A collection of essays explores the quirky, the mundane and the surreal of our unique West, from coffee-hauling llamas to Navajo tacos and more.
Crane hunt is contested
Idaho approved a sandhill crane hunt last month to appease farmers who are losing barley and potatoes to the birds. The state plans to distribute 20 permits to shoot the lanky, long-necked cranes this September, but it is not yet clear who will do the killing. State officials would like to use the permits to…
Endangered salmon leave rafters dry
In Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area, rafters are butting heads with the U.S. Forest Service over regulations meant to protect endangered chinook salmon. This summer, four rafting companies filed an appeal to a plan that would keep boats away from spawning grounds in the upper Salmon River after late August. They said the Forest Service…
A tree did it
On July 2, a blackout in the West left 2 million people without electricity. The culprit, it turns out, was a cottonwood tree in southeastern Idaho. Or perhaps it was the maintenance folks who allowed this lone tree to grow so close to a power line that electricity jumped to it. When this “flashover” occurred…
Park Service preys on lake trout
At Yellowstone Lake, there’s a new fishing regulation: No matter how many lake trout you catch, you can keep them. In fact, you have to. The compulsory open season is part of a desperate attempt by the Park Service to curb lake trout, a species dumped illegally in the lake (HCN, 9/19/94). Lake trout are…
Yellowstone mine a goner
A year after President Clinton announced his opposition to a proposed gold mine just outside Yellowstone National Park, he delivered the goods. At an Aug. 12 press conference in the park, Clinton announced that Crown Butte Mine Inc. had agreed to give up its mine project in exchange for unspecified real estate valued at no…
Marvel wins a round
Anti-ranching activist Jon Marvel has won a favorable decision from the Idaho Supreme Court on the first state grazing lease that he challenged three years ago. On June 20, Idaho’s highest court ruled that the state Land Board violated the state constitution by awarding a 640-acre grazing lease to a Challis rancher, even though the…
Sowing the red suns of August
This was my dream: I wanted vines obscenely thick with tomatoes, a constellation of what my friend John calls his “red suns of August.” Early Girls and Romas; don’t forget peppers and some cucumbers snaking around my feet as well, and a long hedge of basil. I wanted to walk into the garden, maybe barefoot…
New rules seek to cap canyon flights
GRAND CANYON, Ariz. – Nearly 10 years ago, when Congress set a national goal to restore natural quiet here, surveys indicated that only 43 percent of the park was unaffected by aircraft noise. Now only 31 percent of the park is considered quiet, defined as free from aircraft noise at least 75 percent of the…
What is a Navajo taco?
The sign at Ambassador Auto’s used-car lot in Moscow, Idaho, is advertising a 1993 Mazda Navaho (sic) in stock for $18,487. Seems like a lot of cash, but then I remember the glossy magazine ads: “Navajo: It knows the land.” Just down the street, Taco Time has launched their new “Navajo Taco,” for only 99…
Dead salmon do more than stink
Not so long ago, when great runs of wild salmon still ruled the Northwest, fish carcasses littered the banks of streams each spawning season. Scientists have long suspected that these rotting salmon helped fuel the food chain. But they didn’t know to what extent. Now, studies by Weyerhaeuser Co. fish biologist Bob Bilby have shown…
Why Juan Valdez doesn’t haul coffee beans on a llama
Recently I read a story in an outdoor-sports magazine about how “superior” llamas are to horses, burros and mules for backcountry packing. It caused me to spit green grass juice. Over the last decade, I have trained, cared for and packed with burros, horses and llamas. I’ve even gone so far as to enter a…
A green Republican makes a run
Physician Robin Silver of Phoenix is known as an uncompromising environmentalist. Most recently, he forced the federal government to list the Mexican spotted owl as “threatened,” thereby stopping logging in the Southwest (HCN, 9/4/95). He has also fought against construction of a series of telescopes on Arizona’s Mount Graham (HCN, 7/24/95). So some Republicans may…
Wallowing the flies away
Ouch! A fly bit me in the soft spot under the lobe of my ear. Gripped with insights about trees and rocks, I’d stopped moving for too long. While even the sheep slept that I’d come to herd, I walked back to stand in the opening of the tent. My brother mumbled inside and the…
