If you float down the Clark Fork River for three hours from Missoula, Montana you’ll come to the charred remains of Harper’s Bridge. An emblem of folly, like all ruins, this one stands for the ludicrous attempt by private landowners to keep the rest of us away from the water.

I started hanging out here in the 1960s, when I moved to Missoula to dodge the draft by enrolling in college, a strategy that worked till it didn’t.

I squandered many hours flailing around with my frat brothers in the deep holes, jumping off the bridge, and trying to convince our Kappa Kappa Gamma dates that these bright beaches were topless. 

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This year during one of the daily parades at Crow Fair, the annual powwow and rodeo held along the Little Big Horn River on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana, one of my mothers-in-law yelled combatively at a professional photographer who planted himself between her and one of her grandchildren on parade.

"Hey, get out of the way," she hollered. "We're taking pictures, too."

The guy knelt down and kept shooting film.
 

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Politics in the West

If John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver (above) appears to be an unconventional politician, it's because he is. But, he's become typical of Democratic politicians in the New West. He loves microbrew beer (started Denver's first brewpub) and the Mountain West (hails from Pennsylvania before becoming an oil geologist based in Denver), and he isn't afraid to make his voice heard. He, and his city, are basking in the national spotlight this summer as the Democratic National Convention, which he helped woo, comes to Denver. I recently asked Mayor Hickenlooper about his transitions and about politics in the region.

NewWest.Net: You're an East Coast guy, from Pennsylvania, right? Product of a small, East Coast liberal arts college?

Mayor Hickenlooper: Yup

NW: How did you choose to be a Westerner? How did that happen?
 

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This January, room reservation numbers spiked at the Sanders Bed & Breakfast in Helena. And more recently, the family-owned business, which advertises exclusively on the Internet, has had a spate of drop-ins.

Bobbi Uecker's visitors have taught her "Thank you" in German, French and Russian and even Kurdish. That's all the foreign language she knows, and it's just enough to get along, she said.

European and Asian tourists have sought the Mountain West in record numbers this year; they expect a lot, and with good reason. With the U.S. dollar trading at historic lows, there’s hardly been a better time for travelers with pockets full of colorful, foreign bills. 

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An Appreciation

Eleven years ago, long after the journalistic style he championed in the 1960s had become mainstream, even old-school, my teacher, the legendary magazine editor Clay Felker, asked me to prepare some photocopies of an old Tom Wolfe story about William Shawn and the New Yorker. I was a second-year graduate student in journalism at UC Berkeley; my student job, a plum, was as Clay's research assistant. That meant, aside from the occasional stint at the school's copier, that Clay and his wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, generously and often treated me to dinner at their beautiful home in the Oakland Hills and at many a jazz bar and sushi restaurant in the Bay Area.

Back then, Clay often wore beige or yellow suits made of light cloth - what I thought of as rich-man's New York City lunch attire - and baseball caps to shelter his head. Sometimes he seemed a bit wobbly. Now and then, he would proclaim things that seemed, to my untested ears, a bit too simplistic, or just plain bad. What I saw as his celebrity fetish seemed boring. Once, he insisted I write, as my master's thesis, a long story on Internet gambling, which he predicted would become a huge business. To my mind, the idea lacked the human scope I yearned to write about. Plus, I doubted his business acumen. Internet gambling? How lame. Years later, it's obvious that I was wrong.
 

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The first full issue is hitting newsstands

There are two ways to subscribe to the new quarterly magazine, The New West: Click here for the questionnaire for a free subscription. You can also subscribe for $9.95 a year by clicking here.

In the Spring Issue and online here:
Montana’s Cash Cowboy
Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
Essay: The Family Farm, Version 2.0
Essay: Tracks Across A Landscape
Have Your Ranch & Develop It, Too
Design Showcase: The Big and Little of Western Building
Cabela’s Country?
Stuff It: Can Wolf Hunting Help Conserve the Species?
Traffic Perplexes New Western Communities
Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
Revenge of the Resource Economy
Spotlight North Idaho: On the Agenda: Youth, Growth & Silver
Spotlight North Idaho: Players of the Panhandle
Spotlight North Idaho: Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom
 

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