In Salt Lake City and other Western communities, billboard companies battle local democracy. Also in this issue: Buying out grazing permits to solve public lands conflicts, mom-and-pop energy companies risk a lot to find new reserves, A lawsuit raises questions about how far environmentalists should go to keep wilderness ‘untrammeled.’, and much more.
Residents of Montana’s High Plains are angry – but not at the real threats
I was born in eastern Montana, on a dusty stretch of nearly riverless high plains north of the Bull Mountains. I came of age there, in a country that has never not been true frontier, in the late ’80s — during the farm crisis, that notoriously bad old time in rural America. In much of…
A mom-and-pop oil company prospects for gas in central Wyoming
In 1954, the Empire State Oil Company drilled a gas well in central Wyoming. The well turned out dry but showed some gas in an unexpected shallow formation. It wasn’t worth much at the time, so Empire plugged the well and abandoned it. A geologist named John Wold, however, believed the area merited further exploration.…
Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Salt Lake City, UtahDriving around Salt Lake City on a pleasant day last June in a plain white city government car, Doug Dansie pauses at the corner of two streets, 1300 South and 300 East. This is a residential neighborhood where old trees tower over the houses. But there’s no house on this particular corner…
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini…
The logging town of Darrington, Wash., fights to save a fire lookout
On a blustery summer night, the Red Top Tavern in Darrington, Wash., is nearly empty. A neon Hamm’s beer sign illuminates a picture of a local logger reclining in the bucket of an excavator with the caption “Redneck Hot Tub.” Above it hangs a crosscut saw, just like in every bar in every other Northwest…
Billboard corporations and other big industries make their own rules
There were rumors of night-time guerrilla activity when I lived in Tucson, Ariz., during the 1980s. Under cover of darkness, people scurried around using chainsaws and flammable liquids to destroy billboards. Ed Abbey, the edgy desert author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, was reportedly among them; so were some other founders of the…
Detente in the rancher v. environmentalist grazing wars?
If you’ve been trolling the news recently, you might think that ranchers still reign supreme over the federal estate, despite the fact that the number of cattle and sheep on public lands has declined by more than half since the 1950s. In November, for example, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a…
From the Old World to the Old West: A review of The Little Bride
The Little BrideAnna Solomon314 pages, softcover: $15. Riverhead, 2011. Anna Solomon’s fascinating first novel The Little Bride begins in Russia in the 1880s, when Minna Losk, a 16-year-old orphan, signs up to become a mail-order bride. After the death of her father, Minna worked for a while as a maid for a once-wealthy woman. Now,…
How much time does Congress spend discussing the issues you care about?
Ten months before the election, news outlets are already jammed with political jabber. One way to put it in perspective is to chart the attention Congress has paid to your particular issues over time. Capitol Words, an online visualization tool created by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, assembles the daily contents of the Congressional Record…
Huntsman: not worthy
Obama should ditch Vice President Joe Biden for Jon Huntsman in the 2012 presidential campaign? It is hard to believe that High Country News would suggest such a move (HCN, 12/26/11 & 1/09/12, “A Westerner for the White House”). First of all, Huntsman resigned as ambassador to China to run against the president who appointed…
Move over, Ed Abbey
Craig Childs is a treasure, and his essay in the last issue is but another jewel (HCN, 12/26/11 & 1/09/12, “Stranger in these parts”). I have been enjoying his words for a decade and have now come to realize that he is my favorite Southwestern writer since Ed Abbey. I think that Ed, whom I…
No more stopgap solutions
The dispute between the Environmental Protection Agency and Mora Mutual Domestic Water and Sewer Association brings to the fore an issue that plagues many poor rural communities (HCN, 12/12/11, “Clean Water Conundrum”). Both septic systems and treatment plants distract from the real issue of human waste removal at the point of disposal — the household.…
Shadow Wolves track down smugglers on the Arizona-Mexico border
The technologies border police use to protect our boundaries range from the historic (mustangs trained for mounted patrols) to the futuristic. (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency plans to nearly triple its fleet of unmanned surveillance Predator B aircraft.) But nothing can track a smuggler quite like a human being. The Shadow Wolves, a…
Small dairies raise big questions
In the article “Milk and Water Don’t Mix” by Stephanie Paige Ogburn (HCN, 11/28/11), the dairy industry was made out to be the bad guy, which it is in its present form as a huge, polluting concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. But a combination of trends has created a monster from what used to…
A second chance at love: A review of Liberty Lanes
Liberty LanesRobin Troy192 pages, softcover: $22.University of Nevada Press, 2011. Robin Troy’s second novel, Liberty Lanes, is a big-hearted story of ordinary people, their hopes, secrets and longings. It begins quietly in a bowling alley in a small Montana town, where Nelson Moore, a 74-year-old stalwart of the senior bowling league, waits for an early…
Welcome, Eric and Kati
Eric Strebel, our soft-spoken new Web developer, joined the HCN team Dec. 1. He’s been working with computers since 1978, when he got his first personal computer. Eric eventually developed his programming hobby into a livelihood. Prior to joining us, he freelanced and operated Mountain West Communication’s website for about a decade. Eric enjoys fishing,…
What the flock?
I just finished reading HCN’s Dec. 12th issue, and discovered, on the back page, within Betsy Marston’s letter-perfect column no less, the unexpected: an aggregation of sheep referred to as a “herd.” “Holy sufferin’ sheep dip,” I blurted. “How can it be?” But then as I backtracked through the same report, I discovered that I’d…
A former Green Mountain fire lookout tells his story
“Lightbulb” Winders recounts his experiences as the last lookout on Green Mountain, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness near Darrington, Washington.
Beauty and the Beast
It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part…