Strapped parks look for money
Visitors who go to Nevada’s Great Basin National Park to tour limestone caves and gawk at wind-twisted bristlecone pines may not notice anything different this summer. Campground gates and visitors’ center doors are open as usual. Rangers lead hikes to Alpine Lake each morning, and lecture campers in the evenings about everything from bats to…
Advice for visitors to Rock Springs
(Note: this article was printed in a broken-line poetic format; this online version does not preserve that format.) If you stop at the diner on the outskirts of town, skip the soup full of dust from Indian graves, the rinds of bad winters bobbing in a mean meat broth. Avoid the acid coffee & too…
Yellowstone cutbacks bring out the politicians
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news story, “Strapped parks look for money.” When Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Mike Finley started to feel the budget pinch this summer, he made sure everyone knew about it. Finley closed a popular campground and two museums in Yellowstone,…
Junkyard Rancher: Automotive wrangler scraps for a living
“Well buddy when I die, throw my body in the back, and drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac.” – Bruce Springsteen CARBONDALE, Colo. – Three phones are ringing in the office of the J-Y Ranch. A woman follows me in the door. “Have you got a window motor for a Jeep Cherokee?” she’s…
Doomed park bill just a tool of politicos
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As a young Italian girl once noted, names can be confusing. Take the name, “Presidio.” To the many millions who speak Spanish, it’s no name at all, merely a word for prison. To San Franciscans familiar with their city’s history, it’s the name of a fort the Spaniards built in 1776 when…
Recyclers challenge Big Steel
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: Junkyard Rancher: Automotive wrangler scraps for a living “Minimills” that recycle steel are an environmentalist’s dream. A fraction of the size of conventional steel mills, the first mills started disassembling discarded Chryslers and Cuisinarts 25 years ago. Arriving cars and appliances get beaten…
Heard around the West
Mountain guide Forrest McCarthy told us he had learned a valuable lesson recently: Assume nothing – absolutely nothing. He learned that while leading a couple up a mountain in Grand Teton National Park. The range, he told them, is a 40-mile-long block fault into which glaciers, over the eons, had carved the mountain peaks above…
A new breed of artists depicts Montana – cyanide leach fields and all
For Marilyn Bruya, the turning point came one February morning a few years ago when she gazed out the window of an airplane over western Montana and made a startling discovery. “There were more clearcuts than forests,” Bruya recalls, still amazed. By the time she returned home to Missoula, inspiration had bubbled into conviction. Ever…
The artist
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: A new breed of artists depicts Montana – cyanide leach fields and all When artist Dana Boussard looks out the window of her studio on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, she still sees a few bison — animals that numbered in the…
Dear Friends
A celebration of essayists We are not calling this issue devoted mostly to essays “special,” but it certainly feels that way. It is the first time we have taken such a large break from straight reporting to feature stories that stem from personal experience in the West. Staff debated the idea and finally plunged. An…
Of muskrats and mortality
When I am driving up the dugway toward Logan Canyon I think that if I get going fast enough I can fly upward to where my father will go when his cancer finds the kindness to release him. It seems to be a place over the mountains, in the air above the canyon; and I…
Searching for grass in a magic valley
In 1980 I was laboring in southern Idaho for the Bureau of Land Management, doing hot, dusty work that belied the local name for the Snake River bottomlands: the Magic Valley. My job was to look for grass, find how much was there and report to my superiors. Then they could determine whether or not…
While the vultures circle
The air around the volcanic mesa shimmers with reflected heat; if the temperature rises, surely it will return to molten lava. I’m on Black Butte in the southernmost peak of Arizona’s Vulture Mountain chain, a place where vultures are the only birds ingenious enough to perch atop the black crags: They piss on their feet.…