Last Thursday, the complaints of business owners and restaurant workers in national park gateway towns around the West hit home when my boyfriend’s parents, who were about to embark on the Southwestern leg of their once-in-a-lifetime cross-country road trip, realized the shutdown had foiled their entire itinerary for the region. Instead of snapping pictures from […]
States pay to re-open national parks and fuel anti-feds fire
Posted inWotr
In the land of getting nothing done
A delegation of outdoor recreationists go to D.C. to lobby for climate action — and walk into the congressional shutdown.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Lessons from the flooded Front Range
Learning to live with the inevitable.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Tribal casinos don’t like competition
The Northern Edge Navajo Casino sits on an otherwise empty chunk of desert alongside northern New Mexico’s San Juan River, just inside the Navajo Nation’s borders. It’s a perfect place for a casino, right across the river from Farmington, N.M., home to hundreds of energy-field workers with cash burning holes in the pockets of their […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Tortoise treatise, critiqued
Emily Green’s Aug. 5 article “Mojave Squeeze,” states that, in 2008, “California’s habitat conservation plans (were) superseded by a new ‘Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.’ ” In fact, the DRECP has not superseded anything; a draft environmental impact statement has yet to be released. Ms. Green failed to note that the final biological opinion for […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The world of the speed artist
The FlamethrowersRachel Kushner400 pages, hardcover: $26.99.Scribner, 2013. Reno, the 22-year-old protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, makes her first appearance as she flies across Nevada on her way to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s. “The land was drained of color and specificity,” she observes. “The faster I went, the more connected […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The mysterious reappearance of the white-bottomed bee
A Western species that crashed in the 1990s may be making a comeback in Washington and Colorado.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The fungus among us
West Nile virus, valley fever, hantavirus: Over the past decade, the West has seen an increase in some rare but scary illnesses. According to a September study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the U.S. places 11th globally for incidents of plague. Scientists also recently discovered that a deadly tropical fungus, which […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The drill rig next door
The Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah has air-quality problems just like those mentioned in Erie, Colo (“Front Range drilldown,” HCN, 9/2/13). In the Uinta Basin, the natural gas industry loses 6 to 12 percent of its product from leaky installations and flaring. Methane is about the strongest of the greenhouse gases, and shouldn’t be released. […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The cartographer’s lament
Thanks for keeping the art and science of cartography alive (“You are here,” HCN, 9/16/13)! I’m a cartographer, too, working in my own little shop. While the independence is really fine, the economics of competing with the large corporations is devastating. Now, with mapping going online, there is very little true cartography involved. It’s just […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Is this heaven? No, it’s Idaho
Godforsaken Idaho: StoriesShawn Vestal,209 pages, softcover:$15.95.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Shawn Vestal sets the stories in his focused yet far-reaching debut collection among regular Mormon folks who live in Idaho, touching on their lives in the past, the present and even the afterworld. Most of his characters have fallen away from their faith or are struggling […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Hikers face assorted hazards, bull elk get revenge on hunters, and more
What have you heard?
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Help HCN complete its online archives!
We’re proud that High Country News is 43 years old — but our website, hcn.org, is still incomplete, because our online archive goes back only 20 years. Now we’re finally scanning in issues published before 1994. Soon they’ll be available online. We need your help to finish the project, though. So far, our point man, […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Gimpy’s lessons
I found Ana Maria Spagna’s essay, “The story of Gimpy” touching and thought-provoking (HCN, 9/2/13). Beyond evoking the compelling image of the black bear left incapable of foraging by a gunshot wound, Spagna addresses human compassion toward animals, concluding, “We’re all connected and we owe our fellow creatures something.” It is essential that HCN continue […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
A review of Painters and the American West, Vol. 2
Painters and the American West, Vol. IIJoan Carpenter Troccoli, et al.,344 pages, cloth: $80. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. In Painters and the American West, Vol. 2, retired art scholar and museum director Joan Carpenter Troccoli writes about the lives and times of the artists whose works fill the American Museum of Western Art in […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The Latest: In Oregon, a record number of spawning salmon
BackstorySome 16 million salmon and steelhead once returned to the Columbia River Basin each fall, but impediments like the Bonneville Dam near Portland, Ore., decimated their numbers. Costly recovery efforts and courtroom battles brought only marginal improvements, and populations were largely supported by hatchery stock. In 2006, court-mandated spillovers — running less water through turbines […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The Latest: A House bill would double timber harvest
BackstoryWestern counties that once relied on timber revenue, especially in Oregon, now depend instead on federal aid provided by the Secure Rural Schools Act. But the law expired this year, and federal forest managers are trying new logging methods to increase income while also protecting forests. However, state and federal lawmakers continually press for higher […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Kids will be kids
See a full gallery of Rebecca Drobis’s images from the Blackfeet Reservation here. On the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, winters are long and difficult, unemployment is high and infrastructure lacking. Children grow up without the latest video games and movies or a rigid schedule of activities. But despite the sometimes-harsh realities of the reservation, […]
Posted inGoat
Does the Rim Fire leave room for compromise on salvage logging?
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., might have known that his proposal to salvage burned timber from Yosemite’s Rim Fire would not go over smoothly. Not only is he trying to auction off logging contracts in a national park while his own party’s antics have kept that park closed to citizens, he wants to sidestep the whole […]