I crept along, trying to keep my skittish white pickup on the narrow road that climbs above Bear River Ridge while peering the few visible feet ahead into a white swirly fog. One missed turn at a rash 15 mph, it seemed, and I’d be floating free, descending through the foggy gray twilight to a […]
Heidi Walters
Heidi Walters worked as a staff writer at the North Coast Journal from 2005 to 2015.
Posted inNews
Trinity Terroir
At the Winnett family’s winery, east of the Trinity River, tiny green beads of fruit clustered on the young plants in the vineyard. Halfway down one of the grassy aisles between rows of tethered leafy vines, you could stand and stare out across the plunging landscape toward Friday Ridge and imagine the past. Timber country, […]
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Too much power?
It is a situation that must send shivers of anticipatory (even smug?) delight down the spines of all the peak-oil prophets who’ve been warning us we’d better figure out how to hunker down and self-sustain. We’re talking about the boom in renewable energy exploration here in Humboldt County — the "new gold rush," as David […]
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On the home front
For the past two years, up to 28 stakeholders have been meeting behind closed doors to negotiate a settlement that will provide a framework for a host of Klamath River projects aimed at fixing water quality and quantity problems throughout the entire river basin. The meetings have been secretive – the better to allow the […]
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Born again
On a sunny, nearly hot spring afternoon in early April, Susan Penn was setting up easels inside the Northcoast Environmental Center’s headquarters and placing paintings on them. The office was chaotic – boxes everywhere, some with giant stuffed salmon swimming atop them. How much of this stuff would make it to the new headquarters, up […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
420 at the Clam
Regional celebrants of 4/20 last Friday may have felt torn between two settings: forest, or beach? Several thousand chose forest, converging upon Arcata Community Forest’s Redwood Park – one obvious reason, we’d think, being that apparently the greatest height to which a redwood tree can, in theory, grow before the water poops out is 420 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Tall Ships
Had Captain Jack Aubrey had the occasion to board the Lady Washington, docked in Humboldt Bay since last weekend, and take it for a spin around the bay, his face might have darkened with dismay at the brig’s unhealthy complement of civilians bumping about, getting in the sailors’ way, holding soda pop cans, answering cell […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Beachcombing
It seemed like a good place to look for the dead. The tide was ebbing, leaving behind orange crab casings, their goathead patterns staring blankly up at the gray-milk sky; huge clam shells jutting from the sand like small white tombstones; and sand dollar skeletons slowly fading from purple to bleach-bone white. A bitter north […]
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Get Your Glitter On
If you hiked to the top floor of the Eureka Municipal Auditorium last Saturday night, it might have made you dizzy. No, not the height – though it was plummetous – but the action down below on the dance floor. Nearly 2,000 people had unwittingly formed themselves into a pulsing neon arrow (sans the real […]
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No Work? No Workers!
Vince Campbell, he just got sick of it. He’d worked for Eel River Sawmills for 20 years as the environment and safety director. A good job. But for years, it seemed, the wood products industry had been crashing around him. A mill closed here, another mill closed there. When it was Eel River’s time to […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Logger Heaven
There it was, corralled behind a thin rope inside a grassy expanse at Redwood Acres: the retired figure-conscious logger’s dreambike. No, nothing noisy or fume-spewing, chrome-boasting or rubber-laying – those kinds of bikes are for sissies. This was a deceptively delicate, spindly blond wood affair, stationary, with the playful look of an old Flexible Flyer© […]
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The goose conundrum
Hear that gabbling in the sky, that high rambunctious cry as if an entire city of laughing children is flying over? Or see that shifting V-tipped string of black stretched south to north? And another and another? Early in the morning, we stop what we’re doing to watch banner after noisy banner of Aleutian geese […]