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 […]
Don’t lock us out of our land
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, […]
Posted inArticles
First impressions: an Easterner’s new life in the West
Photographer Andrew Cullen used Instagram to document his summer 2012 move from Maine to Colorado, capturing Western scenes of surprise, wonder, and delight. Click on the gallery view to see the images full size.
Posted inWotr
Hanford’s nuclear history is messy, but worth preserving
Hanford, in eastern Washington, is arguably the most polluted radioactive waste site in America. Yet if Congress passes pending legislation now backed by the Obama administration and members of Congress from both parties, parts of Hanford will be included in a new national historic park. The intent of the proposed park is to preserve relics […]
Posted inGoat
Big dreams in a little town
Last Thursday evening, three members of the HCN crew stopped off in El Rito, N.M., an hour and a half north of Santa Fe, where we were headed for a Board of Directors meeting. There, in a hamlet of about 1,000, we strolled through a century-old campus and learned about a grand vision for education. […]
Posted inGoat
Yes Virginia, there is poop in your well
There’s an industry that’s been contaminating rural water wells for years, but it hasn’t had to endure the same public vitriol that “frackers” have. Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report placing probable blame on dairies in the Lower Yakima Valley for spoiling drinking wells in the area with nitrates and antibiotics. Local […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Harvesting the Desert Shoe Tree
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Rants from the Hill is now a FREE podcast! Listen to an audio performance of this essay, here. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or through Feedburner for use in another podcast reader. On the […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: The desert shoe tree
Rants from the Hill are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in rural Nevada. They are posted at the beginning of each month at www.hcn.org. You can subscribe to the podcast for free in iTunes, or through Feedburner if you use other podcast readers. Each month’s rant is also available in written form. Musical credits for Rantcast: Bumper sticker sloganeering, licensed under […]
Posted inArticles
Abbey’s Road: Retired BLM chief gives one last look across the range
Bob Abbey, director of the federal Bureau of Land Management, retired this May after a total of 28 years with the agency. It was his second — and final — retirement: He originally left in 2005 after eight years as the Nevada state director, returning in 2009 only after a special request from Interior Secretary […]
Posted inGoat
The underwater gold rush
The right to dredge part of Idaho’s Salmon River for garnets and gold now belongs exclusively to one man. That was the decision of the Idaho Land Board last week when it granted Mike Conklin a mineral lease for a half-a-mile stretch of the river below Riggins, a small town near the western border of […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Storm on Lava Creek: A season in Yellowstone
By the second mile of my third hike during my first season in Yellowstone, thunder booms near. I wonder if we’ll have time to finish the hike. • • • Ten days ago, my best friend, Alison, and I began our new summer jobs as Xanterra lodging reservation agents at Mammoth Hot Springs, after a […]
Posted inWotr
Our survival depends on fighting climate change
I am 88 and have seen a lot of change over the decades, but I do not think anyone living now has ever faced a more serious threat to life than the threat of global climate change. As President Obama said recently, “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat […]
Posted inGoat
The sound of pollution
Artists like British “grime writer” Moose, who scrubs designs into filthy, smog-charred city surfaces (including the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco), have found novel ways to visualize air pollution for passersby. But now it’s also possible to experience air pollution with a different sense: hearing. Using mass spectrometry, which helps scientists pinpoint the exact compounds […]
Posted inRange
GOP risks much with its zeal to sell public estate
The Republican Party has formally embraced a policy to sell off America’s chunks of our public lands. That’s likely to prove as welcome as a hornet in a pair of swimming trunks. The GOP 2012 Party Platform espouses a purely market-driven exploitation of natural resources, as opposed to the traditional American system that embraces both […]
Posted inWotr
The “truth” about organic food
The way headlines broke after a recent Stanford study comparing organic food to food grown on conventional farms, you’d think organic had been shot and left for dead. The New York Times, for example, announced that “Stanford scientists cast doubt on advantages of organic meat and produce.” Maybe the doubt was inferred from the study’s […]
Posted inGoat
You get what you pay for
At first glance, the LA Times’ most recent solar power expose looks like perfect fodder for the drumbeat argument from many GOP lawmakers to end federal subsidies for renewable energy projects. Big corporations building utility-scale solar in California, it points out, have been receiving huge direct and indirect payouts from the federal government, from loans […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Fire scientists fight over what Western forests should look like
Mark Williams and Bill Baker stand amid ponderosa pines in the mountains west of Fort Collins, Colo., holding a copy of a 19th century land survey. They’re looking for a small pile of rocks with three notches on the east side, indicating that a General Land Office surveyor stopped here to describe the forest. Surveyors […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Fire & Brimstone
In this edition of West of 100, we’ve got a couple of stories about wildfire. First, the backstory to Emily Guerin’s piece, “Fire scientists fight over what Western forests should look like.” We’ll talk with Emily about why the debate over a new study arguing that severe fire may be more normal than we thought […]