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Essays

  • Gunning with the in-laws

    Jonathan Thompson learns to love guns – and to fear them even more than he did before.

  • Are tomorrow’s ghost towns sprouting today?

    Alan Kesselheim wonders if rising gas prices and global warming will one day turn our sprawling suburbs into empty ghost towns.

  • The good and bad of peak-bagging

    Steven Albert – like John Muir before him – loves the thrill of climbing fourteeners, even if it’s sometimes a guilty pleasure.

  • The brief but wonderful return of Cathedral in the Desert

    Utah’s drought gives proof that Glen Canyon’s Cathedral in the Desert is still in liquid storage underneath Lake Powell

  • I say: Good riddance to bad billboards

    Wyoming’s billboards are ugly, and probably outdated, too

  • “W” in 2004: Taking stock of wilderness at 40

    As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, it’s time we got back to a realistic attitude about proposed wilderness, saving actual places, no matter how small they are, instead of holding out for mega-proposals

  • The Land of the Dry

    A Westerner makes the disconcerting discovery that as we age, the high, dry West we love isn't so good for our moisture-loving bodies, and the only cure is a trip to the beach.

  • Winter Prayer

    Snowshoeing alone at night in the forest, a woman thinks – and prays – about the friends she loves, and the families they worry about.

  • The great wilderness compromise

    Both sides of the contentious debate over a proposed Idaho wilderness bill invoke Howard Zahniser, father of the Wilderness Act -- and both sides have a point.

  • I fell into a burning ring of fire

    There’s nothing like a campfire to soothe and lift the soul

  • Shear Pleasure

    A photo essay follows Matt Smith and the other New Zealanders who make up the company Shear Pleasure as they travel Montana, visiting sheep ranches, shearing sheep, and drinking hard at the end of the day

  • Dina's Place

    An 8-year-old named Dina leads the author down to her own "special place" by the Big Sioux River on the Indian reservation that is home to the troubled child

  • Farewell, whoopers, Western skies aren't big enough for you

    The last whooping crane west of the Mississippi is dead, and the skies of the West are poorer for the loss

  • From the backcountry to the building zoo

    Robin Pam and Erin Beller remember an adventurous summer spent documenting the historic structures of Yosemite National Park.

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