Dispatch
Dispatch
The Man With a Teflon Star
Mired in legal problems, Sheriff Joe Arpaio still portrays himself as a folk hero—and, so far, he refuses to ride off into the Arizona sunset
February 16th, 2012
They say the sheriff’s department routinely racially profiled, unlawfully stopped, detained and arrested Latinos—and then retaliated against those who complained about it. Investigators said officials discriminated against non-English-speaking inmates in the county jails by denying them services and punishing them for not obeying commands given in English. Read more »
Dispatch
Fracking the Colorado Myth
When energy exploration collides with nature, what’s a recession-torn Western town to do?
February 2nd, 2012
In the shadows of the Rocky Mountain foothills, the St. Vrain Creek meanders eight miles east to Sandstone Ranch. Here, less than 20 miles from downtown Boulder, all is serene—and quintessentially Colorado. But tension lies beneath the surface. Tension and natural gas. Read more »
Dispatch
Go Tell It on the Mountain
In the California desert, Salvation Mountain has a storied past. Now its future is in question.
January 19th, 2012
In 2007, Leonard Knight made a cameo appearance in the film Into the Wild playing himself, the bug-eyed, sun-ripened, white-haired, contagiously enthusiastic then-76-year-old builder of Salvation Mountain in Niland, Calif. Brief as Knight’s film career was—he only had a few lines—it neatly captured his open, earnest nature, and introduced the world to the cartoonishly colorful monument to everlasting love he’d been building, by himself, for 23 years out in the desert. Read more »
Dispatch
Lake Invaders
The quagga mussel has made a mess of Lake Mead. Is Lake Tahoe its next victim?
January 5th, 2012
The quagga mussel is about half the size of your fingernail. It originates from the Caspian Sea, but in recent times its shells have been irritating the feet of beachgoers on the shores of Lake Michigan. It filters vital nutrients from freshwater, disturbs the food chain, endangers fisheries, excretes carbon, spurs algae growth and clouds the water. Other than that, it’s great. Read more »
Dispatch
The Other Side of the Border
In the Sonoran desert, an American dreamer seeds the future
November 3rd, 2011
Out there in the mediasphere, solving the U.S.-Mexico immigration crisis seems to depend on things like optimal fence height and calculating the number of National Guard troops it takes to seal a border. When you live at the border, though, solutions can look different. Read more »
Dispatch
Gone Haunting
They say Virginia City’s got ghosts. We took our wagons (and our ghost-hunting apps) up there to find ’em
October 27th, 2011
For all its charm, Virginia City is full of residual spirits: lovers quarreling for eternity on the stairs just outside our room, a little girl tragically run over by a carriage who hangs out on C Street’s creaky wooden sidewalks, miners trapped and killed in Gold Hill’s Yellow Jacket Mine fire. There are also happier spirits, such as the children said to frolic in the Silver Queen’s halls and at the local elementary school. Evidently, this quaint mountain town, with its “100-mile views” and horse-drawn carriages, is something of a paranormal beehive, humming away with way more than just its 600 year-round residents. Read more »
Dispatch
The Occupation of Los Angeles
In a city of dreamers, the people speak
October 13th, 2011
Somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 protesters, depending on which news source you prefer, assembled on Saturday, Oct. 1, at Pershing Square in Los Angeles (not exactly a brand-name landmark) and marched a mile or so to City Hall. This was part of the nationwide wave of Occupy Wall Street Protests, except we had no place like Wall Street to occupy. Our City Hall building is a lovely beaux arts/classical mash-up on Spring Street, right across from the equally magnificent Los Angeles Times building, whose denizens, not surprisingly, took little notice of what was going on under their noses. Read more »
Dispatch
Mountain High
Oktoberfest in Big Bear
October 6th, 2011
This time of year, 65-year-old Bonnie Kelso spends her weekends looking for the next Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest queen amid crowds of women in cleavage-baring dirndls and men in knee-high socks. Read more »
Dispatch
In Small-Town Colorado, a Team With Brass
These football players can really play—in more ways than one
September 8th, 2011
In Lyons Senior High School, students have to multitask. Almost 90 percent of them are involved in athletics, choir, drama and/or band. Last year, no one dropped out, class attendance was at 95 percent and students destroyed their peers throughout the district and statewide in educational benchmarks. Out of last year’s 67 graduates, 15 carried 4.0 GPA.s. Read more »
Dispatch
Brown Is the New Green
Making peace with nature on the golf courses of California’s High Desert
August 11th, 2011
Transforming the sands of the Mojave into miles of evergreen grass has long been a point of pride for California’s High Desert communities, with seven golf courses serving a population of some 400,000. But lush fairways may soon go the way of the Hummer as efforts to conserve money and the environment are driving planners to embrace brown as the new green. Read more »
