In the summer of 2010, construction began on the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate artery for carrying as much as 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Opal Hub in southwestern Wyoming to the Malin Hub in southern Oregon. The project crossed sensitive sagebrush plains and something like 1,000 creeks and […]
A pipeline built years ago may start to export Rocky Mountain gas to Asia
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Strange little museums and zoos enliven the region
British ColumbiaAs you wander the West, keep an eye out for the tiniest, quirkiest museums and zoos tucked in unexpected and obscure spaces. They often provide outsized amusement and – fair to say – unrivaled learning experiences. You can see, for instance, “Canada’s largest ant farm,” along with hulking tarantulas, Malaysian rainbow frog beetles and […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Savoring the horror stories
(This is the editor’s note for an April 2014 special issue of the HCN magazine devoted to travel in the West.) I’ll never forget the time I was hiking with my five-months-pregnant wife in Bryce Canyon National Park in remote rural Utah. An unexpected November snowstorm hit us, and Linda slipped on an icy path, […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
How to save your town from the interstate
Tourists flocked to Winslow, Ariz., back in the golden era of cross-country rail travel, and later along the classic two-lane highway, Route 66. But now the old Valentine Diner sits empty and rusting, having long given up on luring customers off Interstate 40, which sidestepped the town in the 1970s. It’s a symbol of all […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Houseboaters vs. river runners
Andrew Gulliford, a professor in Durango, Colo., spent five days last summer on a houseboat floating around Utah’s most famous party scene, Lake Powell – a reservoir on the Colorado River – and then another five running the Yampa and Green rivers on the Colorado-Utah border. Gulliford noticed sharp differences between the cultures of houseboating […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Backpacking with monster skeeters
An Alaska encounter with the fiercest of the 176 mosquito species that roam the U.S.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
A brave and unusual conservationist turns 90
Ninety years ago, on April 12, 1924, Tom Bell was born in a house owned by the Union Pacific Railroad, in Winton, Wyo., a coal-mining camp. It was an inauspicious but appropriate beginning for the guy who would start both High Country News and Wyoming’s largest conservation group. Tom’s father, Lafe Bell, worked in the […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
49 trout streams of southern Colorado
49 Trout Streams of Southern Colorado Mark D. Williams and W. Chad McPhail, 120 pages, softcover:$27.95. University of New Mexico Press. 2013. For southern Colorado anglers in search of plentiful, hard-fighting trout, getting to gold-medal waters is the easy part: there’s the Gunnison, the Frying Pan, and the Animas, to name a few. But as […]
Posted inGoat
Rancher vs the BLM: A 20-year standoff ends with tense roundup
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Cliven Bundy says, ‘the BLM don’t exist.’
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Best place to see a crowd of grizzlies
A few tourists get close to amazing numbers of bears catching salmon at Alaska’s McNeil River Falls.
Posted inGoat
Mojave Desert is an amazing carbon storehouse
Add this to the list of why deserts are awesome: they can suck a bunch of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. For ten years, researchers in southern Nevada piped extra carbon dioxide into the Mojave Desert’s air. Their goal was to learn about the capacity of arid ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide as we […]
Posted inGoat
Threatened lynx are bycatch in Idaho trapping resurgence
Last January, in the snowbound mountains that crease northern Idaho’s Boundary County, an unnamed trapper found what he thought was a live bobcat in his baited wire cage. He shot the creature on sight, hoping for a pelt that would fetch up to $2,000 on the fur market. But when he lifted the carcass from […]
Posted inWotr
Former Interior secretary blasts gas industry pressure
Former Interior Department Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the University of Colorado recently to talk about oil and gas drilling on federal public lands. Not surprisingly, he didn’t pull any punches. Babbitt criticized the agency he oversaw during the Clinton years, the Bureau of Land Management, for its handling of drilling on 250 million acres of […]
Posted inGoat
Can cacti help San Joaquin Valley farmers survive a drought?
When I finally got a hold of John Diener, the busy 62-year-old farmer was en route to his organic broccoli field in central California’s San Joaquin Valley. I could picture the scene: a truck bouncing over a dusty track, golden morning sunlight, rows of bright green plants meeting a blue sky. The vision was idyllic. […]
Posted inWotr
In the West, it’s all about beer
After sampling 50 different beers and spending a number of hours searching for garages converted to breweries, I was content. A friend and I had planned this getaway for weeks, and the night in Bend, Ore., was as central to the trip as was Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. In fact, the visit […]
Posted inArticles
Will the Colorado River reach the Gulf of California once more?
Photographs of the historic water pulses.
Posted inGoat
Coast Guard blames Shell for beached Arctic drill rig
On New Year’s Eve, 2012, Royal Dutch Shell’s Kulluk drilling platform ran aground off a southern Alaskan island called Sitkalidak. Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard released a 152-page report dissecting the incident in minute detail and squarely pinning the blame on the oil company and its contractors. The company had used the Kulluk – […]
Posted inWotr
Save sagebrush, and good things happen
High in the Desatoya Mountains east of Fallon, Nev., and just east of Route 50 — famously dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America” by Life Magazine in 1986 — a curious congregation gathers in the predawn light. It is a congregation made up of two parts: one, of sage grouse, preparing to strut their stuff […]
Posted inJune 22, 1973: The crisis in energy: stampede corralled
My neighbor is an addict
No, he’s not addicted to drugs, good whiskey, or even bad women. He is addicted to the gasoline engine and the various vehicles and devices to which it has been adapted. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/5.13/download-entire-issue
Posted inArticles
The energy haves and have-nots
Will rooftop solar owners get off the grid — and leave other power users in the dark?