Thank you for the superb article on the plight of red abalone along the Northern California Coast. (HCN, 6/11/12, “Gastropodan Crimes”). Growing up in Crockett, in the San Francisco Bay Area’s East Bay, my brother and I spent more than a few days of our youth out in that frigid, four-foot-visibility water, being knocked around by […]
Hail the ab
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
Gutted protections, gutless politicians
I am weary of politicians who “gut” the rules and regulations intended to protect human health and the environment (HCN, 7/23/12, “(Not so) quiet canyon”). They all seem to play the jobs/economy card, when in fact the deterioration of the environment leads to situations that cost the taxpayers money and citizens their health (and therefore […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
Farewell, Ed Quillen
I’m not much on being anyone’s fan, but I will have to live with my failure to ever write in to thank Ed Quillen for repeatedly sharing his knowledge and sharp, long-view perceptions that felt as right and big as the West (HCN, 6/25/12, “Dear Friends”). I never met Ed. I didn’t always agree with […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River Reservation
Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River ReservationSara Wiles262 pages, hardcover: $35.University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. For more than 30 years, Sara Wiles has photographed life on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, a community she first encountered as a social worker in 1973. Wiles, who was adopted by Arapaho elder Frances C’Hair, is clearly […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Puppy love
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 […]
Posted inGoat
Birkenstocks and Stetsons
I have spent all of my adult life in Maine, where there are only two kinds of people: Mainers and people from “away.” If you weren’t born in Maine, you’ll never be a Mainer, and I’ve even heard purists say that your parents have to be from the state to gain insider status. “Just because […]
Posted inWotr
On the front line of mental illness and violence
Moments after I entered the room where the patients locked in the secure area tend to hang out, a young man asked me for enough meds to “put him to sleep” until the day of his commitment hearing. “If I’m asleep, I won’t say anything that they can use against me,” he said calmly, indicating […]
Posted inGoat
Buzz of the Undead
If you were a honeybee, you might scare your children into obedience with tales of the phorid fly, a creature whose depravity sinks to deep depths. Picture this: you’re going about your business, pollinating flowers and the like, when one of these devils swoops in, clamps down on your abdomen and, using a spiked injector […]
Posted inWotr
It’s all about the aircraft, not the Grand Canyon
Thanks to successful lobbying by Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl, with some help from Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, aircraft will continue to swarm over the Grand Canyon and are even likely to increase in number in the future. Tour operators are being offered more flights as incentive for adopting “quiet technology” […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
South Dakota disses Montana
SOUTH DAKOTA The Custer County Chronicle, established in 1880 in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, is one of those weekly papers that asks the sheriff’s department to pitch in and publish its daily log of complaints, most of which seem relatively trivial, including concerns about “a big black cow” wandering the highway, a […]
Posted inGoat
Price matters
Last winter, the Bureau of Land Management gave its approval to a large natural gas drilling project in northern New Mexico. Under the Middle Mesa plan, WPX Energy would drill and frack 53 shale gas wells on a mesa overlooking Navajo Reservoir over a five year period. The company can drill year-round, too, since the […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Will Utah’s tar sands make it the Alberta of the high desert?
In a small alcove at the foot of eastern Utah’s Tavaputs Plateau is an old inscription left by French-Canadian mountain man Antoine Robidoux, one of the region’s earliest entrepreneurs. Chiseled into cream-colored sandstone, it reads: Passe ici le 13 Novembre, 1837Pour Etablire MaisonTraitte a la Rv. Vert ou Wiyte A few years earlier, Robidoux had […]
Posted inGoat
From art as elegy to art as action
How do we grieve? How do we grieve for all that disappears into the insatiable maw of human appetite? How do we grieve for the eventual loss of something as beautiful and terrifying as the polar bear? The small, white-haired woman’s voice broke as she stood to ask her impossibly difficult question, the other audience […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Can the outdoor gear industry wield its power for conservation?
For the people drifting in rafts and kayaks through the vast silence of Desolation Canyon, the circling plane must have been a puzzle. A King Air turbo prop, it flew low over the canyon rim, dipping its wings to make wide loops over the Tavaputs Plateau and the Green River. Below, boaters slid along the […]
Posted inGoat
Are big, severe wildfires normal?
The conventional wildfire wisdom goes something like this: Western forests are out of whack due to past fire suppression and logging practices. Forests that used to be open and free of undergrowth have turned into dense “dog hair” thickets of young trees that burn like kindling. Combine that with millions of acres of trees killed […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Oregon ignores logging road runoff, to the peril of native fish
Tillamook State Forest, OregonChris Winter stands by a dirt road along the South Fork of the Trask River. The scattered clouds pass for a clear spring day in coastal Oregon, where annual precipitation tops 100 inches. Moss-draped red alder and Douglas fir frame the wide channel, where rocks gleam beneath crystalline water. It’s idyllic, and […]
Posted inWotr
Megadrought, the new normal
In a dirt parking lot near Many Farms, Ariz., a Navajo farmer sold me a mutton burrito. He hasn’t used his tractor in two years, he told me; he has to cook instead of farm because “there isn’t any water.” He pointed east at the Chuska Mountains, which straddle the New Mexico border. In a […]
Posted inGoat
West Coast trawlers spare the little fish
Last year, fishermen on the West Coast who trawl for groundfish — species like cod and sole that live on or close to the sea floor — started fishing by a new set of rules. The National Marine Fisheries Service introduced a system that, to date has succeeded in reducing the number of discarded fish […]
Posted inRange
Harvesting versus hunting
One interesting effect of spending three weeks in the bottom of the Grand Canyon is the fresh view you bring to the “rim world” outside the canyon afterwards. Some of the novel experiences are pleasing (“oh yeah! Getting around is so convenient!”) while others are puzzling. One such moment occurred while I was catching up on […]
Posted inWotr
Global climate change: We need to talk about it
“Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is the old saw about the height of corn in the rural irrigated parts of Colorado where it’s grown. But this year, hurried on by the hot weather, the stalks stood waist-high to my 6-foot-2 frame by the summer solstice –– nearly two weeks before the Fourth arrived. We […]