A life-threatening stroke in Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument puts the author’s fight for wilderness into perspective.
Also in this issue: Frustrated by Utah’s anti-wilderness moves, the national outdoor-equipment industry threatens to move its twice-yearly giant Outdoor Retailer show out of Salt Lake City.
The best memorial
Responding to fellow soldier Martin Murie’ s proposal to restore the natural (wilderness) balance of the World War II Camp Hale military site (HCN, 3/31/03: A citizen soldier looks beyond war), I can clearly remember two years of great mountain military training there prior to our commitment to the Italian theatre in 1944. I certainly…
The grief is real
I realize that it’s slightly odd to respond to another letter, but Wayne A. Gilbert’s observations in the April 28 edition moved me. He said, “I realized my weariness was really sorrow and loss and longing. My loss of faith in public acts wasn’t some moral failing; it was a symptom of my grief.” I…
Go Natives!
Thanks so much for the recent cover article on native vs. exotic plant species (HCN, 5/12/03: Planting time). The author effectively described ways that invasive grasses damage ecosystems — very well explained for the lay reader. And I love the positive side that the article focused on. I didn’t realize how many of the exotics…
A better read
Just received my May 26th issue. The “New Look.” Awesome, dude! Well done. Kudos. Your farsighted reporting is much easier to read for this nearsighted person who now wears reading glasses! Keep up the great work. I have always looked forward to each issue … now, more than ever. Karole Lee Clancy, Montana This article appeared in…
Happy Sounds in Arizona
Yee ha. I picked up the new HCN and began making little inarticulate whimpers of sheer pleasure. The new design is wonderful, classy, befitting the amazing writers who grace its pages. Mary Sojourner Flagstaff, Arizona This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Happy Sounds in Arizona.
The Latest Bounce
The nation will now be safe — from endangered species such as red-legged frogs, southwestern willow flycatchers and manatees. Congress has exempted the military from the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (HCN, 3/31/03: While the nation goes to war, the Pentagon lobs bombs at environmental laws). Although miffed that environmental rollbacks…
Gulf of California Dreamin’
No river in the United States has been as aggressively seized for human use as the Colorado — and shelves of books have been written to tell the story. But what becomes of the river once it flows out of the U.S. and into Mexico has received considerably less print. Now, Defenders of Wildlife has…
Park Service guts budget to fight terrorism
The National Park Service plans to cut millions of dollars in trail and building repairs to cover its share of the “war on terror.” Since 2001, the Park Service has moved more of its rangers to parks with international borders and high-profile icon parks such as the Statue of Liberty. As rangers are reassigned, their…
Barren, wild and worthless? Anything but
For naturalist Susan Tweit, moving to New Mexico meant learning to love the harsh beauty of a landscape that one haggard 19th century surveyor dismissed as “barren, wild, and worthless.” That bitter phrase became the title of Tweit’s eloquent 1995 memoir on life in the Chihuahuan Desert. Taken in by her masterful prose, readers, too,…
Mammoth airport expansion on hold
Conservationists recently won a round in their fight to curb expansion at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. In April, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration violated federal law when it chose not to conduct a full-scale environmental impact statement on the proposal to expand Mammoth-Yosemite Airport on the east side of…
Tribes recognized at Little Bighorn
This summer, the National Park Service will finally acknowledge a missing chapter of history at the Little Bighorn National Monument. On June 25, the 127th anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand, the Park Service will unveil “Peace Through Unity” — a memorial to the American Indians who defeated General George Custer in battle in eastern Montana.…
County commission stands down on gas wells
Last summer, Colorado’s Delta County Commission made history when it denied state-approved drilling permits for four out of five coalbed methane wells (HCN, 9/2/02: One Colorado County Takes a Stand). The commissioners cited concerns about drilling’s impacts on water quality. But in May, they backed down. County Attorney Brad Kolman says they didn’t have much…
Calendar
Western Writers of America and Western State College are hosting the 3rd Annual Writers Workshop in Gunnison, Colo., on July 10-14. To register for Writing the West, go to www.writingthewest.com or call Larry at 970-943-3035. Head to John Day, Ore., for the fifth annual SolWest Renewable Energy Fair on July 25-27. The fair will feature…
A dirty use for Clean Water Act money?
