A prom request painted on BLM land, a Nevada brothel, and more.

I agreed to buy our 45-acre ranch sight unseen after my husband, Kevin, came back from a fishing trip to western Colorado’s North Fork Valley. He’d been suffering from a kind of emptiness that couldn’t be filled by our marriage, our family, or his work. It turned out he needed to get back to the […]

The recovery of the endangered fox on Channel Islands National Park off the Southern California coast might be a benchmark for modern conservation. With the cinnamon-colored fox due to come off the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species list in about two years, this could be the fastest recovery of a land mammal in […]

Pat Dixon wrote his first fishing poem in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. For 12 years, Dixon had gillnetted salmon in Cook Inlet, the finger of water that points from the Gulf of Alaska to Anchorage. But after the Valdez dumped its noxious cargo into nearby Prince William Sound, fishing in Cook […]

The young man who looked like he was from the Middle East was sitting against the wall of the Grand Canyon, a Go-Pro camera strapped to his chest. My aching quads begged for a break, so I stopped, said hello, and pulled out my own camera lest he think I was intruding.  He had chosen a […]

On a recent trip to California, I visited the North Coast, where spring usually means green hills with deep grass strewn with lupine and bright orange poppies bobbing in sea breezes. This year, we found stunted grass, browning hills and the local news obsessing on the worst drought in California’s recorded history. Suddenly, the most […]