About Hal

In one guise or another, Hal Clifford has been a journalist pretty much non-stop since 1984. He is presently the executive editor of Orion magazine (www.orionmagazine.org), in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, but most of his journalistic history was written in the American West. From 1986 to 1992 he participated in America’s smallest daily newspaper war as a foot soldier, lieutenant, rear admiral and, eventually, general (manager) at The Aspen Daily News, where the motto was (and is), “If You Don’t Want It Printed, Don’t Let It Happen.”

From 1992 to 2003 he was largely self-employed. He wrote (and was paid for) three books and worked as a freelance journalist for more than 60 publications, including Outside, the New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and many you’ve never heard of. He joined Orion in 2003, six months after telling his wife, the writer Mary Lou Bendrick (http://www.loubendrick.com), that “the only thing that will get me to move east of the Mississippi is a job at Orion magazine.”

In 2007 Hal began work as creative director and writer on the documentary film "The Next, Best West". See the trailer here, learn more about the film here, and the production company Coldstream Creative here. Go on, get really excited and decide to donate lots of money to the project! We need it!

His work has been acknowledged in several ways besides paychecks. He was a finalist for the 2002 Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting and the  2001 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and a top-three finalist for the 2001 Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Environmental Reporting. He was among the writers who created the story package that won a 2000 American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Award given to National Geographic Adventure. He won the 1998 Colorado Press Association First Prize in the “humor” category for a weekly column he wrote for The Aspen Times, and his first book, The Falling Season: Inside the Life and Death Drama of Aspen’s Mountain Rescue Team, won the Colorado Council on the Arts nod (and check!) as 1995’s Best Non-Fiction Book. His most recent book, Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry Is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment, assured that he will never receive a free ski pass again.

He’s a pretty good public speaker and has been on CBS Evening News, Larry King Live, CNN, Saturday Night With Connie Chung, Nick News (Nickelodeon), Search & Rescue (The History Channel), and NBC Nightly News. He’s also been interviewed on Colorado Public Radio, High Country News Radio, High Plains News, BBC 4 Radio, and scores of individual radio stations for various things he has written or done.

He is a licensed private pilot who believes that flight is a faith-based undertaking; a lover of wild places who prefers living out of the back of a pickup truck or backpack; a student of zymurgy; an increasingly addicted fly fisherman; and the dubious holder of a Commonwealth of Massachusetts “license to carry large capacity firearms.” He continues to believe that the best work he ever did was as a volunteer for Mountain Rescue-Aspen, where his charge was “save lives,” and that his second-best job was making maple syrup when he was a teenager, back when it still actually got cold in Massachusetts.

He shares a big Victorian house in the Berkshires with his wife, children, best-friend dog, and a rotating cast of mice, bees, wasps, bats, spiders, and birds. Not to mention the mildew. Or that thing in the basement.