The prism of clear river water can distort and magnify the size of a fish, an effect amplified by adrenaline and nostalgia. Still, I remember one fish big enough to shake my whole view of the world.

 I was of that tender age when one believes one’s father to be capable of anything except failure. Dad and I were camping along a headwater tributary of Idaho’s Clearwater River.

The trout rose from the shadows of the glassy waters, beyond reach of my childlike casts. It dashed after my dad’s spinner, but never struck. My mind’s eye sees that fish flashing bright and infuriating until the rich evening light faded to dark.

The fish made my old man mortal. That was my introduction to a bull trout, apex predator of the Columbia River Basin.

 Today, I live in the stronghold of the bull trout – the Kootenai and Flathead Drainages of western Montana. I’ve watched as the legendary run from Flathead Lake crashed, and another at Swan Lake drifts into trouble. I’ve also seen the species go from obscurity to headlines when it was listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Still, in Montana waters where the species is holding its own, one may catch -- and even keep and eat -- bull trout. I believe that’s a good thing, and shows the inherent flexibility of the Endangered Species Act.

It surprises many that fishermen are still allowed to pursue bull trout under the Endangered Species Act, that notorious “atomic sledgehammer” of a law.

DALLESPORT, Wash. – On April 25, 2012, representatives from four tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Army Corps of Engineers all stood by the Columbia River to mark the end of a construction project both useful and symbolic. It was the completion of the 31st -- and final -- fishing access site on the river, giving tribes the ability to use their traditional fishing grounds and village sites, which they had lost access to due to dams on the river.

The moment harkened back to another gathering, that of the Bonneville Dam’s fiftieth anniversary in 1987, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration threw a big celebration called, “Roll on, Columbia,” immortalized earlier in Woody Guthrie’s ballad about the dam.

Dignitaries arrived from near and far. Hundreds joined the VIPs to celebrate the first of eight federal dams on the Columbia/Snake river system dedicated Sept. 28, 1937. Somehow the Corps and the BPA forgot to invite the Indians displaced by the hydroelectric power.

They came anyway.

But the four Columbia River treaty tribes, the Umatilla, Yakama, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce didn’t join the revelers. Instead they set up their tee pees and an oversized drum on the Washington side of the project and took up a 50-hour vigil, mourning lost salmon, and their river way of life.

By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House

This spring, to fulfill a friend’s birthday wish, we traveled from Colorado into Utah, dropped south off of I-70 near Green River on Utah Highway 24, and drove about 30 miles before leaving the pavement. Our destination was the West Rim trailhead in the Horseshoe Canyon Unit of Canyonlands National Park. To get there we bumped and lurched over 30 miles of washboard dirt road, the final few miles of which reminded me of my last dentist appointment. 

Once parked, we hoofed it across the benchlands and over slickrock domes, weaving around pinyon and juniper, then dropped about 750 feet down into the canyon on an old stock trail. From there, we trudged along the sandy wash bottom for miles to the Great Gallery, an astonishing panel of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs unlike anything I’d ever seen. One large, ethereal figure, painstakingly painted on the Navajo sandstone and standing nearly eight feet high, raises goosebumps in my recollection.

It took some effort to reach the Great Gallery and we saw just a handful of people over several hours, one of whom was a national park ranger. Its remoteness, and the quiet that enables introspection there, is part of what makes a visit to Horseshoe Canyon an uncommon and moving experience. 

But a debate that’s spanned a decade in Utah, and may soon come to a head, could make places like Horseshoe Canyon more accessible to the masses by leveling, widening and/or paving historic “highways.” Local government argues it’s a necessity, but wilderness watchers are worried that fragile desert ecosystems and archaeological treasures are at risk.

So there’s this enduring stereotype about English teachers. We like cats. In my experience, it’s mostly true – among my colleagues (the nice ones anyway), a reliable conversation topic is always the latest amusing cat story/photo. There are other stereotypes also: yes, we do Tweet in complete sentences. But for the purposes of this post, I’m sticking with the cats. If you’re not a cat person or English teacher, please bear with me; I promise there are some Western environmental implications that will emerge shortly.   

First, the background: one of my earliest posts for High Country News, in October, 2010, was a narrative about the death of my outdoor cat Finley and a reflection on the ethics of keeping cats outdoors, given their less-than-ideal impact on the environment. While it was rather far afield from my assignment at the time to write about environmental justice (the human variety), the HCN editors were kind enough to run it, and it received quite a lot of thoughtful comments. The commenters’ remarks, taken as a whole, represent a snapshot of what is to this day a lively debate about cats’ actual impact on birds and other fauna. Some statistics project an astronomical figure; others question those numbers. Still, if you’ve seen little Muffin with a terrified, thrashing hummingbird in his mouth, it’s not a pleasant sight.

