http://www.newwest.net/magazine/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2008 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:23:17 MDT Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:23:17 MDT http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_new_west_magazine_premiere_issue/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_new_west_magazine_premiere_issue/C555/L555/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:17:00 MDT 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 http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/clay_felker_master_of_the_magazine/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/clay_felker_master_of_the_magazine/C555/L555/ Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:57:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/your_stories_of_mortgage_woe/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/your_stories_of_mortgage_woe/C555/L555/ Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:07:00 MDT 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 robert@newwest.net, 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 robert@newwest.net http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/cabelas_country/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/cabelas_country/C555/L555/ Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:31:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_big_and_little_of_western_building/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_big_and_little_of_western_building/C555/L555/ Thu, 22 May 2008 05:44:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/tracks_across_a_landscape/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/tracks_across_a_landscape/C555/L555/ Mon, 19 May 2008 15:36:01 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/having_your_spread_and_developing_it_too/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/having_your_spread_and_developing_it_too/C555/L555/ Wed, 14 May 2008 12:46:00 MDT The Sand Creek Ranch sits on about 850 acres of Wyoming prairie near the Big Horn Mountains and the small town of Buffalo. It's the kind of place a real estate developer might dream of slicing into pieces of Western paradise. The ranch, like hundreds of others across the Mountain West, is worth far more with cul-de-sacs than cattle. John Jenkins, who 40 years ago helped his newly widowed mother downsize from a large spread on the Powder River to this smaller ranch, has a powerful reason to protect the property and to preserve a portion of its, and his, agricultural heritage. "I want to keep it open. I cast my mother's ashes to the wind out there on the big meadow," says Jenkins, who recently retired after a career as an oilman and political consultant. "But, realistically," he adds, "because I'm a businessman, I know that its highest and best use is really as real estate." http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/montanas_cash_cowboy/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/montanas_cash_cowboy/C555/L555/ Wed, 14 May 2008 09:34:00 MDT If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile. But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business. Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_family_farm_version_20/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_family_farm_version_20/C555/L555/ Fri, 09 May 2008 12:30:00 MDT I spread my sleeping bag on the floor and crumpled my coat for a pillow. I put the bag where my bed used to be. The room still smelled the same. Aside from the echo, there was something homey, something warm, the smell of a vanilla candle still lingering in the empty walls. My brother and I were at the now vacant house for the night. It was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to stay somewhere familiar. The land had sold, but the house hadn’t yet, so we would stay the night on the floor in my old bedroom. Facing me, in the wall, was a small hole about the size of a heel. My brother and I had been fighting about something teenagers fight about and, in a tantrum, my foot connected with the wall. My brother had laughed. I was 16 at the time. I had forgotten about the hole, hidden by a dresser long ago. As I ran my fingers over it one more time, my brother walked in, shaking his head. He always told me I was too sentimental about this place. It’s just a house, just a farm. They’re just walls. It’s just dirt. He didn’t believe it either. http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/real_ranch_living_not_everyone_is_selling_out/C555/L555/ http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/real_ranch_living_not_everyone_is_selling_out/C555/L555/ Thu, 08 May 2008 10:23:00 MDT It's 2:30 a.m., and Bud Boyce, 75, fumbles in the dim light of the pickup cab for the controls of the mounted spotlight. Outside, the beam cuts the blackness, illuminating clouds of warm breath and glassy eyes as it pans from left to right, then back again across a herd of more than 250 Angus-Hereford cows, all pregnant and ready to give birth. The cattle huddle in dark masses. Bud plays the light across them, carefully watching for a cow in labor or a newborn calf. With no signs of a delivery-in-progress and no new calves since the last check three hours ago, he wheels his pickup back toward the house and lurches down the frozen drive. In three hours, he'll do it again. Then, ranch hand Mike Horst will take over. It's a grueling schedule, part of what makes ranching a lifestyle, not a job.