Last spring, Joshua trees put on a magnificent show in the Mojave Desert. Nearly all at once nearly all of them bloomed, sprouting dense bouquets of waxy, creamy-green flowers from their Seussian tufts of spiky leaves. The bloom was so sweeping and abundant — and such a contrast to the typical pattern, where only a […]
Joshua trees may be migrating north in response to climate change
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Why we risk life and property
Dangerous places in the West are often the most desirable.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Voting down science education, world’s toughest boss, and bending over backwards for healthcare.
THE NATIONWhat if you went to your family doctor complaining about that nasty rundown blah sort of feeling and were advised to experience the joys of nature rather than those of pharmaceuticals? In a nutshell: Take two aspen and call me in the morning. Daphne Miller says it’s not a joke: Nature in general is […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Two energy giants forced to clean up uranium mess
Kerr-McGee and Anadarko to put billions into detoxing.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The high price of cheap housing and falt-screen TVs
The sad and infuriating article “Fallon’s Deadly Legacy” (HCN, 3/3/14) is staying with me; I did not simply read it and move on to the next interesting article. Of course, there is no way to fully overcome the pain of the death of a child, no words that can be truly comforting. However, those affected […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Shilling for Big Oil?
In 1993, the mayor of Cordova, Alaska, committed suicide. In his final note, he mentioned Exxon. This tragedy represents the lasting shocks that continue to ripple through many communities still affected by the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill 25 years later. While Krista Langlois’ story was focused on the ecological aspects of the […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Shady dealings in the desert
SunlandDon Waters200 pages, hardcover:$25.95.University of Nevada Press, 2013. Sid Dulaney leaves his cheating girlfriend behind in Massachusetts and returns home to Tucson in Sunland, Oregon writer Don Waters’ hilarious first novel. Sid had worked as an itinerant teacher, but finds himself jobless in Tucson, where he spends his time looking after his beloved grandmother, Nana. […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Mulies on the move
Scientists discover a surprising migration in western Wyoming.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Minidoka: An American Concentration Camp by Teresa Tamura
Minidoka: An American Concentration Camp Teresa Tamura, 305 pages, hardcover: $27.95. Caxton Press, 2013 In the wake of the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order forcing the West Coast’s entire Japanese and Japanese American population to relocate to internment camps. Photojournalist Teresa Tamura, a third-generation Japanese American, tells the […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Inconclusive conclusions
Sierra Crane-Murdoch’s thoughtful article on the legacy of the tragic cancer deaths of young children in Fallon, Nev., brought to mind the cancer clusters amid the pesticide-saturated lands in California’s Central Valley (HCN, 3/3/14). The investigations result in the same inconclusive and deeply unsatisfying official conclusions. Suspicions linger for years that information has been withheld, […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
In like a lion, out like a donut
Spring has hit High Country News headquarters in Paonia, Colo.: The trees are blooming and the temperatures rising, the winds are strafing our winter-complacent mucus membranes with Colorado Plateau dust and juniper pollen, and snowpack is raging down the North Fork in a torrent of red water. HCN is undergoing a sort of season change […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Hot Mess and other fears for the future
I live in an idyllic little Western town, rich in natural beauty and culture. I have a great family, no pressing health or financial worries – in short, it’s a utopian life. And yet … somehow I can’t leave it at that. I can’t tune out the news, can’t ignore economic and political injustices, and […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Embracing parched ground
All the Land to Hold UsRick Bass322 pages, hardcover: $25.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Rick Bass’ fourth novel, All the Land to Hold Us, focuses on human desire and – like the Montana writer’s many previous books – our relationship with the natural world. Richard is a geologist who reads rock layers to find oil, fossils […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
A path to an unexpected place
What will happen to Paonia, Colo., when our three coal mines close? That’s a question almost everyone in this rural valley has asked at one time or another. But ever since the Elk Creek Mine, which is owned by billionaire Bill Koch, laid off more than 300 employees last year, our musings have taken on […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Colorado River Delta update
BackstoryOver the last 50 years, the Colorado River has rarely reached its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. The giant dams on its main stem and the water demands of some 35 million people have largely dried out its vast delta, which once sustained cottonwood and willow forests and armies of fish and birds. But […]
Posted inGoat
Restore fish to Oregon’s Sandy River Basin: Just add trees
On the evening of January 16, 2011, a soaking-wet Sunday in northwest Oregon, the Sandy River, engorged by snowmelt and hurricane-level rainfall, leapt its banks. The river tore through neighborhoods on the slopes of Mount Hood, devoured cars and trucks, and left hundreds without power or phone service. Lolo Pass Road was transformed into the […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
A Japanese fly-fishing art comes to life
Centuries-old tenkara is becoming a hit on streams in the American West.
Posted inGoat
In an era of light pollution, the darkest skies in the West
Here are some of the region’s best stargazing spots.
Posted inWotr
A Montana university can’t resist a great big gift
Perhaps nothing warms a university president’s heart like successful alumni throwing millions of dollars at their alma mater. Recently, Montana State University’s President Waded Cruzado announced a $50 million donation – a university record — from Norm Asbjornson, owner of AAON, a Tulsa, Oklahoma based heating and cooling equipment manufacturer. Asbjornson is a 1960 MSU […]
Posted inGoat
Wildlife and rodenticides: The new silent spring?
The Griffith Park mountain lion, discovered wandering the urban wilds above Los Angeles in the late winter of 2012, has been celebrated like none other of its kind. While mountain lions menace suburbs in Colorado and distress ranchers in Arizona, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California, the rare cougar is widely viewed as […]