Anyway, this begs the question: does keeping kitty indoors resolve all green concerns? If you’ve been following the cat litter debate (I confess I hadn’t been), you know that the answer is no.

By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House

I’m embarrassed to say that, in the decade I’ve lived on the Colorado Front Range, I’d never been to the Pawnee National Grasslands; that is, until last week. With mountains in my rear-view, I drove east from Fort Collins. Before long, I crossed the border into Weld County (called “Upstate Colorado” as I came to learn) and, after passing the Bison Breath bar in the tony town of Ault, I was on the Pawnee Pioneer Trail.

The land settled into rolling hills of gold and green and pockets of metallic-grey virga hung in the sky. Red-tailed hawks perched on fence posts and lark buntings darted upward then plummeted back toward the earth. Near-dry arroyos accompany small pockets of cottonwoods. There are homesteads with wrought-iron arches proudly marking ranch entrances —the legacy of pioneers who survived the Dust Bowl in the 1930s—and the tumbled-down remnants of the ones who did not. Here the PNG is interspersed with private land in a checkerboard of preserve bordered in spots by cattle munching on rangeland or farms with bales of hay stacked toward the heavens.

Here and there, poking up from the plains like giant, lit cigarettes are gas flares, burning off “waste” from oil drilling operations. The oil and gas game in Weld County is part of the Niobrara play, a rich shale deposit that lies beneath more than 8,000 square miles of northeast Colorado, northwest Kansas, southwest Nebraska, and southeast Wyoming. The formation is made up of layers of shale (where the oil formed) and limestone (where the oil collected) that were deposited 90 million years ago when a vast, inland sea covered most of the West. The wells lie on both private and public land and, out here, it’s hard to tell which is which.

"Rants from the Hill" are Michael Branch's monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada's western Great Basin desert.

Desolate as their reputation remains among people who are looking for a handy place to test weapons or dispose of nuclear waste, American deserts have had as allies an impressive bunch of talented, passionate writers. Among these lyrical defenders I’d include Wallace Stegner, Cactus Ed Abbey, Ellen Meloy, Ann Zwinger, Leslie Marmon Silko, Charles Bowden, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Terry Tempest Williams. And at the headwaters of this dry river of sparkling prose I’d place Mary Austin, the early-twentieth-century writer who once described arid landscapes as “forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.” We don’t need to agree on what God might be to recognize how powerfully this expresses the exhilarating experience of desertness. In her 1903 book The Land of Little Rain, Austin writes of the desert that “There are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers.”

As a desert dweller myself, I’m fascinated by Austin’s geographical determinism—by her conviction that folks who live in the desert long enough are profoundly shaped by it. Out here in Silver Hills we’re buffeted by uncontrollable desert forces, from aridity, wind, and snow to earthquakes and fire. But we’re also profoundly influenced by the crisp, thin air and the unique quality of the light, by the unforgiving openness of the land and the monstrous silence it engenders. Lately I’ve been thinking about this towering desert silence, and how it might be shaping us even as we speak, or choose not to. I’ve long observed that raven and coyote talk more than we laconic Silver Hillsians do. The few folks scattered along our rural road seem to have tacitly agreed that words are best left in town, and out here we ration them as we do whiskey when we’re snowed in for too long. To illustrate how this desert silence has shaped us, I offer these three small stories of unusual encounters with my rural neighbors.

The first occurred atop our home mountain, whose base is several miles west of the Ranting Hill, and whose summit ridge sits a little under 8,000 feet. To appreciate this story you must first understand that in a decade of walking these hills, canyons, and valleys—a total of over 10,000 miles logged in all seasons and all weathers—I have seen a grand total of two recreational hikers. When you run into another walker only every five years or 5,000 miles (whichever comes first), you forget that such an encounter is even possible. Although I walk every single day, presidential elections happen more often than I see another desert rat like myself out in these dry, high wilds. One June morning my dog and I had climbed the 2,000-foot grade to the mountaintop, and were picking our way south along the boulder-strewn knife edge of the summit ridge. The wind was howling, the views were spectacular, and we were—if I may presume to speak for the dog—very happy. As we cleared a rough notch in the summit ridge I looked up and saw, to my great surprise, a guy about a hundred yards ahead, making his way toward me along the ridge, and also accompanied by a dog. I thought to myself how unlikely this meeting was, and how much we two must have in common. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what I should say to him, since life in Silver Hills has taught me respect for a kind of inviolable solitude that now seemed oddly endangered by this chance meeting. At last we were almost face to face on the ridge. The guy looked at me and smiled. “Hey,” he said. “Hey,” I replied, smiling back. Neither of us even broke stride.

