Slideshow

For the rodeo cowboy, speed is everything. A couple of weeks ago, a handful of cowboys gathered at a private arena in Redcrest off the Avenue of the Giants, on a patch of land situated between a forest of tall redwoods and the Eel River. They were there to practice for the upcoming Orick rodeo. […]

When the Sequoia Park Zoo’s oldest and most popular animal rejected food and water and struggled to breathe for a second day, his caretakers made an announcement that riveted the Eureka community: Bill the Chimp was dying. The press release declaring that the 61-year-old chimpanzee was “gravely ill” got instant responses from reporters, and when […]

“Ramone’s Bakery.” “Hi, may I talk to your baker?” Jon Norris, the daytime baking production manager at Ramone’s on Harrison in Eureka, gets on the phone. “Do you make thimbleberry pie? Or tarts, or scones, or cookies, or … ?” “I don’t know anybody who uses thimbleberries,” says Norris. “You couldn’t get enough of ’em […]

You might see them busking on the street in Old Town, picking and singing in cafés and clubs, at open mic nights, jamming on a back porch, in a garage or a living room or on some festival stage — musicians of a wide range of ages and caliber living the folk life in their […]

A couple of weeks ago, one of the many small intergovernmental chat shops that hammer out Humboldt County public policy behind the scenes met for the final time. This particular working group had been meeting for over a year. Its goal was to study ways to build a hiking and biking trail between Eureka and […]

If you’re like us, these questions plague you: What is it about karaoke — singing other people’s songs, often badly — that brings tons of people to bars every night all over the country? Who are these people, what exactly do they do and why do they do it? And most importantly, is it physically […]

H umboldt County is a “natural” sort of place. And we’re not just talking forests, rivers, seashores and mountains — when it comes to food, we’re ahead of the curve on the suddenly hip natural trend. We have fruit and vegetable farmers who have been completely organic for decades, dairies and cattle ranchers producing grass-fed […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]