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 […]
The Latest: Colorado River Delta update
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Neighbors who visit my backyard in the dead of night
Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of snickering outside my bedroom window. I lay still, ransacking my brain for ideas on who might be out there, playing a trick on me, though by this point I had a fairly good idea of the culprits. I reached for […]
Posted inGoat
Escalante oil spill raises questions about remote clean-ups
After four dusty days spent slithering through slot canyons and scrambling over boulders in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, this morning’s walk is notably refreshing. Steve Defa, a 59-year-old psychotherapist from Escalante, Utah, is leading me up a sandy wash shaded by big ponderosa pines and smaller pinyons. The air is fragrant with pine needles and […]
Posted inWotr
Cliven Bundy needs to pay his grazing bills
Whatever you’ve read or seen on television, a new “Sagebrush Rebellion” of public-land ranchers against the federal government has not erupted in rural Nevada. What’s happened there can best be described as the last act of a long-running dispute between a delusional rancher and a hapless federal agency, the Bureau of Land Management. Unfortunately, the […]
Posted inGoat
Has Durango sold its river, and its soul, to recreation?
Several months ago, an old friend and sometime source contacted me with a tip on a big local story going down here in Durango, with statewide and even national implications. I had been looking around the immediate region for something into which I could dig my investigative reporting teeth. This might be it. A week […]
Posted inArticles
Listen to HCN readers share horror stories
Sometimes when you set off across the west in search of adventure, you find a bit more than you bargained for. For our recent Travel Issue, High Country News held a “Western Travel Horror Story” contest that prompted more than 50 readers to submit stories about trips in the west that went terribly—and hilariously—wrong. For […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Visiting the frosties of the Lost Sierra
The wonders of the classic roadside stands that still dish out soft-serve ice cream.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Mind over mountain
As adaptive adventure sports boom in the West, a paralyzed athlete pushes his limits.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Touring Indian Country via footrace
How to run in a reservation race that’s both sport and cultural tradition.
Posted inGoat
After the standoff, what’s next for Bundy and BLM?
With armed militia on one side, armed federal agents on the other, and about 900 cows in the middle, the Bureau of Land Management last Saturday called off its roundup of rancher Cliven Bundy’s “trespass cattle,” releasing the 300 or so cows it had already collected back into the desert. BLM director Neil Kornze said […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
International Car Forest of the Last Church
For a strange trip, check out Nevada’s otherworldly Stonehenge of wildly painted abandoned vehicles.
Posted inGoat
North Dakota, BLM look to curb natural gas flaring
Temperatures were in the single digits on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation in early February when Debbie Dogskin began to take off her clothes. In the throes of late stage hypothermia, people act irrationally as cold clouds their thinking. The 61-year old was found dead in a friend’s mobile home, an empty propane tank outside. […]
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Against the grain: Proposed FDA rule has beer-makers foaming
In 2013, New Belgium Brewing, the Fort Collins, Colo.-based purveyor of libations like Fat Tire and Ranger, whipped up exactly 792,292 barrels of beer. Considering each barrel is capable of filling somewhere in the range of 60 six-packs, that production made for plenty of happy drinkers (including, on more than one occasion, yours truly). But […]
Posted inArticles
Map of Colorado River pulse moving toward Sea of Cortez
Update May 16: The Colorado River has now reached the delta for the first time since the 1990s. Conservationists will study environmental effects of the pulse for years to come. Update May 13 from Karl Flessa: “Image taken Monday May 12. Tidal waters in foreground, Colorado River in background. Connection will likely take place on […]
Posted inWotr
My chickens lay their own Easter eggs
My first baby chicks arrived 10 years ago, just after midnight on Easter Sunday. The post office, of course, was closed, but I got the call to come get them, as happens when live animals are shipped. I’ve been rocking a flock ever since. Those who raise backyard chickens will inevitably go through an obsessive […]