“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. […]
Rants from the Hill: Sorry, Utah
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 […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
California clean energy rules may impede imports from rest of West
When a group of Pacific Northwestern utilities teamed up to build a $580 million pair of wind farms in the Columbia Gorge a few years ago, they planned to help pay for the projects by selling excess generation and renewable energy credits to a California utility. Selling some or all of a project’s power to […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Student visitors from near and far
As their foreign exchange program at Paonia High School came to a close, Henna Reinhardt, from Germany, and Gabby Moet, from Holland, stopped by to see how HCN operates. They sat in on our fast-paced weekly story meeting, in which the editorial staff huddles in a tiny, sweltering conference room to discuss (and argue passionately […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Something in the desert water?
While Arizona’s homegrown political traditions tend more toward a conservative Blue Dog Democrat, moderate stance, there has, since Goldwater, arisen in Phoenix and the Valley a somewhat hard-core Republican population of voters (HCN, 4/30/12, “Money talks — and votes”). For some reason, when voters retire and move to Phoenix or Scottsdale from the East Coast, […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Secretly funded Montana sportsmen dive into political fray
The images are arresting: An ATV stops in a sunny meadow filled with knee-high grasses. Its driver, a young woman, removes her helmet and looks directly into the camera, a strip of black duct tape stretched across her mouth. A bird hunter in full camouflage is likewise muzzled by tape, as is a fisherman on […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Rowing to Yap
Michelle Nijhuis’ essay in the April 30, 2012, issue, “The row to nowhere,” was delightful. I lived on Yap, or more accurately, I spent several weeks there several times. The island is beautiful and traditional. Most amazing is that part of the islanders’ own “rowing history” involves rowing, or, rather, sailing, to the sort-of-nearby island […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Libro-tempest in a teacup
I live in sight of Tucson Unified School District’s ground zero, and this controversy is a storm in a teacup (HCN, 4/16/12, “The book smugglers”). Tucson is a multi-ethnic community, but this controversy seems to have only two cultural dimensions, Latinos and everybody else, with “everybody else” wearing the bad, black cowboy hat these days. […]