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 […]
When deer attack dogs
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 […]
Posted inGoat
A monumental danger
Southern Arizona’s national monuments have the uneasy reputation of being good places to smuggle drugs and immigrants. Bureau of Land Management law enforcement rangers routinely find trash bags of marijuana stashed beneath mesquite and paloverde trees, piles of muddy, discarded clothes and Dumpsters-worth of empty water bottles, painted black to make them less visible in […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Seattle-based artist paints portraits of a melting world
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing Maria Coryell-Martin wants us to dance the horizon. We are in the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park, beneath a hunk of orange steel (The Eagle, by Alexander Calder), but she is looking past the art, […]
Posted inWotr
Utah’s SkiLink closes off public land
Some 80 groups and companies that want public land to remain open to the public have signed a petition to stop a Canadian developer from building a gondola to hook together two ski resorts near Salt Lake City. Traversing about 30 acres of what is now Wasatch National Forest, the gondola would benefit the Talisker […]
Posted inGoat
Gas guzzlers
If you’ve been feeling the pinch at the gas pumps, and wondering how drivers in other states are faring, you might be interested in a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. It looks at what portion of their wallets drivers across the nation empty at the pumps, as well as how states are […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Western Colorado wingnuts?
COLORADO: Hey, nice rack! Courtesy Dennis Slifer NORTH DAKOTA A woman named Donna recently called Fargo, N.D., radio station Y94 to air a problem so bizarre, the station’s hosts were almost speechless. Her complaint? Deer-crossing signs placed along busy highways were “irresponsible” because they simply encouraged the animals to cross there, and that was why […]
Posted inWotr
A rancher must sell out after losing a court case against a gas company
It was a hot day in the summer of 2009, and Dow Rippy was out on his four-wheeler in western Colorado, checking on his cows. As he drove, tracing the southern edge of his property, Rippy followed the route of a gas pipeline that the Houston-based gas company, SG Interests, was building across the ranch. […]