You sleeping relick of the pastif I but had my wayI’d cloth(e) your framewith meat and hidean(d) wake you up to day. – C.M. Russell, 1908 Montana cowboy artist and favorite son Charles M. Russell penned those wistful words underneath a sketch he made of a sun-bleached buffalo skull poking through prairie grass. But that was 104 years […]
Bison deserve a home on the range
Posted inWotr
Safari Club and the NRA aim to gut wilderness
This April 17, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, which promised “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting.” Actually, this bill takes an ax to the 1964 Wilderness Act. Over 30 House Democrats voted in favor of H.R. 4089 because they did not want to be seen as “anti-hunting.” Now, our U. S. […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wearing hummingbirds
THE WEST Back in the late 1970s, Doug Weinant, a just-retired range boss in the Crawford country of western Colorado, had the reputation of being a genius with hummingbirds. He and his wife, Alma, who lived in a remote mountain cabin, would put out a bunch of sugar-water feeders in the spring, and dozens of […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Hidden in plain sight: A review of The American Wall
The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of MexicoMaurice Sherif 224 + 160 pages, two volumes, hardcover: $150.University of Texas Press, 2011 In its ungainly proportions, Maurice Sherif’s The American Wall mimics its massive subject, the U.S.-Mexico border fence. The “book” is actually two giant volumes enclosed in a slipcase. Heft one […]
Posted inArticles
The Excursions Episode
Just in time for summer travel season, we’ll spend this episode of West of 100 wandering the West. Journalist Scott Carrier and poet Alex Caldiero visit the Sun Tunnels, a far-flung art installation in the Utah desert. High Country News editorial fellow Neil LaRubbio gives us a peek into the world of modern hoboes. (Neil is producing […]
Posted inGoat
Omni-busted
Welcome back to my coverage of “race-to-the-bottom 2012,” wherein I gripe futilely about this year’s toxic politics (see past editions here and here), which appear to be completely allergic to anything that protects the environment or public health. Our story today begins in March of 2009, when Congress passed the landmark, years-in-the-making Omnibus Public Lands […]
Posted inWotr
Rancher says coal ash regulation is overdue
In Montana, clean water is the lifeblood of any successful ranch. I know this, because I am a fourth-generation rancher in southeastern Montana. My great-grandfather, a Scottish immigrant, settled along the banks of Rosebud Creek in the 1880s because of its abundance of clean water, both aboveground and below it. I’m sure he never dreamed that, 100 years later, pollution from […]
Posted inGoat
It’s not the two-headed fish
I’m as guilty as the next headline writer. When High Country Newsran a story about selenium pollution in May, I went with the two-headed fish. After all, a headline promising a grotesque tale of a deformed fish was one of our few opportunities to even approach the clickability of adorable miniature pig videos and celebrity sideboob […]
Posted inRange
Enjoying the wilderness
Only five days left. Amidst the turmoil of final preparations – checking and re-checking gear, packing, food-shopping – I’m engaging in a little psychological battle with myself regarding the object of all this activity: a 19 day, 16 person, DIY rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. For those of us who […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
FLDS continues abusive polygamist practices in Utah and Arizona
Rumors swirled around the courthouse in San Angelo, Texas, last summer. Prosecutors had charged Warren Jeffs — leader of the nation’s most notorious polygamous sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — with sexually assaulting two underage girls in the group’s Texas compound. For weeks, spectators whispered that the prosecutors possessed a […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: more wildfires and lizards
Here’s the High Country NewsBurning Man story you all have been waiting for. Thousands of scantly clothed artists and gypsies voyage out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for a week to build a city, burn a hundred-foot, wooden man and vanish without a trace. BLM offices in Winnemucca, Nevada, which manage permits for […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Surveying the oft-snubbed (and very cool) spider with citizen scientists
It’s Saturday morning in early May at the Bluff Lake Nature Center, a modest suburban oasis in northeast Denver. An eager posse of spider hunters clusters around its intrepid leader, Paula Cushing, a petite woman with a dark braid, deep-set eyes and a fearless affection for eight-legged creatures. “Without spiders, we’d be up to our […]
Posted inWotr
Fire on the mountain
I have grown accustomed to stinging eyes, an itchy nose and a raw throat. Smoke is always heavy in the air, especially in the morning after cool nights have pushed it down to the deepest part of the Gila River Valley, where I live. Despite all this, I have to confess that I take some […]
Posted inWotr
Remembering Ed Quillen, that prodigious writer of the West
Western writer, historian, thinker, polymath Ed Quillen, 61, died suddenly on Sunday, June 3. He had been a Denver Post columnist since the mid-1980s, a small-town journalist before that, and founded a regional magazine, Colorado Central, in the early 1990s. But that hardly begins to describe Quillen. When the news of his sudden passing began […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Sea lion squatters in So-Cal
CALIFORNIA “A large gang of sea lions” is occupying three docks at Ventura in Southern California, the first time the 800-pound animals have squatted within the harbor itself. Until recently, the sociable sea lions congregated on large buoys that lead out of the harbor, but now, thanks to what rawstory.com describes as the animals’ “hostile […]
Posted inGoat
Old and foul-mouthed
I’ve done a few stories on air pollution in the last year, and many a source has told me this: When it comes to pollution, all fossil fuel power plants are not created equal. It’s a principle enshrined in the Clean Air Act. Power plants that began generating electricity before 1978 are grandfathered into the […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Gregory Jaczko’s resignation weakens federal nuclear regulation
Two weeks before he resigned as chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on May 21, Gregory Jaczko publicly wrist-slapped Southern California Edison, whose two-gigawatt nuclear plant now sits idle on the Southern California coast. Utility spokesman Stephen Pickett had just announced that the troubled facility could be back online before midsummer. Jaczko swiftly dashed […]
Posted inRange
Aging mining law handcuffs the American West
Two of my favorite western cities, Tucson, Ariz., and Boise, Idaho, share some common blessings and one common curse. The blessings include lovely mountain backdrops, vibrant universities and increasingly diverse economies. The shared curse: badly misguided mining claims upstream. I was a newspaper reporter in Boise for a short spell and when I return, I […]
Posted inGoat
Burn baby burn
Nearly every Western ecosystem needs fire. Flames thin overly-dense trees, disperse nutrients and stimulate new growth. But decades of logging, grazing and fire suppression have left many forests, especially in the dry Southwest, prone to fierce, high-severity burns that do more harm than good. In their aftermath are scorched, blackened moonscapes with powdery ash sifting […]
Posted inGoat
Temporal shift
But a recent study published in the current issue of the journal Ecology suggests that the Earth’s warming climate is jeopardizing the bird and lily’s temporal bond. According to the researchers, earlier snowmelt in the mountains (brought on by warming temperatures) has, in turn, led to a blooming shift in the lily, the first blossoms […]