How Tyrone Kelley’s roots influence his forest management Photos by Heidi Walters Laramie, Wyo., summer 1985. The bus shuddered along at a crawl and then stopped, brakes exhaling sharply — whshhhh . The driver pulled a lever, folding the door in with a thud, and stumped down the steps to the ground. A passenger, a […]
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On the Inside
The first thing you notice when you walk inside the Humboldt County Correctional Facility is the smell. It’s overpoweringly sterile. “Pine-Sol,” says Sgt. Dean Flint, walking briskly across the gleaming tile of the booking station. “This place gets mopped three times a day.” As one might imagine, people are not at their best when the […]
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Battle for Boomer Jack
IT ALL STARTED WITH A DOG. Lincoln Kilian says he originally unearthed the story of Boomer Jack sorting through clippings in his job as an HSU librarian, a job he’d had since 1966. In 1977, he was transferred to the Humboldt Room, which houses the library’s special historical collections. Part of his assignment in the […]
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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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Summer Activities for Kids
Humboldt County has a wealth of organized summer activities for children. This is just a survey of what’s available. For more information, contact your school, church or pick up a copy of the *Humboldt Kid’s Digest at a branch of the Humboldt County Library, the Eureka Chamber of Commerce or county agencies. Most of these […]
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Two Cities
In January of this year, journalism students in a class in investigative reporting at HSU taught by Marcy Burstiner explored the concerns of people in two different Humboldt County towns: Fortuna and Arcata. What drew them was a troubling statistic from the 2000 US Census; despite the obvious differences of these two cities — one […]
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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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Mission to Omaha
Dressed in traditional regalia, with woven baskets on their heads and earthy symbols of renewal in hand, about 20 Native Americans chanted, danced and prayed in a circle. They surrounded Karuk tribe member Kathy McCovey, a medicine woman, sitting next to a fire burning angelica root, her eyes closed, meditating. Their shell-encased skirts made 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 […]
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People Project protest ends
Two Sunday mornings ago, my mother returned from walking to church in town. "There’s a Hooverville down the street," she told me. My mom is just old enough to remember the shanty towns that popped up in urban areas during the Great Depression, where homeless families lived in makeshift shelters made from packing crates and […]
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Prescription for trouble
While visiting Sacramento a few weeks ago, Patient X, a Humboldt County resident who asked that her name not be published, went to a medical marijuana dispensary to fill her prescription, which she uses for migraine headaches. In her two years as a card-carrying medical cannabis user, the college-aged woman purchased the drug in dispensaries […]