low wages, the constant threat of…

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Bison — back where they belong

By Ben Long

Early in the Covid-19 epidemic, I visited the Bison Range on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. But the…

Bison by the Midway Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park

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Larmer was the first editor of Writers on the Range after it landed at HCN in 1998, he went on to become publisher/editor of High Country News (HCN) 2003-2020, and is currently senior development director HCN. Larmer is also on the advisory board of Writers on the Range.

Writers on the Range grew out of the West’s public lands, growth, and culture wars of the 1990s. At the time, environmentalists were at loggerheads with the timber, mining, oil and gas and ranching industries that had dominated and shaped land-use and rural communities for decades. 

Meanwhile, a flood of newcomers poured into the region’s urban areas and smaller towns, stressing their social and economic fabrics beyond recognition. How could the West sort through these contentious issues in a civil manner?

The answer was to give voice to a wide range of people from the region itself.  Writers with different backgrounds, espousing new ideas, were put front and center on the region’s opinion pages.

After a brief run as a think tank, Writers on the Range landed on the front porch of High Country News in 1997.  High Country News is the well-known, highly awarded publication that covers the west’s diverse natural and human communities.  It was a perfect match.

Soon dozens of news outlets subscribed.  Over the next 20 years, Writers on the Range published fresh columns from writers and thinkers across the ideological spectrum, provoking thought, generating debate, and defining the possibilities of a better west.

 It was truly a grassroots opinion service and, now as an independent non-profit organization, is still so today.

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