One of the best things about summer is watching these teams strive for major league.
Stephen J. Lyons
Posted inWotr
Why do you live in a flood zone?
How to empathize with people who experience devastating loss after fires and floods
Posted inSeptember 17, 2007: Facing the yuck factor
In search of giant trees and unseen realms
One of former President Ronald Reagan’s more notorious remarks concerned the grand California redwoods. There was “nothing beautiful about them,” he said, “just that they are a little higher than the rest.” An inspiring corrective to Reagan’s indifference is Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees. The author of The Hot Zone follows professional and bare-knuckled gonzo […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 2007: Salmon Justice
A family of criminals and killers
Danielle Marie Cox came from a loving family. She attended private school through the sixth grade, had a 3.8 grade point average in high school, and earned a scholarship to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. But the impressionable Cox fell prey to the drama and drugs of a homeless Portland street “family” she met […]
Posted inDecember 11, 2006: Old but Faithful
Old but Faithful
How a feisty group of government retirees faced down the Bush administration and changed the future of America’s national parks
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
A season of love — and secrets
When an unexpected teaching vacancy arises in the town’s one-room schoolhouse, Morrie steps in. His pedagogy is unorthodox and his résumé dubious, but he ignites the minds of his pupils. Morrie’s finest teaching moment comes when he organizes the children to honor the arrival of Halley’s Comet with a harmonica concert for their astonished parents. […]
Posted inMay 29, 2006: 'Clinging Hopelessly to the Past'
The life of an enigmatic seabird
One of the great North American ornithological mysteries in recent history was solved not by a scientist or a birder, but by a tree-trimmer. Working in an ancient Douglas fir in California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Hoyt Foster began to lop off a limb 148 feet above ground when suddenly he was confronted by […]
Posted inMay 15, 2006: The Immigrant's Trail
Finding hope in a new land
Mexican-born author Rose Castillo Guilbault first saw America from the window of a Greyhound bus. The 5-year-old sat next to her divorced mother, Maria Luisa, who had taken a distant cousin’s advice to heart: Head to El Norte. “Get out of this cesspool. It will pull you down and drown you. You’re still young. Start […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
A natural and cultural history of the Rocky Mountains
The backbone of the West, the Great Divide, stretches some 1,100 rugged miles from Montana to New Mexico. It’s been the home of Native Americans, artists, miners, mountain men, preachers and charlatans, back-to-the-landers and trust funders. Each group has defined the landscape for its own purpose, leading author Gary Ferguson to conclude, “Hardly a story […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Meloy’s last message — from bighorn country
Author Ellen Meloy died unexpectedly at her home in Bluff, Utah, last Nov. 4. The gifted writer, illustrator and environmentalist leaves behind an impressive canon of nature writing that includes Raven’s Exile, The Last Cheater’s Waltz and The Anthropology of Turquoise, a book short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Eating Stone, completed just before her death […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Western military bases still reporting for duty
New Mexico’s Cannon Air Force Base won’t be shut down — at least not for the next few years (HCN, 8/22/05: Leavin’ on a Jet Plane). It and four other Western military installations narrowly escaped the base-closure ax. The nine-member federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission finished its hearings on Aug. 26, voting against […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2005: A Military Town Fights for its Life
Leavin’ on a Jet Plane
As the Air Force prepares to fly away from New Mexico’s Cannon Air Force Base, the town it helped to build won’t let go
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
More than numbers: The dead of Idaho’s Sunshine Mine
The statistics of Idaho’s worst mining disaster are still startling, even more than three decades after that fateful day in 1972, when an underground fire broke out in the Silver Valley’s Sunshine Mine: Ninety-one men dead, 77 women widowed and 200 children left fatherless. The oldest victim was 61, the youngest 19. More than half […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2005: An Empire Built on Sand
Gators, dirt and hot tubs in the Cowboy State
Readers will recognize the collection of colorful characters in Proulx’s latest installment of Wyoming fictions. The 11 stories in Bad Dirt feature trailer types, Eastern transplants, local roughnecks, and eccentric elders, living in a zero-sum economy of extractive plunder that would make native son Dick Cheney giddy with pride. In “Wamsutter Wolf,” mountain man wannabe […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
Crimes against workers
Environmental crimes are among the hardest to prosecute. That’s the message authors Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni dramatically deliver in The Cyanide Canary, the true story of chemical contamination in southeastern Idaho. In the summer of 1996, 20-year-old Scott Dominguez, an employee at Evergreen Resources — a company that produced fertilizer from mining waste — […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
A beautiful ode to a melting earth
Gretel Ehrlich’s latest book, The Future of Ice, is an intimate “ode and lament” on the effects of global warming. The conclusions are dire, of course: In the Arctic, as billions of gallons of fresh water pour into places like the Greenland Ice Sheet and where, in 2002, “at least 264,400 square miles of ice […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
An unfinished life in Wyoming
A new novel from Wyoming’s own Mark Spragg relies less on the distinctive landscape of the West and instead explores the more universal territory of a fractured family. Still, most of An Unfinished Life unfolds on a Wyoming ranch near fictional Ishawooa, “elevation 5,313, population 1,783.” Seventy-year-old Einar Gilkyson lives a lonely life on a […]
Posted inWotr
The ghost of Richard Butler surfaces in Arizona
It would be foolish to believe that the death of Aryan Nations’ leader Richard Butler means the death of hate in the West. Butler, who sowed ill will for decades in the region, passed away at the age of 86 Sept. 8 in Hayden, Idaho. He died a broken man, his empire of knuckle-draggers that […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Living in harm’s way
Unlike water, denial is in excess supply in California. Half the residents west of the 100th meridian live in that state, and 80 percent of them live in areas that have been rattled by major earthquakes. Northern Californians, for example, straddle 60 miles of the deadly Hayward fault; the late Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Living in harm’s way
Unlike water, denial is in excess supply in California. Half the residents west of the 100th meridian live in that state, and 80 percent of them live in areas that have been rattled by major earthquakes. Northern Californians, for example, straddle 60 miles of the deadly Hayward fault; the late Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac […]