(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 […]
Conflict for the sake of conflict
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 […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The Latest: Coal companies seek export terminals beyond the Northwest
BackstoryCoal companies, frustrated by environmental regulations and growing competition from natural gas producers, have long hoped to expand their market by exporting coal to Asia. So far, however, they’ve been stymied by Western opposition, from Montana ranchers battling new rail lines to Washington residents fighting coastal terminals (“Coal-export schemes ignite unusual opposition, from Wyoming to […]
Posted inArticles
The National Park Service’s diversity problem
From Yosemite to Glacier National Park to the Harriet Tubman National Monument in Maryland, the 400 parks that make up the U.S. National Park system are supposed to be the shared heritage of all Americans. Yet as Jodi Peterson reports in the current issue of High Country News, the vast majority of people who visit […]
Posted inGoat
ESA changes could help protect sage grouse on private land
In an increasingly subdivided and trailblazed West, southeastern Oregon’s Harney County is a place that can still make you feel small. From the empty blacktop two-lane highways 78 and 20, broad grasslands rise to sagebrush-studded mesas and hills that crest and break to the blue horizons like the landlocked waves of a parched sea. Drive-fast-with-your-windows-down […]
Posted inWotr
The Colorado River’s reunion with its usually bone-dry Delta
They kissed. Like two long-lost lovers who had been cruelly kept apart for 20 years, the Colorado River and the Sea of Cortez finally embraced. The historic reunion occurred this May as the United States and Mexico worked together to restore the Colorado River Delta. The “pulse flow” of water raced down from Lake Mead, […]
Posted inGoat
Feel-good salmon farms
Standing on a grated metal platform above a fiberglass tank, I’m entranced by silvery salmon gliding through a current of recycled freshwater. The salmon are lively and occasionally jump when a large feed bin, meticulously set with a timer, rains down an exact amount of feed pellets. Everything is designed to help the fish grow […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Parks for all?
The National Park Service struggles to connect with a changing America.