High Country News

Overview

High Country News is a nonprofit, reader-supported magazine based in Paonia, Colorado, that has covered the American West since 1970, reporting on public lands, water, wildlife, climate and Indigenous affairs across 12 western states including Alaska, with a staff of about 30 (Editor and Publisher). It is, in the words of Colorado College, one of America’s most respected environmental publications, dubbed by some “the conscience of the West” (Colorado College). Its distinctive recent chapter is a deliberate shift from writing about Indigenous communities for a largely white environmental audience to writing for Indigenous readers themselves — a shift that produced its most consequential investigation, “Land-Grab Universities,” and that shapes its coverage of fights like the one over Chaco Canyon (5280).

From a shoestring paper to the “conscience of the West”

Tom Bell, an educator and rancher-turned-environmentalist, bought Camping News Weekly in August 1969 and renamed it High Country News a year later, with its first issue appearing in 1970 (Texas Observer). The paper nearly died in its infancy: in 1973 Bell announced he could do no more and would have to shut it down, only for money-stuffed envelopes from readers to pour in and save it, and a year later he sold his stake (Texas Observer). His successors, the Texas Observer noted, struggled to keep the paper afloat even as they turned out one strong issue after another over the next 40 years (Texas Observer).

The magazine built its reputation on the unglamorous, consequential business of the West: water, public lands, grazing, mining, wilderness, wildlife and growth (Colorado College). By 2008 it had 23,500 subscribers, including most of the congressional delegations of the western states, and its prestige had been bolstered by a 1987 George Polk Award for an investigative series on water-use policies in 10 western states (Colorado College). Its reporting has repeatedly moved policy rather than merely describing it: after a fracking-site explosion in Colorado in 2017, its multimedia account of the fear and alarm that followed won the National Press Foundation’s 2019 Thomas L. Stokes Award for energy and environment writing, and judges noted that fracking accidents like the Windsor fire had prompted the Colorado legislature to pass a bill giving cities and counties more voice in regulating oil and gas development (National Press Foundation).

The business model behind that independence is reader support rather than advertising. Editor and Publisher reported in February 2025 that the magazine had about 20,000 paying subscribers, a staff of about 30 — around two-thirds of them editorial — and some 6 million website impressions in 2024, operating on revenue generated mostly from donations, grants and other contributions (Editor and Publisher). Its coverage area spans nearly 2 million square miles, and about half of that land is public land — national forests, Bureau of Land Management grazing lands, wildlife refuges or military lands (Editor and Publisher). Subscriber counts have moved over time rather than standing still: 5280 reported 37,000 subscribers in 2020, against the roughly 20,000 paying subscribers reported in 2025 (5280; Editor and Publisher).

Year	Recognition	For
1987	George Polk Award	Investigative series on water-use policies in 10 western states
2019	Thomas L. Stokes Award	Reporting on the aftermath of a Colorado fracking-site explosion
2021	George Polk Award, Education Reporting	“Land-Grab Universities”

The Indigenous Affairs desk and “Land-Grab Universities”

High Country News created an Indigenous affairs desk in 2017 that published dozens of stories from journalists, authors and experts across Indian Country, with other non-Native outlets following with new beats of their own (Buffalo’s Fire). The desk’s stated mission was to write for, rather than about, Indigenous readers — gaining their trust and moving past the tropes journalists tended to flock to in Indian Country, like dying languages or alcoholism (5280). Its first leader was Tristan Ahtone, an investigative reporter and then-president of the Native American Journalists Association, who came in as a consultant and stayed for three years (5280). Ahtone himself described the magazine’s past record frankly: when it did cover Indigenous affairs, it extracted stories from Indigenous communities but wrote them for a white audience, and the question was whose viewpoint was being centred (5280).

