The Continental Divide of my childhood rises up the moment I spy the fractured, uplifted horizon formed by the Rocky Mountains. Ahead lies Longs Peak, and the log cabin my family has rented for the summer. Ahead lie weeks full of freedom and possibility. Left behind, so close to Missouri it barely qualifies as Kansas: […]
Gathering strength from the Continental Divide
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bloodsuckers in California
THE SOUTHWEST & CALIFORNIA It’s been hot lately. Damned hot. Phoenix, Ariz., Palm Springs, Calif., and other Western torrid zones posted temperatures of more than 100 degrees every day during the first two weeks of August. Death Valley’s high exceeded 115 degrees on 14 out of those 14 days, and on one occasion reached 126 […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t look for the frontier in Alaska
Alaska. The word tumbles out like a wild stream, carrying a cascade of images: grizzly bears, glaciers, vast mountains, Native villages. It’s the Alaska we believe in, an American Eden for lovers of wilderness. But as change sweeps the state, the veneer is cracking. In the southeastern panhandle, the famed Inside Passage bordering British Columbia, […]
Posted inGoat
Home rule
School kids in Colorado have to walk at least 1,000 feet from the playground to reach the nearest medical marijuana dispensary. But if they want to clamber around on the closest oil and gas well instead of trying to scrounge crumbs of THC-laced brownies spilled on the sidewalk, they have to stroll only about a […]
Posted inGoat
Is Lake Powell really shrinking?
The West is heating and drying up so much that the whole place could burst into flames at any second. At least, that’s the way it seems, reading the news these days. Every day it’s another item about the catastrophic, unprecedented drought and the “new normal” of months of consecutive 90+ degree highs in places […]
Posted inRange
Antibacterial soaps in the backcountry
I try not to be one of those people who buy into every alarmist headline about how common products will poison me. Over the years, consumer safety scares have come and gone with predictable regularity. Eggs were forbidden cholesterol-bombs for a while. Caffeine was blamed for just about every possible malady, and then (at least partially) exonerated. And […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Watching land swaps in Idaho and the West
For Western Pacific Timber and its then-President and CEO Tim Blixseth, the spring of 2006 promised big business. The company had recently purchased 39,371 acres in the Clearwater National Forest in the Upper Lochsa, on the Idaho-Montana border. The Lewis and Clark trail winds through here, and the rivers and woods are home to threatened […]
Posted inRange
Pesticides and salmon: It ain’t about the fish
Ask folks what is the most pressing environmental issue facing America and they’re most likely to say: Water. Protect the water. So shame on Beltway lobbyists taking apart the legal framework we’ve built to protect our water and the species that depend on it. After all, those species include human beings. See the photo here? […]
Posted inGoat
How do you tell an invasive species from a natural colonizer?
By now, you’ve probably heard of the 66-foot-long, 7-foot-tall, 188-ton “tsunami dock” that washed ashore near Newport, Ore., this summer – perhaps the most dramatic chunk of debris to reach the West Coast in the aftermath of last year’s tsunami in Japan. You’ve probably heard that state workers sliced it up like a giant block […]
Posted inGoat
Finding true north
Two weeks ago, I traveled to Alaska for likely the same reasons most people visit: To experience the American landscape as I imagine it once was, as a place where you can’t walk five yards in the forest without spying scat of predator or prey, where fish crowd the rivers and eagles wing overhead enjoying […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Cracking the ozone code in Utah’s gas fields
Updated 9/4/2012 On a bright February morning, a curiously adorned cargo van crept down a dirt road in northeastern Utah’s Uintah Basin. A steel pole with a jumble of funnels strapped to its tip rose from the roof’s rear, and the vehicle moved so slowly that its speed didn’t even register — a good thing, […]
Posted inGoat
Conventioneering
The Democrats didn’t throw environmentalists many bones at their convention this week — at least not any with much meat on them. Yet it was striking how even bland, unspecific statements about the environment drew stark contrasts between the parties. Take a few lines from Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s speech, who is not a […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
In rural California, a Liberian family finds an agricultural refuge
On a historic 50-acre ranch in Northern California, Cynnomih Tarlesson and her nine children drop watermelon seeds into the ground. Behind them, her father, Roosevelt, uses a tractor to churn up the dirt for tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant — along with some lesser-known crops, like the Tarlesson-named ‘Billy Goat Pepper,’ from the family’s native West […]
Posted inWotr
Giving names to smoke and fire
We name fires the way we name hurricanes, giving them the identity that comes with our naming. Naming our fears also makes them a little more manageable, which is probably the main reason we go to the doctor, seeking a word for what ails us, because having that name is at least as comforting as […]
Posted inGoat
From predator to prey
It’s getting harder to be a wolf in the Northern Rockies. Last spring, a rider on a budget bill took gray wolves off the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana. On Friday, Wyoming joined the club when U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services declared the state’s wolf population to be recovered and no longer in […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Dark days for bovines
WASHINGTON: “It’s all downhill from here, sweetie.” Courtesy Alexis Alloway. COLORADO These are dark days for bovines. In northeastern Colorado, 50 cows keeled over this summer, most likely from anthrax, which thrives during drought. That sad news came on the heels of a grisly spate of livestock mutilations in the western part of the state. […]
Posted inWotr
Taking my chances in grizzly country
When I travel in grizzly bear country (admittedly less often than I used to and far less frequently than I would like), I leave the bear spray at home. In fact, I’ve never even owned a canister of it. Never wanted to. My basic rationale, if you can call it that, is that I would […]
Posted inRange
Rinella aims for the impossible, scores a hit
Book Review:Meat Eater, Adventures from the life of an American HunterBy Steven Rinella231 pages; Spiegel & Grau. 2012 Periodically, an outdoor writer aims for the impossible: to explain the why of modern hunting, as opposed to producing just another “how to” book. The task is impossible because the motivations behind hunting are as individual as […]
Posted inGoat
Promise of the Sea
In the not-too-distant future, when some Oregon residents plug their laptops into an electrical outlet they could be using juice generated by the fierce waves that roll shoreward along the Pacific Northwest coast. An early step toward this possibility is scheduled to happen next month when a barge will carry a 260-ton buoy to a […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
The Bay Area Chevron explosion shows gaps in refinery safety
When a crude-processing unit at Chevron’s Richmond, Calif., refinery burst into flame in early August, sirens wailed through local neighborhoods as pillars of smoke blackened the sky over the city and surrounding hillsides. The plant’s emergency management system issued 18,000 calls to nearby residents, urging them to “shelter in place” — closing windows, sealing cracks […]