Extremophilia, River Rats, Timber Tramps, Biker Trash, and Realtors: New and Selected WritingsFred Haefele145 pages, softcover: $16.95.Bangtail Press, 2011. If you’re not familiar with the term extremophilia, don’t worry. As Missoula, Mont., author Fred Haefele explains: “It’s a genuine neologism. A freshly minted word. It refers to someone with an intemperate love of extremophiles, those […]
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Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
A headstrong hero
It was a great pleasure to read the article in the Feb. 20 edition of High Country News on Martin Litton (“A restless giant”). He is one of the heroes of the American West: passionate, headstrong, principled. The photo of him rowing the dory in the Grand Canyon should one day make its way to […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
A lament for open range
Thanks to Jonathan Thompson for pointing out that there is more nastiness involved in the drilling and production of natural gas than fracking (HCN, 3/19/12, “A fresh focus on frack attacks”). Once-open Western rangelands have been transformed into industrial slums, complete with contaminated water and air. Habitats have been destroyed and wildlife populations displaced or […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
At the boiling point
Thanks for Matt Jenkins’ article on the “water warrior” and the woes of interbasin water transfers that affect so many regions of Colorado and the West (HCN, 3/19/12, “Water Warrior”). It is also time to think about how we are boiling our water away in order to create electricity in the steam-generating plants that dominate […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Diverters be damned
HCN‘s story about Bob Rawlings is a classic tale of one influential man’s moral conflict and hubris, yet the story is incomplete (HCN, 3/19/12, “Water Warrior”). Like Rawlings, the author disregards the damaging consequences of the original water diversion. Rawlings will be remembered for maintaining a distinct tribal myopia for decades, and perhaps for overlooking […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Big game tag auctions raise big bucks for Western states
In the West, big game hunting can be big business. In January, a New York man shelled out $300,000 at auction for a tag to hunt Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in Montana this fall — almost equaling the 1994 bid record of $310,000 for a bighorn tag. All Western states have similar auction programs for […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When a boom is not a boon
Dark nights have long been a hallmark of the West’s vast rural High Plains. But a 2010 nighttime satellite photo from the National Geophysical Data Center reveals a striking change in the arid, once-empty sweep of western North Dakota — a smear of light that spreads far wider than any of the state’s cities. This […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Redefining “renewable” to get a clean energy bill through Congress
Seven times since the 101st Congressional session in 1989, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has sponsored or co-sponsored some bill establishing a national energy policy to reduce global warming. Each in some way called for U.S. utilities to get a certain percentage of electricity from renewable sources by a certain year; a few had bipartisan support. […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
New books from friends of High Country News
In mid-March, former intern Jeff Chen (winter 2009) came by our Paonia, Colo., office to say hello. After his stint at HCN, Jeff founded Pick Up America — a “youth-inspired nonprofit conducting the nation’s first coast-to-coast roadside litter pickup to encourage a transition toward zero waste.” So far, Jeff and his team have walked over […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Living on faith: A review of The Man Who Quit Money
The Man Who Quit MoneyMark Sundeen272 pages,softcover: $15.Riverhead Trade, 2012. The title grabs your attention: The Man Who Quit Money. Intrigued, you open the book and read: “In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings — thirty […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A farewell to Montana’s grand madam
MONTANARuby Garrett, the racy grande dame of Butte, Mont., died March 17 at age 94. For many years, Garrett was the proprietor of the Dumas, the town’s last brothel, until it closed in 1982, reports the Montana Standard. Garrett had a couple of brushes with the law along the way, serving six months in jail […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Following the Old Spanish Trail across the Southwest
In his search for the routes used by the West’s early travelers, archaeologist Jack Pfertsh has become a detective of detritus. Today he’s on the hunt for old tin cans and fragments of purple and green glass. The mid-November sun is sinking as we walk the windswept land just north of Delta, Colo. Brown grasses […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Falcon fear factor
OREGONThree peregrine falcons named Judah, Carbon and Zinc are the go-to birds for a Portland garbage station when it wants to discourage pesky seagulls that scatter food scraps and foul nearby roofs and cars with their droppings. The raptors don’t have to attack the gulls to haze them away, reports The Oregonian; all they need […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Traveling Arizona Highways, in your dreams and on the ground
Even as a kid, I recognized an obsession when I saw one. My father’s began late in the Eisenhower years when he got his first subscription to Arizona Highways. A rural route mailman in northern Illinois, he used to rise at 4 a.m. and be home by 1 p.m. As soon as each month’s issue […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Montana’s hard core school bus drivers
COLORADOThe city of Grand Junction, in western Colorado, just loves controversy, or so you would think from reading the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. First, there was the flap over a high school student who refused to sing an Urdu song because its lyrics translated into an Islamic hymn; then there were the members of the […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Loggers give unique Oregon ponderosa pine a lifeline
On a gray February afternoon, rain falls in huge drops on Chuck Volz’s 65-acre property near Springfield, Ore. It drips from the brim of his faded camouflage baseball cap and rolls off his tan jacket as he walks down a muddy path crisscrossed by deer hoofprints. He stops at a young ponderosa pine and frowns: […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A scrappy community ski hill hangs on in Colorado
In the one-room warming hut at the base of the Lake City Ski Hill, Betty Lou Blodgett serves hot cocoa to kids in no need of a sugar high. She mans the hut alone, maintaining a loose sense of order while selling lift tickets and doling out rental gear. A big barrel woodstove blazes while […]