Selling the West

Your latest cover about the West being SHREDDED made me nauseous — not because of the vertigo-inducing image of bikers perched at cliff edge, but because it reminds me that enjoyment of Western public lands is becoming impossible (HCN, 7/20/15). Since my backpacking days are over, my solitude-seeking trips now tend to yield annoyance and […]

Your Aug. 3 article treated only one aspect of aerial firefighting — daytime activities, when fires are most active. Firefighting officials seem to have ruled out aerial operations at night when the fire has “laid down” and most often is not active. We see instead the photo ops of planes attacking fully active fires in […]

“Aerial firefighting: Is it worth it?” (HCN, 8/3/15) claims that wildland firefighting from the air has yet to be proven to work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone knowledgeable about wildland firefighting understands that fixed-wing tankers and helicopters have always been used in an initial attack mode. Their mission was never meant to extinguish fires, […]

Have we learned anything about wildfires and people living in high fire-hazard areas? (“The Bigger Burn,” HCN, 8/3/15.) The late columnist Ed Quillen got it right when he challenged the “closer to nature” lifestyle of people unconcerned about wildfires until one was knocking on their front door. He called this living in “the stupid zone.” […]