One summer, I spent so much time fishing the stocked pond behind my parent’s house that middle-school boys called me “bass-master.” Most of my 14th birthday presents were lures. I grew up near the headwaters of the Potomac River in western Maryland, and my dad used to hike into those streams to tempt wily brook […]
Blogs
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Delayed gratification
Back in July 2011, a Montana judge prohibited Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of ExxonMobile, from trucking 200 “megaloads” of tar sands mining equipment over the company’s preferred rural highway route. Even though Montana and Idaho state officials had backed the plan, and Imperial had secured the necessary permits, local governments and conservation groups had taken […]
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The sad tale of Shiprock South
Residents of northwestern New Mexico may by now be numbed by the almost surreal, ongoing saga of the busted housing development in Shiprock. But to those unfamiliar with the tale, it’s downright heartbreaking. “Navajo housing project could waste millions,” reads the headline in the Farmington Daily Times, and “be forever incomplete.” The story opens: SHIPROCK […]
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Want to put Western weather on the map?
Some of the earliest weather forecasts began with people scattered across the country who regularly telegraphed observations back to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. as part of a mid-1800s program to solve “the problem of American storms.” Though scientific tools have advanced far beyond the telegraph, the challenge of forecasting small-scale, fast-acting weather events, […]
Posted inRange
Western States Survey says
Colorado College’s 2013 Western States Survey report is out. This year pollsters grilled 2,400 voters in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming on energy, conservation and the role of government in both, and it yielded some fascinating results. Westerners’ views of natural resources and public lands, and the roles they play in our […]
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Spending money to save money
Say you’re a struggling Western freelance writer. In a quest for some dependable cash, you apply to work on trail crew for a summer with the Forest Service — a great way to be in the mountains and make money. You call up the local USFS office and get assurance that yes, you’re qualified, and […]
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Managing Western water from space
Over the last 40 years, images from space have shown us a lot about the changing West. Data beamed down from NASA’s Landsat satellites have revealed how cities like Las Vegas are oozing into the desert, how bark beetles are spreading through and killing Colorado’s forests and how ecosystems recover from wildfires. Besides wowing us […]
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The state of Indian nations
National Congress of American Indians President Jefferson Keel began his annual report, State of Indian Nations, with a simple exclamation. “Indian Country is strong!” That statement, he added, is something he hasn’t always been able to say. He then described this as “a moment of real possibility.” And why not? There is a long list […]
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The life of brine
Here in Paonia, Colo., late on January 23rd, I was lying in bed when my house started to tremble. It felt like the whole structure was perched on a pad of Jell-O. There was one short round of shaking, and then another. But before I could become anything more than startled, it stopped. Local news […]
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Of cows and climate
One needs only to look at the coffee-table book Welfare Ranching’s full page pictures of muddy streams and packed dirt ground to know that cattle grazing can have a negative impact on rangelands. While its specific effects are harder to pinpoint, climate change, too, affects hydrology, native plants and wildlife. Add climate change and cows […]
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Where the wealth is
If you live in, say, Boulder, Napa or San Jose, and you feel like your neighbors are wealthier than you are, it’s probably not paranoia. They really do have more money than you. That’s the takeaway from the map of the week, released Feb. 11 by the U.S. Census Bureau, that shows which counties have […]
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‘It helps to be irritating’
Colorado’s North Fork Valley – where High Country News makes its home– recently received news that had many residents cheering and hugging on Paonia’s three-block main drag and at the local brewery. On Feb. 6, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would defer the sale of more than 20,000 acres of controversial oil and […]
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Sally Jewell’s Adventure of a Lifetime
President Obama’s nominee for heading the Department of Interior, Sally Jewell, is noteworthy not for who she is, but for who she is not. She is a mountaineer, an ultra-marathon runner, a CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, and a former bank executive and oil company engineer. She appears to be some kind of […]
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Bakken tech boomlet?
Viewed from space at night, North Dakota’s sparsely populated Northern Plains appear to harbor a mysterious mega-city. But really, the burst of lights on the prairie is natural gas burning in the state’s oil patch. Enough energy is wasted through natural gas flaring each day to heat half a million homes daily. Flaring is not […]
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Powering down
If you want to know why the biggest electricity supplier in Montana, Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL), is trying to sell off its 15 power plants, you have to go back in time — back before 2001, when California had rolling blackouts and Enron was pulling the strings of a shaky electricity market. You have […]
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Can the West have its own Energiewende?
If perchance you are a Westerner and you find yourself rushing across the German countryside in a train one day, there are a few things that are so unlike the West that they are likely to catch your attention: *The fact that you are indeed rushing smoothly across the countryside in a train, not a […]
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Staring down the fiscal cliff
For evidence of the effects of political deadlock in Washington, look no further than a Jan. 25 memo from National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis instructing park directors to prepare for deep spending cuts. The memo, leaked to the media by the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, tells park directors not to hire any […]
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Mexican wolf recovery #fail
At the end of 2007, we published a story by investigative reporter John Dougherty called “Last Chance for the Lobo,” about the “bloody mess” that had become the Mexican wolf reintroduction in New Mexico and Arizona. There were so few wolves left when the recovery effort started that many born in captivity were inbred. Ranchers […]
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Views of Chu
We’ve posted before about the mass exodus of cabinet secretaries Obama is facing (typical for a second-term president). One of the more notable vacancies is that of Energy Secretary – Steven Chu has announced he’s stepping down. When he took office in 2009, HCN senior editor Ray Ring gave his thoughts on Chu and other […]
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Rants from the Hill: Chicken pastorale
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. American folk musician and hillbilly existentialist Greg Brown offers some mid-song patter referring to Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem “On Weariness” (“Cierto Cansancio”), in which Neruda memorably wrote […]