By 2025 the desk was led by Indigenous Affairs editor Sunnie Clahchischiligi, with associate editor Anna Smith focusing on tribal sovereignty and environmental justice and reporter B. “Toastie” Oaster covering, among other topics, “green colonialism” — the critical examination of green-energy projects inside Indigenous communities (Editor and Publisher). Publisher Greg Hanscom told Editor and Publisher that the magazine was among the first non-Native publications in the country to create a desk with a team specifically dedicated to issues of concern to Native communities, led and largely staffed by Native journalists, and that the desk had changed how the whole magazine worked (Editor and Publisher).

The desk’s defining work arrived in March 2020, when Ahtone and historian Robert Lee published “Land-Grab Universities,” reconstructing how the United States funded the land-grant university system with expropriated Indigenous land (University of Cambridge). The investigation located 80,000 parcels scattered across 24 states, identified their Indigenous owners, and traced the endowment profits from dispossession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — 52 universities built on 11 million acres taken through more than 160 land cessions from nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities (University of Cambridge). On 6 April 2020 the magazine launched an interactive website letting the public explore the fully mapped data, and published Lee’s dataset open-source for future researchers and journalists (University of Cambridge). The statistic that travelled furthest is also the one with a documented aftermath: a number of the universities at the heart of the story responded by launching initiatives, changing their land-acknowledgment practices and using the report, website and dataset in their teaching (University of Cambridge). The project won the 2021 George Polk Award for Education Reporting (University of Cambridge). The follow-through continued in partnership with Grist, with reporting on how states own lands on reservations that tribes must pay to use: the joint work found schools, hospitals, prisons and other institutions profiting from land and resources in 79 tribal nations, including Montana’s management of 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023 (Editor and Publisher).

The shift was contested inside the magazine, not just celebrated outside it. Editor-in-chief Brian Calvert, who led the magazine for three and a half years, was invited by publisher Greg Hanscom to resign in late September 2020, and framed the choice facing the magazine starkly: it would either help uphold white supremacy or help undermine it (5280). Former editor Betsy Marston, while praising the Native American coverage, warned that the magazine risked losing readers if it neglected the public lands that had been its core (5280). Hanscom said the staff planned to carry on the changes Calvert set in motion, with the newsroom going fully remote (5280).

Chaco Canyon: the desk’s logic in a live fight

The same editorial logic — Indigenous communities as the protagonists of western land stories, not their backdrop — is visible in the magazine’s coverage of the Greater Chaco fight. In July 2026 the All Pueblo Council of Governors took its campaign for permanent protection of the Greater Chaco landscape to Washington, and High Country News covered the Capitol news conference at which council “chair” Joey Sanchez criticised Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s lack of engagement, saying “we asked for a meeting, but we never got it” (FactsLedger). The event itself, reported by The Paper on 22 July 2026, brought Sanchez and governors from the council’s 20-member Pueblo nations together with New Mexico’s entire congressional delegation outside the U.S. Capitol to urge Burgum to withdraw a proposal revoking Public Land Order 7923, the 2023 order that withdrew about 336,000 acres of federal land around Chaco Culture National Historical Park from new oil and gas leasing for 20 years (The Paper). The delegation also called for the Interior Department’s 14-day public comment period to be extended to 90 days, with meaningful government-to-government consultation with tribes before any decision (The Paper). That is the through-line from “Land-Grab Universities” to Chaco: in both cases the magazine treats the question of who the land was taken from, and who still lives with the consequences, as the story itself rather than its background.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a current publisher, editor-in-chief, staff count or subscriber figure beyond the February 2025 report, and it does not quote the High Country News Chaco article directly, because that article could not be fetched in this environment and the coverage fact rests on the council profile’s record of it. It does not resolve the conflicting July 2026 leadership titles for the All Pueblo Council of Governors — HCN’s “chair” for Joey Sanchez against The Paper’s “Chairman” for the same man at the same event and Native News Online’s “Chairman” for James R. Mountain — and it does not claim that High Country News coverage caused any policy outcome at Chaco or at any land-grant university. It does not state a founding town, which none of the sources read in full confirms, and it does not present any single subscriber figure as current, since the dated figures move from 23,500 in 2008 to 37,000 in 2020 to about 20,000 paying subscribers in 2025 without an explained cause.