The room was a brawl waiting to happen. Horseback riders sat next to mountain bikers. ATV, jeep and motorbike enthusiasts took their seats across from wilderness, hiking and “quiet trail” advocates. Even a survey of peoples’ heads revealed the potential tension: There were cowboy hats and shiny, banker-like pates; spiky mullets and hair flattened by […]
Blogs
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Should the humpback whale stay on the endangered species list?
In the early 1960s, the situation seemed dire for humpback whales. A century of industrial hunting had reduced the North Pacific population to around 1,000, a minuscule fraction of historic levels. Extinction, once unthinkable, appeared not only possible, but likely. Five decades after the International Whaling Commission imposed a moratorium on hunting in 1966, however, […]
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Arizonans leverage local resources to prevent wildfire
While last week the federal government predicted a major budget shortfall for fighting wildfire, some groups are looking for innovative ways to fund wildfire prevention at the local level instead of waiting for the feds to pick up the bill. The latest Department of Interior and Forest Service forecasts for wildfire suppression expenditures are higher […]
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Huge payout for Wind River Reservation
The sight was so unusual we stopped our meeting to stare: men in helmets and riot gear, carrying semi-automatic weapons, were surrounding a bank in Lander, Wyoming, on a Wednesday in late April. As we sipped our chai lattes from the coffee shop across the street, we watched as the armed men escorted a guy […]
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Simon J. Ortiz poetry is a road map to Indian Country
About 20 years ago, my father gave me the book, Woven Stone, by Simon J. Ortiz. I was reading a lot of Native American literature at the time, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie. I was also reading a lot of poetry, from Richard Shelton to Rilke. Ortiz, a poet […]
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Rants from the Hill: The Moopets
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. Although I’ve written 45 of these Rants from the Hill since the essay series launched back in July, 2010, there’s one word I have studiously avoided using. It is a filthy word, one that […]
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The biggest wildlife crossing you’ve never heard of
Nestled in the Cascade Mountains of central Washington, winding along a 15-mile stretch of interstate is the largest wildlife connectivity project you’ve never heard of. Deer, elk, mountain goats, bobcats, black bears, foxes, mink, otters, cougars and wild turkeys roam the region’s old growth forests, mountain meadows, streams and glacier-covered peaks. But all too often, […]
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Use well water in oil & gas territory? There’s a guide for that
As oil and gas development in Western states continues to increase, from Green River, Utah to North Dakota’s Bakken, so do public fears of water contamination from spills and hydraulic fracturing. Although fracking (pumping water and chemicals underground to release oil or gas trapped within rock) has been used for decades, there’s still no conclusive […]
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A new era of clean air regulation is dawning
Court rulings are not typically repositories of poetic prose. But they occasionally contain beautiful little gems, like this quote from the King James Bible, embedded in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in a clean air case the Supreme Court ruled on this week: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound […]
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What to expect when you’re expecting El Niño
The data are trickling in, and with each passing day it seems more certain: 2014 is going to be an El Niño year, and probably a big one. What does that mean for your Western state? First, a quick primer on the science behind The Niño. In normal years, prevailing winds in the Pacific Ocean […]
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Google’s time machine will show changes in development and nature
I like to play the “used to be” game. While walking around my hometown with friends, I point to a storefront — one of the snazzier restaurants in town, say — and say, “That used to be this weird little store that carried everything from comic books to frogs in formaldehyde, all left over from […]
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Joshua trees may be migrating north in response to climate change
Last spring, Joshua trees put on a magnificent show in the Mojave Desert. Nearly all at once nearly all of them bloomed, sprouting dense bouquets of waxy, creamy-green flowers from their Seussian tufts of spiky leaves. The bloom was so sweeping and abundant — and such a contrast to the typical pattern, where only a […]
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Restore fish to Oregon’s Sandy River Basin: Just add trees
On the evening of January 16, 2011, a soaking-wet Sunday in northwest Oregon, the Sandy River, engorged by snowmelt and hurricane-level rainfall, leapt its banks. The river tore through neighborhoods on the slopes of Mount Hood, devoured cars and trucks, and left hundreds without power or phone service. Lolo Pass Road was transformed into the […]
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In an era of light pollution, the darkest skies in the West
Here are some of the region’s best stargazing spots.
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Wildlife and rodenticides: The new silent spring?
The Griffith Park mountain lion, discovered wandering the urban wilds above Los Angeles in the late winter of 2012, has been celebrated like none other of its kind. While mountain lions menace suburbs in Colorado and distress ranchers in Arizona, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California, the rare cougar is widely viewed as […]
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Escalante oil spill raises questions about remote clean-ups
After four dusty days spent slithering through slot canyons and scrambling over boulders in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, this morning’s walk is notably refreshing. Steve Defa, a 59-year-old psychotherapist from Escalante, Utah, is leading me up a sandy wash shaded by big ponderosa pines and smaller pinyons. The air is fragrant with pine needles and […]
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Has Durango sold its river, and its soul, to recreation?
Several months ago, an old friend and sometime source contacted me with a tip on a big local story going down here in Durango, with statewide and even national implications. I had been looking around the immediate region for something into which I could dig my investigative reporting teeth. This might be it. A week […]
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After the standoff, what’s next for Bundy and BLM?
With armed militia on one side, armed federal agents on the other, and about 900 cows in the middle, the Bureau of Land Management last Saturday called off its roundup of rancher Cliven Bundy’s “trespass cattle,” releasing the 300 or so cows it had already collected back into the desert. BLM director Neil Kornze said […]
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North Dakota, BLM look to curb natural gas flaring
Temperatures were in the single digits on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation in early February when Debbie Dogskin began to take off her clothes. In the throes of late stage hypothermia, people act irrationally as cold clouds their thinking. The 61-year old was found dead in a friend’s mobile home, an empty propane tank outside. […]
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Against the grain: Proposed FDA rule has beer-makers foaming
In 2013, New Belgium Brewing, the Fort Collins, Colo.-based purveyor of libations like Fat Tire and Ranger, whipped up exactly 792,292 barrels of beer. Considering each barrel is capable of filling somewhere in the range of 60 six-packs, that production made for plenty of happy drinkers (including, on more than one occasion, yours truly). But […]