In this world of extreme sports, 100-mile ultramarathons and ever-decreasing record times, a 21-mile trail run probably doesn’t seem like all that big a deal anymore. And indeed, you’d never guess, reading about a recently-broken record, that there’s anything unusually taxing about what’s known in running and hiking circles as the “rim to rim,” where […]
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Posted inWotr
Talking vegetarianism to a hunter
In the end, all I could tell the guy was, “I agree with you. I just don’t eat animals.” During our flight from Portland to Denver, two major differences between us had come up: He was a hunter, and I was a vegetarian. I listened from the window seat, two days removed from a backpacking […]
Posted inGoat
Farewell to a wise curmudgeon
On Sunday, the West lost a unique voice – journalist Ed Quillen, who for nearly three decades had written about the region’s communities and issues with a keen eye for irony and an appreciation for history. Ed died at his home in Salida, Colo. at the all-too-young age of 61. “Colorado has lost one of […]
Posted inArticles
Protection versus promotion at Brown’s Canyon
Editor’s note: This is a final column submitted to High Country News by Ed Quillen, who died Sunday, June 3. He was 62 years old. Can you protect an area by publicizing it and attracting more visitors? That question first hit me a few years ago when I encountered a guidebook that featured Colorado’s waterfalls. […]
Posted inGoat
Capturing our way out of the carbon mess
Ah, geoengineering. That crazy idea to manipulate earth’s atmosphere to do the opposite of what our current manipulations are doing — cool the planet instead of warm it — has made its way back into the headlines recently, with pieces in the New Yorker and Scientific American. Geoengineering would be a desperate measure indeed, stemming […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
The fading Arizona town of Gila Bend bets big on solar
One afternoon last April, I took a walk down Pima Street, the main drag that runs through Gila Bend, Ariz., linking the state highway from Phoenix with Interstate 8 to Yuma and beyond. It had been an unusual spring in the Southwestern deserts; abundant late-season rains spread carpets of green across rocky hillsides in the […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Sorry, Utah
“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 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. […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Sorry, Utah
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 in iTunes, or through Feedburner if you use other podcast readers. If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy West of 100, our […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: wildfires and water depletion
If only Billie Holiday were here to sing that solemn “Summertime” song. The living is easy compared to winter, but the environment for this week’s Roundup is harsh. Wildfire broke out across the West, especially in New Mexico, where the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire has burned 190,262 acres, and as of yesterday at 4:30 p.m., […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Conservation agreements try to head off endangered species listings
With the arrival of spring in western Colorado’s Gunnison River Basin comes the bizarre mating ritual of the Gunnison sage grouse. In clearings called leks, males gather to show off extravagant courtship dances, slapping their wings against their bodies and filling and popping the two air sacs on their breasts. Spring also heralds another local […]
Posted inWotr
What should we do with our blink of time?
The long view of science turns out to be both reassuring and daunting. Life on Earth turns out to be remarkably resilient. Within the story of our 13.5-billion-year old universe, our own lives — so crucial to us and to our families and dear friends — look fleeting, gossamer. These paradoxes overwhelm me. For five years, […]
Posted inWotr
Anglers can be advocates for endangered fish
The prism of clear river water can distort and magnify the size of a fish, an effect amplified by adrenaline and nostalgia. Still, I remember one fish big enough to shake my whole view of the world. I was of that tender age when one believes one’s father to be capable of anything — except […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The Forest Service hearts explosives
MONTANA The Forest Service is getting more bang for its buck these days. Recently, rangers said they might have to blow up some frozen cows in Colorado to disperse them before they rotted; now comes the news that the Helena National Forest in Montana has already used explosives to bring down some trees — 500 […]
Posted inGoat
The ideological war against renewable energy
This blog’s headline may sound hyperbolic. But I’m not sure how else to interpret Republicans’ latest congressional hijinks. A couple weeks ago, the House passed a Defense budget that prohibits the department from using or experimenting with alternative fuels that are more costly than oil — which they all are — unless those fuels are […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Coping with two-headed fish and other effects of selenium
Muddy Creek is nondescript, a narrow stream trickling through the sagebrush steppe of southern Wyoming. But like many Western waterways, it carries selenium, a natural poison that seeps from rocks and dirt and accumulates in the food chain much as mercury does. Both humans and animals need tiny amounts for good health, but too much […]
Posted inGoat
The power and plight of the parasite
As the April census indicates, the recovery programs have been a great success, pulling the magnificent bald-headed birds–which sport wingspans of nearly 10 feet and which can live for more than 60 years–from the brink of extinction. But in the process, another, somewhat less charismatic creature, has been wiped out: Colpocephalum californici, an avian chewing […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
What’s the best place for Big Solar?
In spring 2008, reporter Judith Lewis Mernit followed desert activists through Southern California’s Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. They were tracing a proposed route for the Green Path North, a power line that would carry geothermal electricity to Los Angeles to help wean it off of coal. It wasn’t the Mojave Desert’s best wildflower year, but […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Choosing between solar and soil in California
California farmer Michael Robinson’s 120 acres in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta might seem like the perfect site for a 20-megawatt solar array to power thousands of homes. It’s near transmission lines and lacks the endangered tortoises, long waits for federal permits and other obstacles that have tripped up larger solar projects in the Mojave […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Can solar produce long-lasting jobs?
Climbing to the top of the observation tower above the Agua Caliente Solar Project takes some nerve. Wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour challenge white-knuckle grips on the railing; the grated steel landings shudder underfoot. At three stories, the tower is just high enough to set off alarms in the acrophobic brain. It […]