Evel Knievel DaysPauls Toutonghi293 pages,hardcover: $24.Crown, 2012. Khosi Saqr Clark, the narrator of Pauls Toutonghi’s funny and winsome second novel, Evel Knievel Days, isn’t a typical native of Butte. Sure, he loves Montana and enjoys the annual Evel Knievel Days spectacle, complete with its “American Motordome Wall of Death,” but his neurotic nature (“the obsessive-compulsive’s […]
A Montanan walks into a Cairo bar: A review of Evel Knievel Days
Posted inGoat
Managing Western water from space
Over the last 40 years, images from space have shown us a lot about the changing West. Data beamed down from NASA’s Landsat satellites have revealed how cities like Las Vegas are oozing into the desert, how bark beetles are spreading through and killing Colorado’s forests and how ecosystems recover from wildfires. Besides wowing us […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A map collection for time travelers
In 1952, rural Nebraskans encountered an extraordinary sight: an Army chaplain and his 11-year-old nephew zipping around the state in a silver Jaguar convertible. “People in Nebraska never saw such a thing as an open-topped sports car!” Robert Berlo, the nephew, told me last spring from his home in Livermore, Calif. Berlo didn’t inherit his […]
Posted inRange
The state of Indian nations
National Congress of American Indians President Jefferson Keel began his annual report, State of Indian Nations, with a simple exclamation. “Indian Country is strong!” That statement, he added, is something he hasn’t always been able to say. He then described this as “a moment of real possibility.” And why not? There is a long list […]
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The life of brine
Here in Paonia, Colo., late on January 23rd, I was lying in bed when my house started to tremble. It felt like the whole structure was perched on a pad of Jell-O. There was one short round of shaking, and then another. But before I could become anything more than startled, it stopped. Local news […]
Posted inWotr
Thoughts on Presidents’ Day
Abraham Lincoln was among my earliest heroes as a kid. I grew up in Illinois, a state that inculcated a love of the 16th president from the first days of school. My hometown was the site of one of the most famous of his pre-presidential debates with Stephen Douglas, and I often ate an ice […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Don’t eat the yellow snow
CALIFORNIA It read like one of the sweetest wildlife stories ever — the tale of an orphaned bobcat that was too darned nice. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the affectionate bobcat kitten — known as Chips — was found in the burning Plumas National Forest, a surprising survivor at only a few weeks old. […]
Posted inGoat
Of cows and climate
One needs only to look at the coffee-table book Welfare Ranching’s full page pictures of muddy streams and packed dirt ground to know that cattle grazing can have a negative impact on rangelands. While its specific effects are harder to pinpoint, climate change, too, affects hydrology, native plants and wildlife. Add climate change and cows […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
In the Northwest, innovative projects use trees to cool streams
The wastewater treatment plant in Medford, Ore., removes organic solids, oils and other pollutants from sewer and storm runoff before dumping the water into the Rogue River. Even though the process cleans the water, it’s still polluted with heat. Warm waters hold less oxygen and can provide a dangerous advantage to invasive species. The state […]
Posted inGoat
Where the wealth is
If you live in, say, Boulder, Napa or San Jose, and you feel like your neighbors are wealthier than you are, it’s probably not paranoia. They really do have more money than you. That’s the takeaway from the map of the week, released Feb. 11 by the U.S. Census Bureau, that shows which counties have […]
Posted inWotr
When frontier socialism thrived in Wyoming
The last name of a man in the dues ledger of the South Slavic Socialist Organization, No. 136, startled me — “Putz.” I glimpsed it not long ago in old documents at the “Slovenski Dom” in Rock Springs, Wyo., a town where politics once mingled with lodge fraternalism in the Old West. It’s because my […]
Posted inGoat
‘It helps to be irritating’
Colorado’s North Fork Valley – where High Country News makes its home– recently received news that had many residents cheering and hugging on Paonia’s three-block main drag and at the local brewery. On Feb. 6, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would defer the sale of more than 20,000 acres of controversial oil and […]
Posted inRange
Sally Jewell’s Adventure of a Lifetime
President Obama’s nominee for heading the Department of Interior, Sally Jewell, is noteworthy not for who she is, but for who she is not. She is a mountaineer, an ultra-marathon runner, a CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, and a former bank executive and oil company engineer. She appears to be some kind of […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Will the Badlands become the first tribal national park?
Oglala Lakota leaders hope to transform their bombed-out Badlands and help lift the tribe out of poverty, but it won’t be easy.
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
In a rural Colorado valley, old-fashioned print news lives on
On any given Tuesday, if you venture past the creaky door and the piles of paper and boxes and photos, you’ll find Dean Coombs marinating in the smell of hot lead, dust and the slow decay of old newsprint, tending an ancient printing press that emanates a rhythmic whir-swoosh. Coombs, with an unkempt gray beard, […]
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Bakken tech boomlet?
Viewed from space at night, North Dakota’s sparsely populated Northern Plains appear to harbor a mysterious mega-city. But really, the burst of lights on the prairie is natural gas burning in the state’s oil patch. Enough energy is wasted through natural gas flaring each day to heat half a million homes daily. Flaring is not […]
Posted inWotr
Living in a caboose, supporting the railroad
I’ve lived for close on 20 years in an old heavyweight Burlington Railroad caboose. It’s grounded in Gilpin County, Colo., close to the Continental Divide, near milepost 41.77 on the Union Pacific Railroad’s Moffat tunnel sub –a subsidiary line leading up to the tunnel and through it. I may have slept in that old baby […]
Posted inGoat
Powering down
If you want to know why the biggest electricity supplier in Montana, Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL), is trying to sell off its 15 power plants, you have to go back in time — back before 2001, when California had rolling blackouts and Enron was pulling the strings of a shaky electricity market. You have […]
Posted inGoat
Can the West have its own Energiewende?
If perchance you are a Westerner and you find yourself rushing across the German countryside in a train one day, there are a few things that are so unlike the West that they are likely to catch your attention: *The fact that you are indeed rushing smoothly across the countryside in a train, not a […]
Posted inWotr
Never underestimate the power of prejudice
Last year, both New Mexico and Arizona celebrated the centennial anniversaries of their becoming states. But why did it take them until 1912 to join the Union? The answer isn’t pretty; it reveals a pattern of racism and discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics and Catholics in the West. For New Mexico, the long road to […]