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” […]
It’s all about the aircraft, not the Grand Canyon
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 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Food and poetry
Bear-jackers, headed down the road to bruin. Wyoming, left courtesy Julia Corbett, Colorado, right, courtesy Dave Heivly, Snowmass Village Police Department. THE NATION When New York Times columnist Mark Bittman spent a day this spring with Wendell Berry, the man he calls “the soul of the real food movement,” he found the political activist and […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast: The ski industry and climate change
The latest episode of our monthly podcast, West of 100, is ready for listening! It accompanies Greg Hanscom’s recent cover story about Black Diamond CEO Peter Metcalf, and his crusade to turn the outdoor gear industry into a force for nature. As Greg reports, it’s been a process characterized by fits and starts, and the […]
Posted inGoat
The view from above
This weekend, I sweated up to the top of Oh-Be-Joyful pass, a charmingly named ridge in Raggeds Wilderness near the town of Paonia, where I live. From there, my comrades and I could see mountains upon mountains — and way down below, the green slash of the valley where we live. Forty years ago, the […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Coal-export schemes ignite unusual opposition, from Wyoming to India
On India’s sweltering Western coast, Bharat Patel heads a group of traditional fishermen called Machimar Adhikar Sangharsh Samiti, which loosely translates as the Association for the Struggle for Fishworkers’ Rights. Meanwhile, up in the arid breaks of southeast Montana, Mark Fix wants to preserve the rural character of his 9,700-acre ranch along the Tongue River, […]
Posted inGoat
Republican hypocrisy on gun control … and other musings
You didn’t ask, but if you had, I would’ve told you: … The head of ExxonMobil should step down or be fired, because he’s revealed himself to be a caveman ill-equipped to lead the biggest U.S. oil company in the 21st century. All we need to do is “spend more policy effort on adaptation … […]
Posted inWotr
Is the outdoor industry really a green giant?
Last February, the CEO of Patagonia, perhaps the world’s most conservation-minded outdoor gear and clothing company, spoke to eager business students and outdoor-industry professionals at the University of Colorado at Boulder. CEO Casey Sheahan’s message was simple: Companies can do right by the environment and society and still turn a profit. Sheahan’s talk was peppered […]
Posted inGoat
A look inside a clean water regulator’s mind
One of the biggest water polluters in our country is the factory farm. In 2008, a Government Accountability Office report panned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to know where most of these farms were located, let alone if they were releasing their manure into rivers, lakes and streams. So in early 2011, the […]
Posted inGoat
Mutualism on the Colorado River
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing. This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult […]