THE SPOKEN WORD If you haven’t heard Page Stegner, the son of Wallace Stegner, read the long story, “Genesis,” from Wolf Willow, you are in for a wonderful three and one-half hours. (Or seven hours, if, like me, you listen twice.) The same is true of another father-son combination, as John Maclean reads Norman Maclean’s […]
The spoken word
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Where the saguaros stop
WHERE THE SAGUAROS STOP We know of several copies of the seminal reference book – Biotic Communities, Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico – that have worn out, riding around for years on the dashboards of pickup trucks. The Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum in Arizona, which published the book in 1982, sold out its stock […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Tribes settle for new fishing sites
Half a century after their fishing grounds were flooded by a federal dam, four Northwest Indian tribes will be compensated with replacement sites along the Columbia River. On June 23, the Interior Department and Army Corps of Engineers agreed to spend about $57 million to create access to 31 new fishing areas in Oregon and […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Washington voters win vote on takings bill
Washington residents will decide at the November polls whether to scrap their state’s new takings law – considered the most extreme take on the subject to date. Volunteers fighting the law, known as Initiative 164, gathered more than 230,000 signatures before the July deadline. That’s more than double the amount needed to force a referendum, […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Denver vs. the West
Six months after its grand opening, pricey Denver International Airport continues to shake up air travel around the West (HCN, 1/23/95). First, the cost of building and doing business at the mega-airport helped persuade Continental Airlines to all but abandon the Rocky Mountains. Now, blaming the same unprofitable dynamics, the commuter airline, GP Express, is […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Sign of the times
Jordanelle, Utah’s newest state park, opened in early July with a new mountain reservoir and a good deal of controversy. A park sign that was supposed to educate visitors about the damage cattle can cause in streamside vegetation included pictures of a cow standing next to a damaged stream and a cowpie. The text read: […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Salvage logging reborn
Despite a previous veto, President Clinton has signed a compromise bill that calls for accelerated logging on national forests. The president justified the action to angry environmentalists by claiming that his administration now has Republican backing to implement salvage logging that is “consistent with the spirit and intent of our forest plans and all existing […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
No more water for Aspen – for now
Aspen Ski Co. lost a bid for expansion when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in June that the company could not drain a creek to make more artificial snow for its Snowmass Resort. The court agreed with the Aspen Wilderness Workshop and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund that the Colorado Water Conservation Board had […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Human smolts reach Washington
Five mighty strange-looking salmon ended their 450-mile downstream migration at Washington’s Lower Granite Dam July 25. In fact, they weren’t salmon at all but an unusual swim team that started its expedition 25 days earlier at Idaho’s Redfish Lake. Four men and one woman took turns in the water, following the outward migration route of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
My kingdom is a horse
It was a gold mountain. The gray lodgepoles of the corral sorted it into altitudes: hooves and pasterns, the flaring column of muscle and bone above the knee, the glossy wheatfield of chest, and under a mane of cloud, the great, soft planetary eye. At four, I learned a trick. I would scoop double-handfuls of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Heard around the West
Department of What About The Horse? Any person atop a bucking bronc in a Navajo rodeo may soon have to wear safety equipment, reports The Najavo Hopi-Observer. Injuries (to people) have been identified as a problem, so the tribe’s Injury Protection Committee wants to make all rodeo cowboys compete in “rodeo safety vests’ that are […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Have you hugged your tarantula lately?
We live in the Tucson Mountains. Our house sits on the saddle of a low hill with an arroyo on either side. It did not occur to us when we built the house many years ago that the hill on which we built undoubtedly served as a place of refuge when the arroyos became torrential […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
A little sarcasm, a lot of love
I love tourists. I love everything about them. They are the mainstay of our economy and the joy of my life. They buy my newspaper even when I pick on them. What? Me pick on tourists? For example, I love the way they turn left onto Center Street from the right-hand lane on Main. I […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Prison payrolls come with big hooks
I live in Salida: downstream from the Buena Vista Correctional Facility and its associated boot camp, and upstream from Canon City, home of Colorado’s major prison complex, and Florence, which now boasts a federal penitentiary, “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” And so I’ve noticed, firsthand and in my backyard, that most discussions of prisons ignore […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
A 22,000-square-foot castle is not a home
From the living room of my 1,200-square-foot house, I’ve watched a new house going up across the pasture and realized I live in a modern version of a log cabin. My house wasn’t built by hand, and the crew who built it worked together only from eight to five, although a few shared beers afterwards. […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Endless opportunities for solitude
No place on earth has anything quite like the roads of the Great Basin. Maybe the most distinctive recollection of my life 15 years ago at Deep Springs College along the California-Nevada border, was dropping off Westgard Pass into Deep Springs Valley driving a ratty Chevy pickup truck whose sole virtue was a passable sound […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Desert skin
The canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona – the Colorado Plateau – is something special. Something strange, marvelous, full of wonders. As far as I know there is no other region on earth much like it, or even remotely like it. Nowhere else have we had this lucky combination of vast sedimentary rock […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
The spotted owl made the rich richer
In Oregon lumber towns, a popular bumper sticker reads, “Spotted owl tastes like chicken.” But in the boardrooms of some of the nation’s largest forest products companies, the rare bird has laid a golden egg. The scarcity brought about by the federal protection of the endangered owl helped double the value of many corporations’ vast […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Irony piles on irony in Wyoming
JACKSON, Wyo. – Backers of a proposed private-federal land swap want to prevent development of the last huge chunk of ranchland in Wyoming’s Teton County. And they’re counting on the highest officials in the federal Interior Department to keep their plan alive. That’s an ironic twist in a state where Clinton administration officials are regularly […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Feds want to kill some Yellowstone bison
Where tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park see a wildlife haven for free-roaming buffalo, a cadre of federal and state scientists see a reservoir of disease that threatens to spill into the outside world. “Yellowstone National Park is a cloud hanging over us,” says Dick Rath, a veterinarian from Bozeman, Mont. Rath and his colleagues, including […]