The Legend of Billy Poole

Phyllis Erck's small office in downtown Missoula has a poster-sized photo of the smiling face of her son Billy Poole.

Last January 22nd, at 28, Billy skied a line down Big Cottonwood Canyon near Salt Lake City, as a Warren Miller Entertainment film crew captured the scene. Billy jumped a cliff, something he had done many times before. This time he hit a small boulder. A short while later, he was dead -- the first skier to die in the production of a Warren Miller ski film.

That moment has become a fulcrum in Phyllis' life. There was the time before, and there is now. His death has tinted every moment, every conversation his mother can recall having had with her son, especially those times - usually when he talked to his mother via cell phone - after he had brushed against his own mortality in the pursuit of his dream to ski as a professional.

My Own Club Med

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.

Beyond the Photos, the Real Magic of Crow Fair

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.

Politics in the West

An Interview with Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper

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?

West to World: Welcome Yen, Euro and Pound

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.

An Appreciation

Clay Felker, Master of the Magazine

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.

The first full issue is hitting newsstands

The New West Magazine: Premiere Issue Hits Newsstands, Mailboxes

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

housing in the west

Your Stories of Mortgage Woe

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

From The New West magazine

Cabela’s Country?

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.