One of the first things we did when we moved back to my quasi-rural hometown of Durango, Colo., this summer was ride the “trolley.” It’s actually a bus that is made to look like an old street car, complete with wood benches for passengers, but it’s mass transit, and it’s free, and it gets you […]
Jonathan Thompson
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Follow him @LandDesk
Posted inGoat
Price matters
Last winter, the Bureau of Land Management gave its approval to a large natural gas drilling project in northern New Mexico. Under the Middle Mesa plan, WPX Energy would drill and frack 53 shale gas wells on a mesa overlooking Navajo Reservoir over a five year period. The company can drill year-round, too, since the […]
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On droughts and fires past
At first glance, nothing about the photo seems awry. It shows a truck spraying water on the dirt streets of Silverton, Colo., elevation 9,318 feet, to keep the dust down, a regular occurrence in May or June. This photograph, however, was taken on New Year’s Day. In the background, mountain slopes that regularly see some […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Three days in the Four Corners
The Four Corners country — the point where sage plains, mesas and desert canyons radiate out from the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah — is a land of friction. The cultures of the Ute, Apache and Navajo tribes rub up against the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. The ancient rudely bumps into the […]
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Getting strange with land art
“I really like parts of it,” my editor wrote in response to a video I made about my travels to a few pieces of iconic Western land art, “and then other parts do feel a little too weird.” To the uninitiated this doesn’t sound so bad, but anyone familiar with editor-speak knows what it really […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Our first travel issue
When the suggestion that High Country News do a travel-themed edition first came up, there was a lot of skepticism. After all, who needs more fluff about the “Top 10” thisses, and the “Best Secret” thats? We focus on serious issues — the West’s cultures, economies and environmental problems. Right? Right. And that’s why you’re […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
The Atlas of the Industrial West
Ever wanted to tour a wind farm, a giant dam or an oil and gas field? This map will help. Click on the icon of the industrial site nearest you for a bit about the site and tours, if offered, along with a link to more information. Purple = oil & gas; Aqua = dams […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Land art of the West: An interactive map
Land art is not by any means a purely Western phenomenon. Big, monumental sculptures, along with smaller, more ephemeral works, can be found throughout the world. But the big land art movement really was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the West, when Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter DeMaria and others came […]
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Got the gold bug? Tour a mine.
All of us know at least one person who, as a hedge against imminent financial collapse, is stockpiling gold (not to mention Dinty Moore stew and guns). The idea is to have some kind of solid form of currency when the dollar and Euro go up in smoke, whether brought on by Obama, big banks […]
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Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
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U.S. is net energy exporter! (Psych!)
By now you’ve surely read the headlines that proclaim, “US Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter” or “US Becomes Net Oil-Product Exporter” or, the most ambitious and egregious, “U.S. Becomes Net Energy Exporter.” The stories affixed to the headlines certainly have a triumphant air to them, and why shouldn’t they? After four decades of our leaders […]
Posted inWotr
A fresh focus on frack attacks
A widely reprinted AP story recently broke the stunning news that the energy industry doesn’t like “fracking.” They like fracking itself — injecting water, chemicals and sand into wells to break hydrocarbons free of tight rock formations. What they hate is the word: Fracking sounds just plain nasty. “It’s Madison Avenue hell,” says Dave McMurdy, […]
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Oil and gas water use: the real issues
When I read Tasha Eichenseher’s recent Land Letter article (sub reqd) about fracking’s use of water, I was alarmed by the numbers. In Colorado, alone, hydraulic fracturing operations use about 4.5 billion gallons of water per year. That’s expected to increase to more than 6 billion gallons over the next few years. The takeaway is […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Fearful of Agenda 21, an alleged U.N. plot, activists derail land-use planning
In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a […]
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Why industry doesn’t like “fracking” and neither do I
(updated 1/30/2011) I recently read that the energy industry hates fracking. Of course, they actually love fracking — as in hydraulic fracturing to crack rock and release all those juicy hydrocarbons. What they hate is the word itself: “fracking.” I hate it, too, though I suspect for very different reasons. Energy flacks abhor “fracking,” according […]
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The circular logic of energy independence
“From its beginning 200 years ago, throughout its history, America has made great sacrifices of blood and also of treasure to achieve and maintain its independence. In the last third of this century, our independence will depend on maintaining and achieving self-sufficiency in energy.” President Richard Nixon said this back in 1973, after oil producers […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
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The Estonian connection: Or how I started worrying about oil shale
The last big oil shale* boom in the West busted on “Black Sunday” 1982. I was 11 years old, then, living in Western Colorado, and I can still remember my dad explaining the boom, the bust and the process necessary to get the “oil” out of the shale. Here’s a primer: Underground room and pillar […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but […]