These rocks are warm to the touch under noonday sun. I strip my socks off sweaty feet and stand in unlaced boots in the shade of a juniper. Angie perches with her left foot wedged toe-first into a crevice above me, her right leg hanging free. She snaps a quickdraw onto a hanger bolted into […]
Sycamore Canyon: an essay
Posted inGoat
Eat more insects
When I was in middle school my Dad and I were catching grasshoppers for fishing bait, but we ended up in the kitchen frying them instead. Since it’s hard to go wrong deep-frying anything, they were kind of tasty, like popcorn. In a Calvin and Hobbes-inspired move, I decided to take some to school and […]
Posted inWotr
All it takes is somebody with conviction
Once in a while, a principled person can make all the difference. This is how it began for me: I host Home Ground, a weekly public radio program, and a year ago, Montana’s U.S. attorney invited me to attend a law enforcement conference of about 130 officials, ranging from city and county police to state attorneys […]
Posted inWotr
Once there was an effective governor and a middle ground
It’s sobering to recall that, not that long ago, the West wasn’t labeled Blue or Red, but rather a shade of beige. Just a generation ago, centrists like Mike Mansfield, Cecil Andrus, Frank Church, Scoop Jackson, John Melcher and progressives like the cousins Morris and Stewart Udall represented Westerners in Washington. Today, if a Western […]
Posted inGoat
Weighing Pebble Mine
Each year, nearly half the world’s wild sockeye salmon congregate in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay, then make their way up rivers into a wild land tangled with smaller streams to spawn. There, at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak rivers, Pebble Partnership proposes to mine copper and gold. The Pebble Mine, if fully developed, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
BLM teams with researchers to protect midget faded rattlesnake
Summer snake hunting in western Colorado is a race against the sun. The reptiles emerge early from their dens to soak up dawn’s dull warmth. But once the hillsides hum with heat, they’ll split for the shadows. “We better get going,” says biologist Josh Parker of Georgia’s Clayton State University when I meet his small […]
Posted inGoat
BLM fracking rules just got more industry-friendly
When I first wrote about the Bureau of Land Management’s draft of its new fracking regulations in May 2012, I chalked the Obama administration’s pro-industry, jobs-jobs-jobs spin on the proposal up to election-year politicking. After all, beneath the Orwellian PR and despite not going as far as environmentalists had hoped, many parts of it seemed […]
Posted inWotr
Hispanics flex some environmental muscle
The 1906 Antiquities Act, which grants the president unilateral authority to protect broad swaths of land as monuments, has long stirred controversy in the West, where we don’t like the feds overstepping. The 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated by Bill Clinton in 1996, is still a sore point because Utah’s congressmen and governor were […]
Posted inGoat
The cattle-cheatgrass connection
Can grazing help control cheatgrass? That’s one of those questions that in some places doesn’t mean a thing, but in the Great Basin is likely to elicit a range of answers, from a decisive ‘yes’ to a forceful ‘absolutely not.’ The answer, as usual, lies somewhere in between: It depends on how dominant cheatgrass already […]
Posted inGoat
Rooftop solar is killing your utility!
For over a century, monopoly electric utilities have nurtured the West. They fed the mines and the mills, and now deliver the juice to our thirsty digital devices and air conditioners. Now, it appears as if the offspring is offing its mother, as rooftop solar slowly strangles utilities. While the green media has gleefully spread […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but […]
Posted inGoat
Save our gauges
In the spring of 2011, a big, fast-melting snowpack, along with ice-jammed rivers and persistent rain brought intense flooding to Montana. Miles City, in the southeastern part of the state, declared a flood disaster after part of its levee system eroded away, and the town’s stream gauge on the Yellowstone River measured the third highest […]
Posted inRange
It’s Endangered Species Day!
Today, the third Friday in May, is Endangered Species Day. Passed by a unanimously-supported Senate resolution several years ago, the holiday is intended to encourage us “…to become educated about and aware of threats to species, success stories in species recovery and the opportunity to promote species conservation worldwide.” The Endangered Species Act (ESA), which […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
In the field with a Montana couple hunting wolves
We’re hunting wolves on an Arctic December morning in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Ryan Counts and Becky Frey lead me along a hillside above a shelf of open grass and sage known as Decker Flats. The local hunter gossip pinpointed a pack in this area the final day of elk hunting season, […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson from a pig called Eddie
I love animals and always have, but I am also a meat eater. In my early 20s, I tried a short stint as a vegetarian, but jumped off the meat-free wagon after a happy encounter with bacon. At the time I felt a twinge of guilt, but the truth is I never gave vegetarianism a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Have a ponytail? Watch out for owls!
MONTANA AND COLORADO As the Missoulian puts it, “There’s rotten cellphone service, there’s nonexistent cellphone service, and then there’s what’s happening just a few miles east of Ovando.” Which is exactly nothing, because a 195-foot-tall cell phone tower near this tiny western Montana town has never connected a call to anybody. Clearview, a Florida-based company, […]
Posted inGoat
Wyoming’s pile of coal
This month, Wyoming coal companies will pull the 10 billionth ton of coal from the state’s ground, according to a recent estimate by the Wyoming State Geological Survey. If all that ancient metamorphosed swamp were put in a 100-foot high pile, it would stretch across a 12-by-12-mile square of prairie. WSGS based the 10-billion ton […]
Posted inGoat
The other Cannabis legalization story
There were obvious ways to avoid being drafted into combat during World War II: Be a woman. Or a man younger than 18. Or a man of prime age who was somehow “physically, mentally or morally” unfit. And then there were less apparent avenues. For instance: grow hemp. The government would not only allow you […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Of sense and salinity: A swim in the Great Salt Lake
Standing barefoot and swimsuited on a concrete boat ramp, I eyed the shimmering surface of the Great Salt Lake. On this June morning, clouds of brine flies roiled inches above the water: mouth level if you’re a swimmer. Worse, the brine shrimp had hatched, and their countless tiny bodies had turned the water — usually […]
Posted inRange
The danger of too much screentime, in and out of the woods
In an Earth Day podcast, new Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell expressed her concern over the growing divide between people and nature. She pointed to “screen time,” and to other distractions that keep kids, in particular, from exploring their outdoor environments and from developing a general curiosity about the natural world. Children and adolescents […]