Dad didn’t like it when I moved here. Nine years before, I’d left Texas. Now here I was, leaving Colorado Springs for a town with 1 percent of its population and, Dad believed, 1 percent of its opportunities, if that. There are three of us kids, and I’m the nearest to his heart — and […]
River home: an essay on life on the Arkansas River
Posted inRange
Two tales of one river
As Earth Day passed with little fanfare this week, news was mixed for the Colorado River. American Rivers, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy organization, released its annual list of the nation’s most endangered waterways. Half of them are in the West, and the Colorado has the dubious distinction of landing the number one spot. The group […]
Posted inWotr
Snow, no longer so white
The recent online series, Trip, features Swiss free-skiers Nicolas and Loris Falquet skiing through snow colored with yellow, blue and umber dyes, all apparently non-polluting. It’s beautiful, slow-motion cinematography that captures the complexity of snow, with vivid contrasts between storm layers, cornices, powder and slabs. It’s also a timely metaphor, because the color of snow […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Billionaires for energy conservation
MONTANA “If Montana residents can scrape it up, they can eat it,” said The Associated Press, about a roadkill-salvage bill signed by the governor April 4. “It really is a sin to waste good meat,” is how Democratic state Sen. Larry Jent of Bozeman put it. Elk, deer, antelope and moose are all fair game […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change, not terrorists, is the real threat to the power grid
Early in the morning on April 16, someone fired shots at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose, Calif. A transformer bank was the primary victim, and it ended up losing thousands of gallons of oil. The secondary victim was the electrical grid: The power company urged residents to cut back on their […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Aspen, Colo. environmental community split over small hydro
Last summer’s Fourth of July parade in the resort town of Aspen, Colo., was apple-pie middle America. There were Rotarians and librarians, prancing horses and dirt bikers. The mayor passed out flags. Cheers erupted as veterans passed, their signs like bookmarks in American history from World War II to Afghanistan. Then came some unusual floats: […]
Posted inGoat
Pumping the San Pedro dry?
Arizona’s San Pedro River has been called the most studied river in the world, attracting scientists, birders, and anyone wanting to observe the region’s healthiest desert river. But all that research doesn’t seem to have affected an April decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to approve groundwater pumping that could deplete the river’s […]
Posted inWotr
Look! Shooting stars!
My favorite Oregon wildflowers are called shooting stars, delicate darts whose blossoms with their sharp-pointed anthers and swept-back magenta petals seem to hurtle toward the soft spring earth from their height of six inches or so. These are among the first flowers to appear in our oak woodlands, long before the oaks themselves show any […]
Posted inRange
Uranium is no good for the Navajo
A recent post on the High Country News website advocates the position that the Navajo Nation should eventually drop its 2005 uranium ban so that it can get a better deal on uranium development, which the author, Jonathan Thompson, sees as inevitable. The post holds up the example of the Ute Tribe as an example […]
Posted inGoat
High-tech canary in the copper mine
On the night of April 10, 165 million tons of rock — equivalent in volume to 735,000 school buses — ripped down the northeast face of Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon mine near Salt Lake City, damaging giant shoveling machines, haul trucks and other mining equipment. The cascade of earth swept away roads and left […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Sacrificial Land: Will renewable energy devour the Mojave Desert?
Over breakfast at the Crowbar Café in Shoshone, Calif., Brian Brown explains to me how he makes a living. Shoshone is a town of 31 in the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border; Brown runs his own business here, the China Ranch Date Farm. In the late summer, he strips offshoots from unproductive palm trees […]
Posted inGoat
In the ozone
In 2005, smog levels in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin surprised even the scientists who study one of smog’s primary components, ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is typically a summertime air pollution problem in traffic-ridden urban areas, like L.A., Salt Lake City and Denver. But in sparsely populated Sublette County, ozone that winter was […]
Posted inGoat
The companies behind the curtain
Ever since the Bureau of Land Management announced more than a year ago that some 30,000 acres surrounding the towns of Colorado’s North Fork Valley like a necklace had been nominated for oil and gas development, wild rumors have flown about who did the nominating. (Nominating leases prompts the BLM to review whether the parcels are […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
California’s carbon market may succeed where others have failed
Most weekdays, a long line of rail cars delivers thick slabs of steel to a factory about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. Deep in the bowels of California Steel Industries, the slabs are toasted until they glow white-hot and then rolled into thin sheets used to make shipping containers, metal roofing and car wheels. […]
Posted inWotr
Wild horses: Too much of a good thing
I grew up with a dozen horses on Colorado’s eastern plains. In winter I busted hay bales to feed them, and, under a star-strewn sky, chopped holes in iced-over water tanks so the animals could drink. I’ve always believed that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. But not […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Do spoons make you fat?
UTAH If you want to watch the latest death-defying sport in the red-rock outback of southeastern Utah, check out “World’s largest rope swing” on YouTube, which has racked up more than 17 million views, according to TheSalt Lake Tribune. The video shows roped climbers leaping off the top of an arch and then swinging back […]
Posted inGoat
The river and the drought
“We’re geniuses!” bellowed my good friend, G, as we embarked on a rafting tour of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The temperature was nearing 80 under a cloudless sky, only a slight breeze blew upriver and the water was unusually clear. The ranger had just told us we’d have the place pretty much […]
Posted inRange
Real bears get a helping hand from Hollywood
It’s a long way from the cold, rainy valleys of northwestern Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to the bright lights of Hollywood. But they are both bear country, in very different ways. Hollywood is about myths — taking old myths and digging them deeper. Grafting on new, odd branches to existing myths. Hollywood plays to the mythology […]
Posted inGoat
Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Are whale watchers taking a toll on Puget Sound’s orcas?
Some orcas won’t tolerate being tagged, but a few, Candice Emmons says, are willing to play ball — like K33, who on a gray September day is swimming high and slow in Puget Sound. Emmons, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist, angles her boat at the big male, who almost seems to like the […]