The Seventymile Kid: The Lost Legacy of Harry Karstens and the First Ascent of Mount McKinleyTom Walker304 pages, softcover: $19.95Mountaineers Books, 2013. Many readers know that, 100 years ago, the Hudson Stuck expedition successfully summited Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak. But fewer are aware of the integral role played by the expedition’s most experienced […]
A historic climb revisited
Posted inGoat
Obama picks Nevadan Neil Kornze as next BLM head
A native Nevadan is expected to become the next overseer of much of the West’s public lands. Neil Kornze is President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres, mostly in Western states. Kornze joined the agency in 2011, and has been its principal deputy director since March. He […]
Posted inApril 16, 1982: The Big Secret: Highly toxic pesticides in the Rockies
Western chauvinism
To discredit a person’s testimony before a committee of the Idaho House of Representatives, all one need do is prove that the witness was born in some other state. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/14.8/download-entire-issue
Posted inApril 16, 1982: The Big Secret: Highly toxic pesticides in the Rockies
The Big Secret: Highly toxic pesticides in the Rockies
Although the use of toxic chemicals for agriculture in the Rocky Mountains is a public health concern, it is not a matter of public record. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/14.8/download-entire-issue
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Will Obama’s climate preparation order force flood planners into the future?
It’s been over a month since rain-swollen creeks tore through roads and flooded homes in Colorado’s Front Range. While the camera crews have long since gone home, the disaster isn’t over for families who suffered property damage. Of the 20,000 single-family homes in the Boulder area, only 3,504 had flood insurance – one of the […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
Backcountry culture clashes in the North Cascades
A hunter-backpacker examines the divides between user groups.
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Teton pronghorn take to highway crossings the third time around
For 15 days last year, Renee Seidler, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, sat in a truck near a highway and watched the fall migration of Wyoming’s pronghorn. It was the first time since the construction of Highway 191 that the 300-head Teton herd had an alternative to dodging cars and trucks to get […]
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Dead Southern California puma would have spread genetic diversity
As I wrote in High Country News last spring, the pumas of Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains are dying — slowly, but quite literally — for lack of genetic diversity. Blocked from migration by freeways, development and the Pacific Ocean, the lions have begun to inbreed; researchers studying the lions have, through DNA tests, found […]
Posted inWotr
Wolf populations should be assessed by packs, not individuals
The government’s decision to delist gray wolves is flawed.
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Salt Lake City water managers troubleshoot climate change with local data
In many Western cities, municipal water management is a job tied to the mountains. In Salt Lake City, for example, 80 percent of the city’s water supply comes from snowpack in seven Uinta and Wasatch Mountain watersheds. Yet it’s becoming all too clear that the mountains’ water yield will decrease, come earlier in the year, […]
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New anti-wolf, anti-fed film features “wolf cages” to protect kids
Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in […]
Posted inWotr
A uranium mining proposal threatens water supplies
This South Dakota project claims technology will trump nature.
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The long and winding (and dangerous) road: Car crashes and the rural West
It was almost a normal drive home. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in the Colorado Rockies, I’ve completed variations on the same 4.5-or-so-hour route dozens of times on my way down to the plains and my hometown, Boulder, Colo., without major incident: Highway 24 from Leadville to I-70; Highway 82 from Aspen to […]
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Pro-coal arguments win the day at Denver EPA hearing on CO2 regulations
At 5 a.m. on Oct. 30, coal miners and residents of Moffat County, Colorado, gathered at a McDonald’s in Craig for a pancake breakfast before boarding buses to Denver chartered by Peabody Coal. They were headed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s listening tour, in which the agency travels around the country seeking input on […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Towering Cell Phone Trees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. For a couple of years back in the 1970s, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
Cutting class: Alaskan villages struggle to keep schools open
In 15 years, 32 schools have closed because they have fewer than 10 students.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
New Hope for the Delta
During the worst drought in more than a century, the Colorado River may flow to the sea once more.
Posted inGoat
Americans are driving less, but Westerners still love their cars
Fellow Westerners: We are pathetic! Sure, we’ve got our redeeming qualities, I guess, but one of them is not our ability to mitigate the environmental impact of our commute. We Westerners are a tribe of steering-wheel-gripped, fossil-fuel-burning, trapped-in-a-tin-can-in-traffic creatures, guided along highways not by eyes and mind, but by the tinny, seductive voice of our […]
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Will stricter emissions limits mean stranded assets for investors?
Forty-five of the world’s top oil and gas producers received a letter, released at the end of October, that must have come as something of a wake-up call. Seventy investors that control a total of $3 trillion of those companies’ assets sent off the missive with one question in mind: What’s going to happen to […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
O pioneer: A filmmaker explores how we find home in the West
L.A. transplant Vera Brunner-Sung’s first fictional work tackles displacement, transience and belonging in Montana.