“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Edward Abbey began Desert Solitaire with the following words: “This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places.” Well, my home lake here in Silver Hills is the most gorgeous […]
Rants from the Hill: My home lake
Posted inGoat
The stink over SkiLink
Updated Nov. 6, 2012 Utah’s Wasatch Range promises wintry solitude and deep chutes of fluffy powder for backcountry skiers. Its forested watershed provides more than half of Salt Lake City’s drinking water. But it’s far from untouched: The area also hosts 11 ski resorts that draw thousands of visitors each year for lift-served skiing and […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
How the Mormon GOP runs Utah with a collectivist touch
“Our object is to labor for the benefit of the whole …” –Brigham Young, 1873 A throng of cars floats down Interstate 15 on an end-of-summer morning, the rising sun wreathed in the orange gauze of distant wildfire smoke. In Lehi, a suburb sandwiched between Salt Lake City and Provo, a massive steel-and-glass shape juts […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Goodbye, listeners
Hi podcast listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Rants from the Hill podcast for the past 6 months. We recently decided to discontinue our podcasts due to staffing limitations at High Country News. But never fear, you can still read the Rants from the Hill online, at HCN.org, on the first Monday […]
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Strange days
It was Halloween Wednesday night. This brought an extra degree of strangeness to our small town. I saw a cop handing candy to some kids, a giant red bear gyrating on the dance floor, and three of the town’s most ambitious young women shackled in binders. Over the past weeks, as elections draw closer, a […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Voters shape energy policy by choosing utility regulators
Cam Cooper raises pedigree Angus cattle along the Big Hole River, a beautiful, rural region of southwest Montana. Like most ranchers, her politics are “quite conservative,” she says. “I generally vote Republican.” But this November, she’ll vote for at least one Democrat: John Vincent, an ally in Cooper’s battle against a new transmission line that […]
Posted inWotr
A trip back in time
Despite all those scary stories I’ve been reading and seeing in the American media about how dangerous and violent Mexico has become, I’m always eager to head south of the border. It’s because rural Mexico reminds me of a simpler time. Like the recent trip I took to the town of Ortiz, a journey that […]
Posted inRange
Of coal and cows in eastern Montana
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House As the Montana Department of Environmental Quality mulls an expansion of a coal strip mine east of Billings, the public has an opportunity to give input on what environmental factors the agency should consider. Chugging away in the northern corner of the well-endowed Powder River Basin, the Rosebud mine is […]
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The money trail
The Montana Statesman calls itself “Montana’s largest and most trusted news source.” It is edited and published by Donald Ferguson, an “award-winning newspaper veteran,” boasts the Statesman’s website. Its home page features 11 stories — six of them unflattering portraits of Steve Bullock, Montana’s attorney general and the Democratic candidate for governor. The headlines topping the page: “Bullock admits […]
Posted inWotr
Nevada, face down and flailing
Suddenly, this election season, state politicians in Nevada are refusing to sign the pledge – the one anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist has been foisting upon conservative candidates and lawmakers for years. It requires the faithful to swear that they will never, ever raise taxes. Many signers surely believe in it; others sign for fear of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Death Valley wins heat contest
CALIFORNIA Not far from stands of huge redwood trees and often doused by rain, fans of Humboldt State’s Division II football team cheer on their team with an unusual array of helpers. An ax-wielding drum major cavorts in front of the crowd while some members of the Marching Lumberjack Band make music by banging on […]
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Is the Western growth machine coming out of its coma?
I like to keep an eye on what the housing market’s doing in the West. That’s not because I’m invested in it — my family and I have been happy renters since we sold our house a year ago. I’m interested in the housing market because this one data set can tell so much about […]
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Fecal matters
The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY is one of the nation’s most polluted waterways. Toxic sludge lines the bottom of the canal, designated a Superfund site, and used condoms, human feces and tampons bob on the surface. Every time it rains, wastewater treatments plants inundated with storm water flush sewage and run-off into the Gowanus […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Races where the environment matters. Sort of.
Environmentalists can’t contain their glee about Jay Inslee’s candidacy for governor of Washington. “I can count on one hand the members of Congress … that are like Jay Inslee,” gushed League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski at a Washington chapter event last October. The national LCV usually stays out of state politics, but at […]
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The carbon (spin) cycle
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science. We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British […]
Posted inRange
Like a rogue net
Oregon’s salmon politics have taken a curious turn. In late September several sportfishing groups publicly disavowed Measure 81, a voter initiative they had earlier sponsored to ban gillnets on the Columbia River. The reversal followed an announcement by Oregon governor John Kitzhaber that gillnets were his latest cause du mois and he wants them gone […]
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Whither wilderness?
On a stretch of land along the eastern side of Colorado’s Arkansas River, enormous, sand-colored rocks pile up on each other, looking as if a giant child had picked up a handful and let them dribble out between her fingers. This rock jumble is overlaid with piñon pine, juniper, and spots of ponderosa. It’s land […]
Posted inWotr
Moose, the popular wild animal
As I shut the door on my way to work last month, something caught my eye: Two moose, a cow and a calf, stood just 20 yards away, looking as though they hoped I hadn’t noticed them –– something hard to avoid doing, given their size. As I scrambled for my camera, they vanished into […]
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Flight for life
Something about helicopter pilots chasing bank robbers, busting spies and saving castaways impressed six-year-old Doug Sheffer. The Whirlybirds television episodes, over 50 years ago, were heroic and exciting and everything he seemed born to do. While his father tried to waylay those childish ambitions, it wasn’t too many decades before Sheffer had owned his own […]
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Endangered razorback sucker discovered in Grand Canyon
On Oct. 9, biologists electrofishing in Grand Canyon National Park caught a razorback sucker — the first one seen in the park in 20 years. The endangered fish, known for its distinctive humpback, huge size (up to three feet long!) and long life (40-plus years!) was once common in the Colorado River and its tributaries. As […]