High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia, Colorado, but the meeting was scheduled in Lander to honor the paper's birthplace. It is 150 miles from Kemmerer to Lander, with a single town—Farson, population 250 or so— between them at the midway point. East of Farson the tawny plain swept upward to the foothills of the Wind River Range, its peaks shadowed by thunderclouds and streaked by last year's snows. On the South Pass the wind as usual was strong enough to topple Hannibal's elephants, and it was still blowing strong out of the mountains as I approached Lander and put up at the Pronghorn Lodge, where the friends of High Country News had begun to gather and spill into the Lander Bar across the bridge on the other side of the Popo Agie River.
Ordinarily, 150 miles is an insufficient distance between me and 100 or more mostly urban environmentalists gathered for an orgy of self-congratulation. But High Country News is different. It is an excellent publication, usually well-written and always informative: the intermountain West's only regional newspaper, full of information regarding the social, political, economic, and...