When I moved to the rural West, I found myself curious — in a way I never was while living in an urban area — about the infrastructure that makes civilization possible. Who built all those ditches that carry brown waters to the hayfields and homes, and how is the water parceled out? Where do […]
Departments
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The West’s Big Data colonies
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The West’s Big Data colonies.
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Subscriber Warning
High Country News subscribers should be aware that an Oregon company is mailing unauthorized offers for HCN subscriptions and renewals. Please note: These are not authentic solicitations from High Country News. The company name on these solicitations is Publishers Billing Emporium. The solicitation we have seen offers a renewal for $85.95 and includes a lot of […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Book review: Ground/Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River
Ground/Water: The art, design and science of a dry river, edited by Ellen McMahon, Ander Monson, and Beth Weinstein, 112 pages, hardcover: $48. The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Arizona’s Rillito River runs from the Santa Catalina Mountains through Tucson to join the Santa Cruz River. “Except it doesn’t run,” writes journalist Nathaniel Brodie in […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Listening to the secret heart: a review of The Last Shepherd
The Last ShepherdMartin Etchart203 pages, softcover: $22.University of Nevada Press, 2012. Arizona author Martin Etchart’s compelling second novel takes readers to the heart of a Basque family, originally from the French Pyrenees, that has been whittled down to two: a father and a son. Mathieu Etcheberri, the son of Basque shepherds who built a hardscrabble […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Sippings of memory: a review of “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do”
100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother DisappearedKim Stafford202 pages, softcover: $16.95.Trinity University Press, 2012. One of the happy consequences of reading Kim Stafford is that he makes you want to become a better person. The Portland-based author of 12 books of poetry and prose writes with a quiet gentleness, intimacy and kindness. […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Of Muir and Pinchot
In “A New Forest Paradigm,” Nathan Rice refers to “John Muir’s preservationist ideals” and “Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian forestry” (HCN, 4/29/13). Muir certainly fit the mold of a preservationist, believing nature should be preserved for its own sake. But many would argue that Pinchot was more of a traditional conservationist rather than a utilitarian. The latter […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Saving the real old growth
I read with interest Nathan Rice’s excellent article “A New Forest Paradigm” (HCN, 4/29/13). I was around in the 1970s, when the last of the old-growth giants were being felled in Oregon and Washington. I deplored what was happening then and cheered any means of saving those venerable trees, some of which were over 500 […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Wanted: Wolves in Colorado
Being an avid elk hunter in Colorado, I hope the trapping and hunting pressure on wolves in Wyoming brings some of them here (“Wolf bycatch,” HCN, 4/29/13). The presence of wolves in Colorado might reduce the number of cattle that overgraze national forest land and ruin the riparian habitat for six months of the year, […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Word watch
The new buzzword in the woods is “ecological forestry,” to replace “new forestry,” which academics advocated and promoted in the 1990s. I applaud the desire to provide ecosystem management that somewhat mimics nature, but I often question motives (i.e., “to get the cut out”). What “A New Forest Paradigm” fails to acknowledge is that every […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Alaska’s populist, Sarah Palin-era oil tax gets the ax
The TransAlaska Pipeline System is in trouble. During its 1970s heyday, 2 million barrels of crude coursed through it every day from Alaska’s northernmost oilfields to the southern port in Valdez. Now that flow is down by more than two-thirds. The pipeline was not designed for lean times. If the volume of oil declines again […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Sycamore Canyon: an essay
These rocks are warm to the touch under noonday sun. I strip my socks off sweaty feet and stand in unlaced boots in the shade of a juniper. Angie perches with her left foot wedged toe-first into a crevice above me, her right leg hanging free. She snaps a quickdraw onto a hanger bolted into […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
BLM teams with researchers to protect midget faded rattlesnake
Summer snake hunting in western Colorado is a race against the sun. The reptiles emerge early from their dens to soak up dawn’s dull warmth. But once the hillsides hum with heat, they’ll split for the shadows. “We better get going,” says biologist Josh Parker of Georgia’s Clayton State University when I meet his small […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
In the field with a Montana couple hunting wolves
We’re hunting wolves on an Arctic December morning in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Ryan Counts and Becky Frey lead me along a hillside above a shelf of open grass and sage known as Decker Flats. The local hunter gossip pinpointed a pack in this area the final day of elk hunting season, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Have a ponytail? Watch out for owls!
MONTANA AND COLORADO As the Missoulian puts it, “There’s rotten cellphone service, there’s nonexistent cellphone service, and then there’s what’s happening just a few miles east of Ovando.” Which is exactly nothing, because a 195-foot-tall cell phone tower near this tiny western Montana town has never connected a call to anybody. Clearview, a Florida-based company, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Of sense and salinity: A swim in the Great Salt Lake
Standing barefoot and swimsuited on a concrete boat ramp, I eyed the shimmering surface of the Great Salt Lake. On this June morning, clouds of brine flies roiled inches above the water: mouth level if you’re a swimmer. Worse, the brine shrimp had hatched, and their countless tiny bodies had turned the water — usually […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
A hard right in Idaho
(This editor’s note accompanies an HCN magazine cover story on how right-wing emigrants took over North Idaho politics.) In my 18 years in the Northern Rockies, I’ve visited Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, several times and watched it change. The town — draped along the shore of huge Lake Coeur d’Alene — has been dramatically resort-ified, in […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
A tireless documenter of Native America: A review of “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher”
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward CurtisTimothy Egan412 pages, hardcover: $28.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who also won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Times, chronicles the life story of photographer Edward […]