Clair Martin is marked, not only by the “purple-red stain” that spreads across her left cheek and on down her neck, but by being an orphan with a preference for solitude — inconceivable to the Mormons of Brigham City in 19th-century Utah Territory, where she’s deposited at just 6 years old. Valued only as a […]
A tribute to solitude and community: A review of Tributary
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The true believer and the skeptic: A review of River Republic and A Ditch in Time
Two optimistic new books exhort Americans to embrace the challenges of their aging water infrastructure, but they provide sharply opposing views. In River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers, political scientist Daniel McCool calls on citizens to undo the damage done to the country’s waterways by the engineers of yore. In contrast, in […]
Posted inGoat
Some (diseases) like it hot
All sorts of things have been linked to climate change lately: skin cancer, shrinking leaves, extreme weather and death. This summer, scientists and reporters have been puzzling over a wave of disease outbreaks—hantavirus,valley fever and West Nile virus—and whether they, too, are linked to climate change. With some of these diseases the climatic connections are […]
Posted inWotr
Living with autism
School is back in session, and once again I’m grateful. As the parent of an autistic son, I’ve become comfortable with the notion of school as not just a learning opportunity for Harrison, but also as respite care as well. When Harrison is back in school, I have a block of time to work. It’s […]
Posted inGoat
Number games
I’ve always enjoyed the security of numbers, especially the dependable type. Two: the number of feet I have to stand on. Six: the number of months I have to work at the fine establishment that is High Country News. These are figures I can count on. They help me navigate through the world with a […]
Posted inWotr
Budget cuts to natural resource programs hurt more than they help
There is no doubt that our nation cannot continue to plunge deeper in debt while borrowing huge sums each year. Most of us know that addressing this crisis will require cuts in both annual domestic and defense spending, but most critical are significant changes in the big programs like Social Security and Medicare, and reform […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bobcat kittens fall in love with firefighters
OREGON Every town needs something to be proud of. Portland not only has its own television show, Portlandia, but also a toilet. A very special toilet: Portland, if the L.A. Times is to be believed, has revolutionized the public loo, creating a minimalist, solar-powered bathroom that boasts its own Facebook page. It supposedly solves the age-old […]
Posted inArticles
That familiar loneliness: a writer’s own relationship mirrors a Stegner novel
During my first full summer in the West, I participated in a rite of passage: I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The first character I fell in love with was the land. The stirrup-high grass near Leadville, Colorado, that “flowed and flawed in the wind, its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks […]
Posted inGoat
Another win in the Wyoming Range
I’m not usually sold on catchy one-liners, but today, I have a favorite conservation slogan. Care to guess? I bet you won’t get it. Nope, it’s not “What Would Hayduke Do?” (Though I saw that one in Bluff, Utah, this weekend and had a chuckle.) And no, it’s not “Go Green: Eat People.” (Though that […]
Posted inGoat
Fear and loathing in San Juan County
Vandalism and threats play out against wilderness proponents in Utah’s canyonlands.
Posted inWotr
Keystone XL is still a questionable pipeline
Besides repealing “Obamacare,” Mitt Romney has said he would issue a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his very first day as president. That’s an interesting statement from a candidate who, when it comes to other issues, portrays himself as a standard-bearer for states’ rights. In this case, he seems to be saying that […]
Posted inArticles
In Montana, ‘Dr. Trout’ battles the planet’s most dangerous diseases
In his day job, Marshall Bloom is the associate director for scientific management at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a cutting-edge federal research campus in an unlikely place: Hamilton, Mont., a town of about 4,500 in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley. Nearly 500 workers in dozens of lab buildings are dedicated to studying “emerging infectious diseases” like […]
Posted inGoat
Marijuana politics
Marijuana occupies an unusual place in the legal world. Possessing any amount is illegal under federal law with a jail term of up to one year for first time offenders. But the ill and afflicted can happily use the plant to soothe their pains in 17 states, as long as a willing doctor prescribes it. […]
Posted inWotr
As the housing market improves, have we learned to live more modestly?
The trouble with dream houses — the dream homes on the dream streets of big-city real estate tours, or tucked among canyons near resort areas like Sun Valley, Idaho — is that dreams tend to change over time. Despite the notion that a dream is a private world that only the dreamer can know, dreams […]
Posted inRange
Wilderness limited
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I don’t go to the mega-Whole Foods in Boulder at lunchtime on Saturdays because it’s a madhouse, like some Lord of the Flies experiment where hordes of people jockey to secure a limited supply of resources. According to a study I read recently, when facing the prospect of crowding, I’m an “adjuster,” or […]
Posted inGoat
Wild horses to the slaughter?
On Monday, the Bureau of Land Management began its helicopter-assisted roundup of 3,500 wild horses and burros from public lands. Horses gathered from the range are corralled temporarily around the West and then shipped to pastures in the Midwest, where they’re either adopted or spend the rest of their lives chomping on grass at the […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t lock us out of our land
When I parked beside the locked gate at the Forest Service’s recreation site, a hefty entrance sign that had been bolted together out of four-by-fours lay flat on the gravel. The steel tube where campers were supposed to deposit their fee had an autumn shade of rust spiraling up its trunk. A welcome sign had […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Fraudulent corn robberies
Around Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, the livestock are a little different. Credit: Andrew Gulliford UTAH It seemed at first like just another armed holdup of a roadside corn stand. Corn-seller Dusty Moore told police that he was innocently selling ears in a North Ogden parking lot when a Hispanic-looking man in his 30s approached, demanded some money […]
Posted inGoat
OPEC invades Hollywood!
The Heritage Foundation’s crack team of investigative journalists has done it again. After deep digging (looking at the film’s credits?) they determined that Gus Van Sant’s new film with Matt Damon, “Promised Land,” about oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, was at least partially funded by a firm based in the United Arab Emirates. […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast: Fire & Brimstone
And HCN‘s editorial fellow Neil LaRubbio has a travelogue from his visit to the Gila Wilderness in the wake of the Whitewater-Baldy fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, which burned through the Gila earlier this year. More fires have been allowed to burn in the Gila than in most of our nation’s forests, […]