Thumbnail photo CC via Flickr user Palmspringsdude. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A new measure of poverty shifts rankings in the West.
A new measure of poverty shifts rankings in the West
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
A bird in hand
(This is the editor’s note accompanying two stories on the evolution of wildlife-monitoring technology.) Nearly 40 years ago, during a college ornithology course, I helped set up a “mist net” — something like a volleyball net with nearly invisible super-fine mesh — in a spot between bushes where small birds flew. One by one, unsuspecting […]
Posted inWotr
How, 150 years ago, the Homestead Act transformed the West
All across forests of the West, 10-by-12-foot cabins stand forlorn and forgotten, many with tumbledown roofs and gaping doors. Yet these modest homesteads represent a revolution in public-land policy: They were the culmination of an American dream born of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that at our best, we would become a nation of independent farmers. This […]
Posted inGoat
West is best?
A post-Thanksgiving hike should not be too strenuous. It needs to be vigorous enough to help awaken from a food coma but not so tough as to ruin the long weekend. This year, a light stroll through nearby Dominguez Canyon, with a close group of friends, fit the bill. After just a short drive and […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
The right tributary
Yesterday I took a long walk up a cold stream in search of bull trout. I didn’t really expect to see fish. Instead, I’d come to see redds — the gravel nests in which fish lay eggs — because I’d been trying to write a story about salmon and realized I knew nothing whatsoever about […]
Posted inWotr
Here come the Super Storms
Once again, we were all New Yorkers. Watching the heartbreak that continues in Staten Island, parts of Queens and along the pummeled Jersey Shore, our sympathies turned eastward toward the victims of this unusual “Super Storm.” But just how unusual was it? Sandy’s devastation gives us the opportunity to remember another giant storm that barreled […]
Posted inGoat
When deer attack dogs
I was innocently working away in my office (living room) when the barking began. We live in a medium-sized town in southwestern Colorado, where owning a dog seems to be a prerequisite, and every canine in the neighborhood was going off about something, resulting in a cacophonous symphony. Our dog, Princess (no, we didn’t give […]
Posted inRange
Trouble In Mind
Two images stand out from photographs I’ve taken here in northwestern Montana in the last couple months. One is from hunting for deer in November, the other from hunting a Christmas tree last weekend. The snowshoe hare in mid November is practicing “mind over matter.” He trusts his natural camouflage to keep him safe, even […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Pussycat kill kill!
THE NATION Forget denouncing wind turbines as bird Cuisinarts; lovable pussycats rank as the true killing machines. Housecats wipe out some 4 billion animals every year, including at least 500 million birds, reports Wyoming Wildlife. The magazine cites a novel new study by two groups, the National Geographic Society and the University of Georgia, that […]
Posted inWotr
If we don’t get our energy here, where will we get it?
A few weeks ago, a Texas oilman cornered me at a brewery in the high-mountain town of Ouray, in western Colorado. Some young women from Moab had just taken the table next to my friend and myself, when the fellow wandered over to buy us a round. Eventually, he revealed that he worked for ConocoPhillips. […]
Posted inGoat
End of an era?
Last Wednesday, to rather muffled fanfare, the Department of the Interior released a new set of rules that will make it easier for tribes and Indian landowners to lease their property for economic development. Native Americans will be able to do the things that private landowners do all the time: apply for a mortgage; establish […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
State-run banks: a movement driven by unusual politics
During Tea Party champion Joe Read’s first session in the Montana Legislature, in 2011, he drew widespread ridicule for introducing a bill that declared global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.” With another anti-science bill, Rep. Read called for Montana’s government to overrule federal regulations on greenhouse gases. He also passed […]
Posted inGoat
A river of rain
Five days before the rain started in Sacramento on November 28, Marty Ralph knew what was coming: an “atmospheric river” was about to hit the West Coast of the United States. On satellite imagery, “ARs,” which carry warm water vapor up from the tropics on a mile-high current, “have a characteristic long and narrow look […]
Posted inGoat
Wilderness trumps sustainable agriculture in Point Reyes
An epic battle over the future of an oyster farm in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore ended last Friday when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar rejected a request to extend the oyster company’s lease. Salazar’s decision effectively evicts the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company, which has operated the farm since 2004, and turns the 2,700-acre Drakes Estero […]
Posted inGoat
Monumental opposition to a monumental proposal?
Obama’s second term has not yet begun and already folks are heaping on environmental demands – things that may have been politically untenable for the centrist president to do in the long run-up to a tough election where the economy and energy policy hogged the spotlight. Last month, the Outdoor Industries Association – a trade […]
Posted inWotr
Salmon must have water in the Klamath and Trinity rivers
Though it happened a decade ago, no one living near the Klamath River will ever forget the massive fish kill that wiped out at least 60,000 salmon trying to swim up the river to spawn. What happened that summer was the largest known fish kill in the West, caused by disease resulting from a combination of shallow […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Trial by jury
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. Whenever I receive a summons to jury duty I respond to it truthfully — which is to say, I respond to it in ways that would appear […]
Posted inGoat
Gone hunting wolves
By the time you read this blog, I will be on my second day of hunting gray wolves in Montana. An old friend of mine in Livingston introduced me to some ranchers in Paradise Valley to write a story of their hunt. We will be trudging through a wilderness of snow on horseback, hoping to […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
A Washington tribe and a timber company wrestle over a forest’s future
Updated 11/30/12 The Indian chief and the timber agent meet near the shores of Port Gamble Bay. The spring air is cool and breezy along this small and sheltered nook of northwest Washington’s Puget Sound. Inside the room where the two men sit side-by-side, the atmosphere is civil, yet tense, as they discuss their separate […]
Posted inRange
Senate calls a foul on Sportsmen’s Act
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House With a highly anticipated majority, the Sportsmen’s Act of 2012 passed the Senate this week. No, wait, it totally didn’t. The high profile bill (S. 3525), which was authored and championed by Jon Tester (D-MT) would, among other things, increase access to public lands for hunters and anglers. It was […]