In the West: Sen. James McClure and the Forest Service are big losers

Among Western Republicans, McClure is the biggest loser from the Senate shift. For six years he has kept Forest Service timber and roadbuilding budgets high and Bureau of Land Management grazing fees low. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.22/download-entire-issue

A glossary of water terms for those who wonder why water diversions are not diverting and why it is morally offensive to leave water flowing in a stream. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.21/download-entire-issue

The upper Colorado River was plumbed to put water on arid lands and to generate electricity. Today those uses are in decline while recreation, urbanization and aesthetics come on strong. Through luck or forethought, the river’s plumbing is proving adaptable to the new demands. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.21/download-entire-issue

In the high arid plains of southwest Wyoming, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has built Rube Goldberg irrigation systems that keep farmers on the edge of poverty and load up the rivers with salt. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.21/download-entire-issue

An account of the settlement of Mexico’s Mexicali Valley; the escape and subsequent recapture of the Colorado River in the early 1900s; the shattering of a made-in-the-U.S.A. hacienda; and the settlement of an international dispute over the river’s saltiness. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.21/download-entire-issue

Ditch riders on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation work with an aged, deteriorated system, very rough measuring means, and farmers who are quick to assume that they are being shorted. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.20/download-entire-issue

North Dakota’s Garrison Project would irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres, cost about $1 million per farm, devastate wildlife habitat, and add only a tiny fraction to the state’s farmland. But the project would also reassure a remote, hurting and suspicious part of America. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.20/download-entire-issue

Today, the Missouri River has been transformed, but residents of the northern plains still struggle with the question of how to use its water. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.20/download-entire-issue

America can’t keep its hands off its rivers. In the Columbia and Colorado basins, the damming and diverting has produced new economic bases, enormous amounts of irrigated desert lands and green cities in what was desert. But the transformation of the long, wide, muddy Missouri has had little effect on the region. Download entire issue […]

High mountain-streams don’t have dams, but they do have loggers, and the mud spawned by roading and logging in Idaho can be as deadly to salmon reproduction as the highest concrete dam. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.19/download-entire-issue

The Northwest Power Planning Council balances the giant, pro-kilowatt Bonneville Power Administration, and may serve as a model for the West in its search for a regional way to deal with resource questions now dominated by the federal government. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.19/download-entire-issue

Although history has driven a wedge between the people of Washington’s Warm Springs Reservation and their ancestral home, the Columbia River still flows through their lives in significant ways. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.19/download-entire-issue

Will just enough be done — by increasing the number of fish hatcheries, by limiting logging, and by rationing the fishtake — to keep the salmon runs marginally alive? Or will more far-reaching steps be taken to bring back the spirit, as well as the fish, of the good old days? Download entire issue to […]

The author describes the natural history of the region, and then tells how the river has been reworked to provide kilowatts, acre-feet, a route for barges into Idaho and other goods of the modern age. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.19/download-entire-issue

The authors follow a young salmon, or smolt, from its spawning place in the high country downstream, past innumerable physical and bureaucratic barriers, to the ocean. (To read the full text, click on the “View a PDF from the original” link below, or download a PDF of the entire issue: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.19/download-entire-issue) This article appeared in […]

A water deal between California’s Imperial Irrigation District and the Metropolitan Water District was to bring water marketing of age. Instead, it has revealed the pitfalls that lie in the path of water marketing. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.18/download-entire-issue

Western water once existed in a protected world unto itself, made up of complex laws and regulations, tight political alliances, bureaucracies and massive federal subsidies. But now it is subject to real world forces, making it understandable. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.18/download-entire-issue

The Army Corps of Engineers, with its national constituency, appears to have found a strategy for survival. The Bureau of Reclamation, with its 17-state Western constituency, may be on its way to being outdated. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.18/download-entire-issue

As grizzly bears cause trouble for ranchers near Choteau, Mont., a father and son see the issue differently. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/18.17/download-entire-issue