Every weekend at daybreak, the neighborhood dogs begin to bark. I open my blinds to see what’s up, and it’s almost always the same: a Mexican teenager in a dark hoodie running down the abandoned railroad track followed by several others just like him, spaced every few minutes. Sometimes they’re barefoot. They disappear into a […]
Two blocks from the Mexican border
Posted inGoat
New Mexico on fire
New Mexico is burning. Again. In June 2011, winds gusting up to 40 miles per hour propelled an aspen into a power line in the Jemez Mountains, near Los Alamos, igniting a 156,593-acre blaze that became known as the Las Conchas Fire. It was the biggest wildfire in the New Mexico’s recorded history, until the […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The power grid may determine whether we can kick our carbon habit
Minutes before 4 p.m. on a sizzling September day two years ago, right at the time when they were most needed, San Diego’s air conditioners suddenly died. Thousands of television and computer screens also flickered into darkness. Stoplights stopped working, gas stations ceased pumping, and traffic slowed to a snarl. Trains ground to a halt […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Most likely to secede
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. It is less than 90 miles, as the raven flies, from the Ranting Hill to Rough and Ready, California, a western Sierra foothills town that holds special meaning for a reclusive curmudgeon like me. […]
Posted inGoat
Frogs and toads in trouble
There hasn’t been a lot of feel-good amphibian news lately (except this video of a happy toad getting a back scratch) as increasing numbers of frogs and toads succumb to mysterious ailments. Now, we have a way to quantify all that doom and gloom, thanks to a new study in the online journal Plos One. […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
War Bird: An essay on robot hummingbirds
Probably he was bigAs mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.— D.H. Lawrence, “Humming Bird” The other day, a friend of mine sent along a story he thought I’d enjoy. It described how some engineers had developed a robot they called the Nano-Hummingbird. Barely 3 inches long […]
Posted inGoat
Tiny foxes rescued from extinction
The story of Channel Island foxes could have been one about extinction. Some time in the last decade we might have written about how several unique populations of four-pound, foot-tall carnivores ceased to exist in their only known home, southern California’s Channel Islands National Park. We’d wonder what went wrong, and how we allowed the […]
Posted inGoat
A swim through housing data
Home prices climbed again this spring, even in Las Vegas, where the crash hit so hard that entire neighborhoods of brand new, foreclosed-upon houses were virtually abandoned. We’re supposed to greet the news with glee. It is, after all, an indicator of the strength of the economy. If folks can afford to pay more for […]
Posted inWotr
Elwha, a story of today’s West
The heart of the new book, Elwha: A River Reborn, is a photograph of Elwha Dam taken in 2010, one year before it came down. Framed by canyon walls and a mossy rock garden, two thin cascades, leaking through the dam, join and fall down into the Elwha River, to embrace a dark pool just below […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Beavers battle oil and gas spills
THE WEST It takes a bold person to tinker with Smokey Bear, the U.S. Forest Service icon who proclaims, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” Messing with the paunchy blue-jeaned bear and his strong message might just earn you a cease and desist letter, plus a threat of jail time and fines. That happened to […]
Posted inWotr
Bighorn needn’t lose out to oil and gas trucks
It slips into the realm of offensive when a resource management agency is forced to undo its own hard work. The North Dakota Game and Fish Agency recently did just that by helicoptering 26 of 28 bighorn sheep out of the habitat it had carefully helicoptered the animals into in 2006. The herd, near Theodore Roosevelt National […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
A Utah realtor’s quest to sell a ghost town
Woodside, Utah Mike Metzger strides through a row of cracked wooden headstones decorated with faded plastic flowers. The 35-year-old wears a button-down shirt and gray pants. He has lightly-gelled short dark hair and a trim goatee. “These graves are silent now,” he says, staring wistfully at the camcorder. “But if they could speak, the stories […]
Posted inGoat
Mining for dark matter in Lead, South Dakota
Updated 6/17/13 In the 1870s, gold fever struck South Dakota’s Black Hills. Mining camps like the infamous Deadwood sprung from the mud, supporting bustling trade in opium and liquor. The gold seams went deep, and hundreds of miners and their families settled into a stable and prosperous living in the nearby, larger town of Lead […]
Posted inWotr
No thanks, Estonia
At any given moment, 20 million people are video chatting with friends and relatives in distant lands. Skype, the ingenious software that makes this possible, was developed in Estonia, a tiny nation in northern Europe, hard on the Baltic Sea. Ocean-going tribes, sometimes called “pagan raiders,” have lived in Estonia for thousands of years. During World […]
Posted inRange
Collaborative brings good news to Clearwater Country
Idaho is a paradoxical state. In some places it’s desert and sand dunes, in others, ferns and red cedar. Its people are also a complex mix of rugged individualists with strong churches and communities, of urban professionals and backwoods blue-collar workers. Those contradictions can pull the state apart or bring folks together. One of those […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Jonathan Thompson on the grid
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Electrical sounds courtesy of Lonemonk, freesound.org Horns courtesy of Robinhood76, freesound.org Yelling courtesy of stephsinger22, freesound.org Wind turbine courtesy of Andy Gardner, freesound.org
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Word watch
The new buzzword in the woods is “ecological forestry,” to replace “new forestry,” which academics advocated and promoted in the 1990s. I applaud the desire to provide ecosystem management that somewhat mimics nature, but I often question motives (i.e., “to get the cut out”). What “A New Forest Paradigm” fails to acknowledge is that every […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Wanted: Wolves in Colorado
Being an avid elk hunter in Colorado, I hope the trapping and hunting pressure on wolves in Wyoming brings some of them here (“Wolf bycatch,” HCN, 4/29/13). The presence of wolves in Colorado might reduce the number of cattle that overgraze national forest land and ruin the riparian habitat for six months of the year, […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The West’s Big Data colonies
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The West’s Big Data colonies.
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The Latest: Quagga mussels invade Lake Powell
BackstoryIn the 1980s, invasive quagga and zebra mussels hitchhiked on ocean vessels from Eastern Europe to northeast North America. There, the thumbnail-sized bivalves proliferated, clogging water intake pipes, crusting boats, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and causing billions of dollars in damage. Measures were taken to prevent their westward spread, but in 2007 quaggas arrived, eager […]