While we do our best here at High Country News, there’s no way we can cover everything that’s happening in the West. (Small team, limited funding, you know the spiel.)
So we’re grateful that other outlets — some of them large and well-known, others small but mighty — are also out there doing the work: amplifying Western voices, holding the powerful to account, illuminating what it’s like to live in our beloved corner of the world.
At HCN, we’ve created a Slack channel where we post articles that we wish we’d written ourselves. To close out 2023, we scrolled through it and picked out some of our favorites from the year. We think you’ll appreciate them as much as we do.
5 years after the Camp Fire, a survivor reflects on Paradise’s recovery
“We’ve learned a lot. The collective consciousness of the community is very fire adapted, fire aware.”
The media has a tendency to focus on the news while it’s happening — and then neglect it altogether once the interest dies down. That’s why we appreciate this as-told-to story from Grist’s Gabriela Aoun Angueira, which concentrates on one survivor of the devastating Camp Fire, following him and his community as they rebuild long after the TV cameras are gone.
The 20 farming families who use more water from the Colorado River than some Western states
“They used about 1 in every 7 drops.”
This investigation about water usage, by Nat Lash and Janet Wilson, is ProPublica at its finest. The headline alone would be enough to grab anyone’s attention, and once you dive into the data and writing, you can’t stop reading. (By the way, we were thrilled to partner with ProPublica on a different water investigation earlier this year.)
LookWest newsletter
LookWest is a resource rather than a story, but we wanted to share this under-the-radar newsletter from the Center for Western Priorities. Many HCN staffers subscribe to it, and if you care about public lands, you should, too. Each weekday, it offers a 30-second summary of one public-lands issue that’s making headlines and then links to a bunch of news articles that reveal what else is occurring in the West.
Message of powwow in Washington prison: ‘You are not forgotten’
“The normally gray, khaki and white atmosphere was full of color.”
What a heartfelt story from Underscore News. As HCN staff writer B. Toastie Oaster (Choctaw) put it: “The topic was so unexpected, and reporter Nika Bartoo-Smith dealt with difficult issues in a hopeful way. I love the focus on women, and not just the healing power but the necessity of culture. And Jarrette Werk’s photos are bright and heartbreaking — they have so much story in them, too.”
Border killings: How shooters lured historic Colorado wolves to their deaths in Wyoming
“When the gray lobo came within 243 yards, a rifle erupted.”
For WyoFile, Mike Koshmrl unearths how hunters killed at least four Colorado wolves after luring them over the border into Wyoming. (Hunting wolves — illegal in Colorado — is legal in much of Wyoming.) Koshmrl even managed to interview one of the hunters, resulting in a hard-hitting investigation with a haunting last line.
No OB-GYNs left in town: What came after Idaho’s assault on abortion
“For years, the town had a maternity ward that delivered as many as 350 babies every year – now it has nothing.”
This deeply reported piece by the talented Kathleen McLaughlin, which appeared in The Guardian, examines one of the often-overlooked ripple effects of abortion bans. It focuses on a rural Idaho hospital that was forced to shut its obstetrical care division after its doctors left for states with more lenient laws, leaving the locals with no choice but to drive farther for pregnancy care.
How developers helped shape Seattle’s controversial tree ordinance
“Don’t you have to cut down a forest to win one of these?”
If you’ve been paying attention to Washington news over the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Seattle’s much-debated tree ordinance. We appreciated how Eric Scigliano dug past the headlines in this InvestigateWest piece, uncovering how developers influenced the statute and what the ramifications are likely to be.
As groundwater dwindles, powerful players block change
“If we don’t make change, we’re not going to have water.”
We’re big fans of Christopher Flavelle’s reporting on water. For this New York Times story, he examines how small groups of people — from Nevada mine owners to Montana developers to Kansas farmers — have an outsized sway in determining how our nation’s groundwater is used. (For more, we recommend the whole “Uncharted Waters” series.)
What ballooning home values mean for one tenant and her landlord
“There wasn’t anything more I could do to say, ‘Please let me stay here.’”
Housing stories are often all about the numbers: prices, vacancy rates, rental burdens. While those matter, the humans affected by them matter more. So we appreciated how this story from Eric Dietrich at the Montana Free Press zeroed in on the anxieties and calculations of one tenant and one landlord, demonstrating how the state’s housing crisis is playing out for everyday Montanans.
When a whale falls
“How do you measure a life?”
Former HCN staffer Sarah Gilman is impressively gifted as an artist as well as a writer, and this poetically told and illustrated piece in YES! Magazine showcases both of her talents. It dissects the value of a whale, both in life and in death (though it doesn’t include the whale’s potential as a carbon sink). Gilman’s piece will make you stop and think; it may even change your perspective a little bit. The best journalism always does.
Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. We welcome reader letters. Email her at susan.shain@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
