Greg Hood is a researcher in western Washington who knows a few things about salmon habitat — a few surprising things. When Hood talks about preserving threatened populations, he doesn’t mention in-stream flows, fish ladders or water temperatures. Instead, he brings up a mostly-vanished ecosystem than once lined significant portions of the Puget Sound. It […]
Blogs
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“The Sportsman’s Park Service”
Do paved trails, groomed picnic areas, and visitor centers stocked with tacky t-shirts and soft-serve ice cream make your outdoor experience seem uncomfortably like Disneyland? Next time, skip Rocky Mountain National Park and wander into the much less developed lands of the National Landscape Conservation System – like the Gunnison Gorge, in western Colorado. The […]
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From Gitmo to Montana?
During the presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain promised to close the detainee prison at the Marine Corps base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Obama won, and he’s been looking at ways to fulfill his promise. One complication is that there are people in custody who should stay in custody — […]
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A change is gonna come
As more consumers choose to eat locally, agribusinesses tailor their ads to fit the market. According to Mark Muller of Civil Eats, this reactionary stance from the corporations is a big shift in our current food system. Lay’s just recently tried on the “local” hat. And Walmart did too last year. But skeptics are put-off […]
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West’s ATV carnage, part 2
At least 13 people have been killed in all-terrain-vehicle accidents in the West in the past month. The fatalities include a 10-year-old boy in California, a 16-year-old girl in Wyoming, and an off-duty sheriff’s deputy in Utah. Expanding the bloody accounting to include the serious nonfatal ATV accidents in the same period (since April 20), […]
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Snowbowl Redux: The Question of Balance
Every journalist is biased. Scribes-for-hire have opinions, just like anybody else. However most readers expect some approximation of fairness and balance. The reporter’s job is to lock his personal views in a cage until press time. This professional obligation was very much on my mind last winter when I wrote “The Snow War,” a summary […]
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The “Bennett Thaw”, at last
Last week, President Obama signed legislation putting an end to a time warp in Indian land. For more than 40 years, Navajos and Hopi living near Tuba City, Ariz., had been prohibited from building new roads or new homes. Nor could they improve existing homes, or even install electricity and running water when those services […]
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Beyond adventure porn
Adventure sport films can be a lot like pornography. Claiming little-to-no real artistic merit, they are produced explicitly for the excitement of the viewer and the ego-gratification of the performers. They have predictable soundtracks. They provide the chance for adrenaline junkies to sit, slack-jawed, and live vicariously through someone else’s physical abandon. Other adventure sport films […]
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John Sutter’s paramour was named Manuiki
Native American sovereignty, trans-Pacific tribal ties, an intriguing new twist to the Gold Rush and centuries-old gossip about John Sutter’s love life: all that in a surprising article that recently ran in the Sacramento Bee. It’s a must-read for anyone who gets a kick out of learning that western history is more complicated than most […]
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New Ag-Jobs bill hits Congress
As High Country News noted last Fall in a story called Field Day, these days it’s hard for growers to find enough agricultural workers to tend and pick their crops. With tougher enforcement on the Mexican border, stiffer penalties for hiring undocumented immigrants, and a cumbersome H-2A guest worker program, many growers are in a […]
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Jaguars A to Z
For years, HCN contributor Tony Davis has been following — and writing about — the Southwest’s endangered jaguars. The rare cats are in danger of being wiped out in the U.S. by the border fence that isolates them from their Mexican counterparts (see our story Cat Fight on the Border). Recently, a huge male cat, […]
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Poor Lake Powell
The snow’s melting fast here in Western Colorado’s mountains, thanks to a sudden surge in temperatures after a cool spring. A lot of dust on the snow is also contributing: The dust diminishes the snow’s reflectivity, meaning more of the sun’s heat penetrates the snow, meaning the snow melts quickly. As a result, the streams […]
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New grazing technology might save streams
I’m not sure how feasible this is for widescale installment on the many grazing parcels in the West. But it’s worth spreading the word to help it catch on. A grad student, Adam Sigler at Montana State University, has designed and tested a new technology that changes the way cattle use streams. It looks like […]
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Dancing to the Tohono O’odham polka
“Waila” is taken from “baila,” which means dance in Spanish. Blending polka, waltz, tejano, cumbia and Norteno, Waila’s roots go back as far as the late 1700s, when European immigrants brought their accordions with them to work on the railroads. When electricity came to the reservations in the 1950s and ’60s, the Joaquin Brothers amped […]
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Get to know the locals
Encana has a bit of a reputation for looking out for wildlife. Though predictably, it’s an ambiguous one. High Country News has covered the oil and gas company’s efforts to trade habitat restoration dollars for sweetheart lease deals, and its practice of padding drill sites to minimize vegetation impacts. Those moves may not add up […]
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How the rightwingers hold Interior hostages
Republicans in the U.S. Senate today stood up for a downtrodden victim — the oil and gas industry. That’s how they described it anyway. Really a lot more is at stake. The superficial news: On behalf of their chosen industry, using classic Senate martial arts, the Republicans blocked the Obama administration’s nominee for the Number […]
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Gratuitous displays of ignorance
Yesterday morning I got sucked into a vortex of reader comments on several articles about Native American issues. One story by NPR echoed our January feature story by Andrea Appleton, “Blood Quantum,” describing the controversy over what percentage of Indian blood is required to enroll in a tribe. The second, from the Great Falls Tribune, described the Little Shell […]
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Western Imagery
When we look out our windows, do we always see the real West out there, or do we often perceive what photographers have taught us to to see? The question comes up with an exhibit of 120 photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Called “Into the Sunset, Photography’s […]
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Notes from el Mundo Nuevo
We are not talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert. The hungers grow. Fewer crumbs reach the global economy’s bottom-dwellers, so they abandon the slums and failing campos to take their best shots at something more. For this, they must be hunted. I am in the Altar Valley to look at the […]
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No conspiracy in Libby, despite hundreds of deaths
Maybe it’s more incompetence by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors — kind of a holdover from the Bush era. Maybe it’s because a criminal conspiracy charge is always difficult to prove. Or maybe it’s a form of justice. A jury in Missoula, Montana, just decided that the W.R. Grace corporation and some former Grace executives […]