Ken Wright

How I almost turned into a time-share sucker

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Essay by Ken Wright

Real-estate – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine

MY FAMILY AND I just got back from Sedona, Ariz., land of piñon-juniper forest, redrock spires, and vortexes said to be spiritual. The only vortex we found, though, was the one our credit card number went into.

We headed down to the self-proclaimed “New Age” capital of the West, thanks to a friend who gave us a free three-day stay at a resort. All we had to do was sit through a short sales pitch for the timeshare program.

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Just Say No to Improvements

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Essay by Ken Wright

Growth – March 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine

FOR TWO YEARS I wrote an environmental column for a small newspaper in western Colorado.

It wasn’t hard work, really. I just rambled on for 600 words each week about the rugged landscape around us and then offered some helpful observations and suggestions: that housing developments really aren’t good elk habitat, that the local ski area is big enough already, that the Forest Service shouldn’t execute one of the area’s last old-growth Ponderosa stands, that the Bureau of Reclamation shouldn’t insert yet another concrete suppository in yet another nearby river, and so on.

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Time for Ben Campbell to switch parties again?

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Letter by Ken Wright

Politics – November 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine

Time for Sen. Campbell to switch parties again?

To the editor:

It seems Sen. Ben “Nighthorse” Campbell is offering the American people a Trojan horse. Last month a Senate committee approved a bill to authorize a water project in Montana — a bill onto which our Senator has attached a rider that would approve the Animas-La Plata Project without public involvement.

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Call me a Sagebrush Patriot

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Essay by Ken Wright

Rural West – September 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine

I live in a fantastic corner of the American West, on the edge of where mountains fall away into canyon-carved desert. I live in one of this area’s mountain valleys, but at mid-morning on this day I find myself on a high above-tree-line pass, taking in a grand sweep of the country. To the east stands a range of peaks, rippling away like the choppy surface of a lake; to my immediate south rises a single massive peak, a great banded pyramid off whose face falls a sloping scree field that sprawls down and away to the rolling foothill forest lands that reach outward and downward through climate zones, from subalpine fir to piñon and juniper, across the rising and falling of foothills and gathering creeks, then across river valleys and canyons to the green valley bottom where squats the nearest town to the west. Looking in that direction from this 11,000-plus-foot perch I can see across dry sage lands for a hundred miles or more, and in that distance I see the wall of a table-top mountain, the blue bodies of three distant mountain ranges, and the dendritic arms of two major river systems.

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A Modest Proposal for the Interior West

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Essay by Ken Wright

Rural West – January 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine

There’s nothing like a good bad dirt road to screen out the faintly interested and to invite in the genuinely interested. And it’s perfectly fair and democratic, open to anyone willing to endure a little inconvenience and discomfort for the sake of getting away from the crowds.

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