Thankfully, “How to get search-and-rescued,” Shaina Maytum’s travel horror story (HCN, 4/14/14), was short. Fixated on what the volunteer rescuers were wearing (Postal Service uniform, jeans, Keds), she neglected to admit what’s important: She’s lucky to be alive. Any sense of personal responsibility was missing, along with any gratitude for the search-and-rescue folks who drop […]
Respect your rescuers
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Peak water
Bigger reservoirs and deeper wells won’t end California’s water crisis
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Paying for risk-takers
When I was a kid in the 1950s, my dad expressed disdain for people so poor they’d build on riverbanks prone to flooding (“The stages of disaster,” HCN, 4/28/14). High ground was the motto for his dream home, perched on the stable bluffs of the Minnesota River. In 1978, I arrived in Tucson, Arizona, a […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Ordinary heroes
It was refreshing to read the article “Mind Over Mountain” (HCN, 4/14/14). As one who lives with a spinal cord injury, at first I thought, “Oh no, not another hero story.” There are heroes, and Jon Arnow may be one, but there are thousands who live with similar injuries and who “care about the West” […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Baby birds get wood-chipped and draft horses for heavy dude ranchers.
THE WESTHuge draft horses, those “diesels of the horse world,” as the Idaho Statesman dubs them, are showing up at dude ranches these days, on tap for rugged trail rides because more and more would-be adventurers have supersized themselves. At Chico Hot Springs in Montana, for example, Heidi Saile of Rockin’ HK Outfitters said her […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Drought watch
Drought is dehydrating much of the West, with several states in their third or fourth consecutive year. Southern Oregon, California, southern Utah and western Nevada already have extremely low streamflows and will likely get drier in coming months. Nevada and New Mexico reservoirs were at less than a quarter of their normal levels for early […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Conflict for the sake of conflict
(This is an editor’s note accompanying an HCN magazine cover story, The Great Gun-rights Divide.) When federal land managers confronted by armed protesters abandoned their latest inept attempt to remove Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s illegally grazing cows in April, the rest of the world wondered, not for the first time, “What is up with the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Book Review: The Black Place: Two Seasons
The Black Place: Two Seasonsphotographs by Walter W. Nelson,essay by Douglas Preston108 pages, clothbound: $45. Museum of New Mexico Press, 2014 In the 1930s, while driving through northwest New Mexico, artist Georgia O’Keeffe stumbled upon a remote, uninhabited landscape she dubbed “The Black Place” – tall hills of layered sediment, coated in brown and black […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Best use for hayfields
We can argue about who owns the water, yet ultimately the West has a long legal history and an exact answer: We call them water rights for a reason (“What the hay?” HCN, 4/28/14). The owner of those rights – that personal property – should ultimately have the ability to sell the property to the […]
Posted inGoat
Scientists turn to crowdfunding for fracking research
A scientist from the University of Missouri who recently found elevated levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals in parts of Garfield County, Colo. where spills of wastewater from natural gas drilling occurred is now planning the second phase of her research, but with a surprising funding mechanism this time. Rather than seeking backing from government agencies […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
‘Which parks aren’t relevant to black history?’
A black former park ranger talks about diversity on public lands.
Posted inGoat
Will big snowpack bring floods to Colorado Front Range?
Planners gird for more woes after major snows.
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Latest: Utah loses Salt Creek road suit
BackstoryRevised Statute 2477, passed in 1866, allowed settlers to build highways across public land. Western counties later exploited it to reopen and maintain abandoned routes, even in national parks and wilderness study areas (“The road to nowhere,” HCN, 12/20/04). In 2004, Utah and San Juan County filed an R.S. 2477 suit to reopen the Salt […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change threatens nation’s largest archaeological site
When we think about what’s at stake with climate change, we usually imagine impacts to our current way of life. But as a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, our shared human history is at risk of being wiped away as well. Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park – the largest archaeological […]
Posted inArticles
Hydrocarbon inhalation added to long list of oil & gas perils
CDC investigates yet another threat for one of the deadliest industries in the nation.
Posted inWotr
Train Day brought out the Chief’s supporters
A baker’s dozen of us from central Colorado boarded the Amtrak Southwest Chief May 10. We were celebrating National Train Day, so called because back in 1869, a Golden Spike was pounded into a railroad tie, finally linking East and West Coasts by railroad. Lots of Americans still like to link up by train; on […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Out in the backcountry
A profile of a gay ranger in the National Park Service.
Posted inGoat
Obama names newest U.S. monument: New Mexico’s Organ Mountains
President Obama’s record on public lands protection has been spotty – as of January 2013, he’d opened more than twice as many acres to drilling as he’d conserved. Lately, though, the POTUS has been on a bit of a roll. Over the last 16 months, Obama has used the Antiquities Act – the 1906 law […]
Posted inGoat
Tribes now prosecute non-Native offenders, Alaska scrambles to catch up
“I am a Native American statistic. I am a survivor of sexual and physical violence.” So began a 2012 speech by Tulalip Tribes vice chairwoman Deborah Parker supporting the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The man who abused Parker in the 1970s – as well as the men who raped her aunt a decade later […]
Posted inWotr
Outdoor recreation binds us in the West
Travelling through the Beehive State recently, I was struck by two completely different stories emerging from Utah. On one weekend, San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman led a group of angry protesters — many of them armed — on an illegal ATV ride through Recapture Canyon, the site of 1,000-year-old Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that some […]