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Lawmakers need to protect public access for corner crossers

By Karlee Provenza Joshua A. Seckinger

Last summer, hunters and anglers stepped up in a huge way to help defeat a proposal by Utah Senator Mike…

A landscape of the Birhorn Mountains in Wyoming.

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On their own, wolves walk into Washington state

By Mitch Friedman

In 2008, Canadian wolves didn’t wait for an invitation from biologists to move them into Washington state. Instead, they trotted…

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Must water be enhanced and encased in plastic?

By Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff

If someone told me 10 years ago that people would willingly pay over $5 for a one-gallon container of water,…

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Southeast county in Utah has a radioactive target on its back

By Zak Podmore

In the early 1980s, southeast Utah was targeted as a potential dump site for high-level nuclear waste, the kind that…

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What reporting on three city councils teaches me

By Marty Durlin

For the past year and a half, I’ve been reporting weekly on municipal government in three rural Western Colorado towns….

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What Western writers cared about during a tumultuous year

By Betsy Marston

Once the Trump administration took over the reins of government last year, attacks on public land came fast and furious….

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Former Senator Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell knew how to horse trade

By Dave Marston

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the former Colorado U.S. senator and congressman who served first as a Democrat and then as a…

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This Trump nominee wants to liquidate public lands

By Aaron Weiss

Do Western senators really care about keeping public lands in public hands? Steve Pearce, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run…

Canyon of the Ancients, BLM land, near Cortez Colorado, Dave Marston photo

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Every kind of Thanksgiving

By Pepper Trail

On a recent walk through the woods of southern Oregon, I found myself thinking about my feelings of gratitude as…

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The pleasures—and perils—of seasonal jobs

By Kira Cordova

I was a student at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado when my professor told our class he had a…

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What happens to our parks when rangers  disappear?  

By Alex Johnson

For over a month, the longest government shutdown in American history has left our national parks in free fall. When…

Tourists at North Window Arch, Arches National Park, Nov. 25, 2024.

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Sandstone towers challenge this rescue team

By Molly Marcelo

I was high up on a cliff above Moab, Utah, as night was falling, and I couldn’t find my way…

Grand County Search and Rescue members rigging a technical rope rescue on the top of Castleton Tower near Moab. Photo courtesy Grand County Search and Rescue

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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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