U.S. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, got two differing views about Browns Canyon when he met with constituents and hiked in the area during the congressional Easter recess.
 
The meetings were in Chaffee County in central Colorado. The Arkansas River flows through Browns Canyon, which sits between Salida and Buena Vista. It may well be the most popular whitewater rafting course in America.
 
Udall was soliciting input on two separate but related proposals. One is to designate the canyon and some surrounding land a national monument, and the other is to designate wilderness on the east side, from the railroad tracks that parallel the river up to the ridge that separates Chaffee and Park counties.
 
Although most national monuments are created by presidential proclamation under the Antiquities Act of 1906 (which allows the president to set aside federal land), some have been created by Congress, and Udall said he would prefer to go that route.
 
Congress is unlikely to pass it, though, without the approval of the relevant congressman, and Browns Canyon sits in the district of Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Springs Republican who's yet to display any public interest in protecting Browns Canyon. "But Lamborn had said he's willing to talk about it," Udall said.

By P.J. Hill

Last Saturday was roundup and branding day at my ranch in the Madison River Valley, about 20 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. Neighbors came to help and I put the P J (my registered brand) on the left side of my calves. As I carefully placed the irons on each calf (yes, they are hot, and yes, there is short term pain but it seems to subside quickly) I was reminded of why branding came to work so well in the West.

In the Old West a statewide registration of brands developed rapidly. Often a brand registration system was one of the first pieces of legislation a territory would pass (for more details, see Anderson and Hill’s The Not So Wild, Wild West). Those registrations continue today. You can go to the Montana Brand Registry and find that if a cow has a P on the left rib and a J on the left hip, that cow belongs to the P J Ranch. Or, a PJ on the left shoulder of a horse establishes my clear claim to that horse. I can issue you a bill of sale if you buy one of my horses or cows, and that serves a proof of a legitimate transfer of rights.

This system works well for the people in white hats, my neighbors who want to know who a stray belongs to, and against those in black hats, the rustlers who might want to steal my livestock. The state maintains the registration and enforces ownership claims. And I can use the existing court system to enforce my property rights.

Earth Day was once again full of stark warnings about global doom and scolds over my level of recycling and my carbon footprint. So I went fishing.

In particular, I took my 8-year-old to an old gravel pit that has been landscaped into a pond and stocked with rainbow trout straight from the hatchery. One side the pond is flanked by a dense thicket of birch and poplar, the other by abandoned trailers and Quonset huts. It’s not exactly Thoreau’s view of Walden Pond, but on a nice spring day it did the trick.

We arrived to see a pair of drake wood ducks (once an endangered species themselves) spar in the air over the pond territory. There are still cottonwood trunks big enough to host their nests in this urban river bottom. Overhead, an osprey turned on a wingtip, just returned north from warmer climes. Osprey once were nearly wiped out by DDT that weakened their eggshells, but have staged a comeback.

I pinched the barbs off the hooks and we impaled salmon eggs for bait. Before long, Aidan’s bobber bobbed and he felt the bite. He reeled in eagerly to find the bait taken. I hooked a few and let him reel them in, only to release them again. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching a trout dart away from your relaxing fingers.

Once I glanced at his line to notice the bobber going berserk. “Reel!” I shouted. “You’ve got a fish on!” He didn’t so much crank the reel handle as walk backwards, but he landed his first fish, solo. It was a moment to remember. I let him decide, and we released that one, too.

I don’t relish this role, you know. If you happened to have read some of my other posts you may have noticed a certain pattern. Sure, there’s the occasional outlier column that addresses toilets, or aspen trees, or what have you, but on a pretty regular basis I’m the lady who sheepishly discusses all the nut-ball and downright disturbing stuff that goes on in my home state, Arizona.

I was really hoping that this could be another outlier week, where I could write about something pleasant and hopeful (or at least amusing) on the Western environmental front. Believe me, I looked, but around here most of those kind of stories have been obscured by news about the latest round of scandals, subpoenas, and indictments of local officials. Squeezed in between are the antics of the loony state legislature, who must pass a budget very soon but cannot tear themselves away from such issues as birth control, bibles in schools, and seizure of federal lands. Regarding the latter, I can modestly boast that for once, the craziness isn’t all homegrown.