New West Network

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.  [more]

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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housing in the west

We want to know, and tell, your stories of mortgage troubles; of upstanding, perhaps, or questionable lenders; and of your trials and tribulations in the housing markets of the Mountain West, from Colorado and Utah to Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and the eastern reaches of Oregon and Washington. We have a lot in common across this region, and we can learn from each other.

If you don't feel comfortable posting your comments below this post, feel free to email me privately at , and I'll be in touch with you shortly. And while you're at it, keep your eye on NewWest.Net and sign up for our new quarterly news magazine at www.newwest.net/magazine. We're doing our best to cut through the rhetoric, the rosy projections from the real estate organizations and the rest of the hard-spun blather to bring you news that's grounded in actual facts.

Thanks.

Bob Struckman
New West magazine editor
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From The New West magazine

For decades, anglers and hunters made pilgrimages to Cabela's, their almost Mecca. They traveled hundreds of miles to places like Mitchell, S.D., to spend a half-day or more and hundreds of dollars on plastic worms, camo comforters, shotgun shell wastebaskets, and thousands of other items -- and, of course, devote an hour or two to lusting over firearms in the famous gun libraries or gawking at lunkers swimming in the aquariums. Between pilgrimages, they were sated by the massive catalog and www.cabelas.com.

One reason for the devotion was the sense of community. Cabela's aligned with the sporting public in conservation causes, and customers responded with rare one-of-us support usually reserved for members of the local rod-and-gun club.

But as Cabela's expanded over the years with more and bigger stores, it attracted a raft of competitors such as Bass Pro Shop's Outdoor World Superstores, Gander Mountain, Sportsman's Warehouse and Gart Sports. And then the guys in the boardroom either got worried looking in the rearview mirror or greedy, or both.  [more]

In The New West magazine: Design Showcase

In this "Design Showcase" piece from The New West magazine, two of the West's smaller homes stack up against one of the West's log mansions -- showcasing there are different interpretations of having your own "little" piece of the West.

First, is two microhomes in Montana's Mission Valley, 126 square feet apiece. Each cost about $10,000. Second, is a 9,700-square-food log house in the Yellowstone Club near Big Sky. With a lookout tower and guest quarters, it costs about $15.5 million.   [more]

Essay: In The New West magazine

Even 200 years into the modern American West, it's easy, especially for newcomers to this landscape, to feel as if the grand open spaces are a blank canvas. It can seem, standing on a hillside of sagebrush and grass, as if nothing has ever existed but the ceaseless wind and sky.

In other parts of the country, and the world, the past is present, in ancient stone structures and centuries-old communities. By comparison, vast tracts of the West seem untrammeled, especially in the springtime when the snow has melted, leaving its particularly soggy mark on the grasses and naked soil. You can watch the imprint of your own shoe fill slowly with the shallowest film of water and, when you do, it seems no shoe can ever have stepped there before.

It's a seductive idea, that yours are the first sentient eyes to see this landscape, that your story will be its first, and that your imprint will be the one to endure.  [more]