Watershed managers in northern New Mexico are mounting a pre-emptive strike this spring with a forest-thinning project that aims to reduce wildfire risk. In February, the Forest Service began a thinning project in the Santa Fe National Forest, which surrounds the city’s municipal water supply. The Santa Fe Watershed Association, a local grassroots group, secured…
Glen Canyon Voices
Glen Canyon is such a compelling intellectual topic because it is full of contradictions: It has been destroyed, and yet a movement is afoot to bring it back … it was a place perhaps equal in grandeur to Grand Canyon, and yet it was dammed and inundated with only the faintest puff of dissent; it…
Women take the wheel
In the 1990s, the bumper sticker “Thelma and Louise Live!” sprouted on mini-vans driven by mothers in suburbs across America, proclaiming a craving for a journey beyond the kids’ soccer fields. The 19 women writers who contributed to A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West have peeled out of the daily commute,…
Look before you eat
Surely, we would feel better if we knew that food companies were doing everything possible to minimize food hazards, and that the government was looking out for our interests and making sure food companies were doing what they were supposed to. In the absence of such reassurance, we lose trust. — Marion Nestle, Safe Food…
Inside HCN
New from Writers on the Range “The jacket of a popular author’s book says that she lives on a ‘40-acre ranch.’ No real rancher would care to make that statement. Similarly, only uninformed journalists could write, ‘Sen. Jones lives on his 10-acre emu ranch.’ The correct way to write that sentence would be, ‘Mr. Jones…
Ray Ring’s Wrong
So Ray Ring wants us to stand back and let the forests burn (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle)? Get real, dude. Even if fires of the past were truly catastrophic, huge, epic or whatever, and are therefore ecologically desirable today (I disagree), the fact remains that there is a modern civilization now in place in…
Ground Zero
A near miss in the Craters of the Moon puts the fight for the land into perspective
Essays for thought
For the past 33 years, High Country News has lived up to its name, focusing on the news. Though we’ve concentrated on the environment, we’ve also covered Western culture, politics and economics, because you can’t separate the environmental issues from the arenas in which they play out. Besides, the context is part of what makes…
Dear Friends
A new supporter Once a year, High Country News dedicates almost an entire issue to essays. We hope this issue gets stuffed into the backseat of a few cars for the summer road trip, tucked into backpacks, or packed in dry bags for a little reading on the river. We’ll be back with more news…
How much is wilderness worth?
Utah’s anti-wilderness moves could cost it the outdoor industry’s allegiance
Why I fight: The coming gas explosion in the West
Here’s what I once believed: that if the president knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease. I once believed that if you could show that industry can extract gas without damaging land right near us — as it does on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and…
Giant sequoias could get the ax
In a national monument, the Forest Service wants to cut trees to save them
Tourist tales from the New West
I knew I was in trouble the first morning of our cruise. We were headed up the Columbia and Snake rivers on a Lewis and Clark bicentennial expedition, and this well-dressed widow sat down beside me at breakfast. Her diamond ring was the size of an unshelled peanut, and her hair matched the silver flatware…
A ‘nature girl’ remembers a dying lumber town
I never got over Hilt. It is as real to me now, when it no longer exists, as it was when I was 3 years old, or 6, or 12. I see it, sometimes, with an aching intensity that will not go away, so that the little valley beside Cottonwood Creek comes back to me…
Running home
It’s been four years since I touched human bone, since I had silt and clay stuck beneath my fingernails and inside the cracked skin of my knuckles — silt and clay that had cradled bones for hundreds of years. I used to work as a contract archaeologist, scanning the landscape for petroglyphs and fire rings,…
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA If you protest acts of violence, does that make you a violent person? The answer is yes, according to the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center. The center warned Oakland police that an anti-war protest planned for the city’s port might turn violent, even though there was no evidence that demonstrators intended to do anything but…
Love and loathing on the interstate highways
At a conference several years ago, we were given crayons and sheets of white paper and asked to draw our visions of utopia. This was in the West, so of course a great many rustic cabins in meadows far removed from civilization were sketched onto these sheets. Not mine. Yes, of course, I had hills…
Seeing the mysterious in the everyday
Someday, everything is gonna be different / When I paint my masterpiece. — Bob Dylan It’s late at night in the green springtime, and I’m wide awake in the studio, Van Morrison on the CD player and a pastel painting slowly coming to life on the easel before me. Hayfields and a line of cottonwoods,…