Good friends recently sold their home in Wyoming, packed up and moved to Florida. Even though they’d met in Wyoming and married in view of the Wind River Mountains, where they loved to hike and ski, and even though they often spoke of their affection for the West’s open spaces, within months they were gone. […]
Chosen by Wyoming
Posted inGoat
3,000 miles to Paonia
At about midnight last Sunday, the hacking and swearing and puking outside my tent that had gone on for two hours ended with a hysterical man screaming into a starless night, “White power! White power! White power!” His shouts shocked my nerves like a rusty bucket of ticks thrown against my chest. An indecisive moment […]
Posted inMay 14, 2012: The sediment dumps of L.A.
Kayaking memories on the White Salmon River
I almost missed my chance to kayak the White Salmon River before it changed forever. After dropping off the kids at school, packing, making last-minute phone calls and sending last-minute emails, I left the house an hour later than planned. With a five-hour drive and only the afternoon of a late October day ahead of […]
Posted inWotr
Ted Nugent doesn’t speak for me
I’m a hunter, and I know that hunters need a spokesperson. We need someone with a lifetime of experience who speaks with authority about preserving public lands and the wild animals living there that we love to hunt. We need someone whose personal magnetism generates interest simply by speaking on the subject of hunting. I […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Hot hot Arizona, stubborn obituaries
ARIZONA Phoenix broke a record on April , though we can’t imagine anyone celebrated the event. The temperature climbed up to 105 degrees — six degrees hotter than the previous record for that day. COLORADO A recent paid obituary in the Denver Post for a man named Michael “Flathead” Blanchard made for some delightful reading. […]
Posted inRange
Arizona, unpredictable as always
This month, all U.S. citizens have cause to celebrate: Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed Senate bill 1332, which authorized the state to seize federal lands within its borders. Of course the whole notion was nuts, not to mention unconstitutional – although this didn’t prevent Utah governor Herbert from signing a similar bill awhile back – and Brewer deserves some […]
Posted inMay 14, 2012: The sediment dumps of L.A.
Recycling diesel emissions for farm fertilizer?
The summer of 2007 was one of the driest and hottest on record in Montana. Fields withered along the state’s arid Hi-Line. But in the small, north-central town of Rudyard, one emerald-green cornfield stood out amid the brown. The field was a test plot grown with a technology that only a fed-up farmer could have […]
Posted inGoat
It’s the pits
If you’ve followed any government effort to rein in the impacts of a polluting industry over the last several years, especially in the run-up to this year’s Presidential election, then you’re probably familiar with the beaten-to-death description of all new regulations as “job killers.” (That’s right people! This isn’t about public health or protecting private […]
Posted inArticles
There’s (still) gold in them thar hills
In this episode of West of 100, High Country News contributing editor Jonathan Thompson visits a gold mine and ponders the illusory nature of gold prices, and Hadley Robinson reports from the Klamath River, once a popular destination for small-time gold prospectors that’s now at the center of the controversy over California’s ban on suction-dredge […]
Posted inWotr
If corporations are people, what are they really like?
ExxonMobil spits out a gob of chewing-tobacco juice and taps a baseball bat against the cleats of its shoes, knocking off the dirt clods. Then “Exx ‘Em” — as the fans like to call their slugger — steps into the batter’s box and slams the first pitch over the center-field wall of Dodger Stadium. Meanwhile, […]
Posted inGoat
Selling water to the highest bidder
At some point, the way Colorado River water gets divvied up is going to have to change. As we’ve noted in past writings, the lower basin states of Arizona and Nevada frequently push close to the limit of using the amount of water they are allocated use more water than they’re allowed to under the […]
Posted inMay 14, 2012: The sediment dumps of L.A.
L.A. activists try to stop woodlands from becoming sediment dumps
The list price was $1.125 million in August 2011, when Sotheby’s International Realty held the first open house for 1674 Highland Oaks Drive, in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. Scented candles burned, classical music played and the air conditioner ran as potential buyers milled through the home’s three bedrooms, living room and combination den/dining […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: fires start, wildlife die
It’s Friday and that means it’s time for a roundup of some of the important Western news of the week. Our interns are all missing in action, one of the editors is in the Grand Canyon and another is in the canyons of New York City, and so I’m taking on this update. And then […]
Posted inMay 14, 2012: The sediment dumps of L.A.
Retirees join environmentalists in fighting Arizona copper mine
Nestled as it is amid saguaro-studded hills, under a sky crisp blue by day and starry by night, you’d never guess Queen Valley, Ariz., is only 40 miles east of Phoenix. Its cozy homes surround a lush golf course, about four miles from a swath of state land perfect for four-wheeling, hunting and bird-watching. About […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t bury her deep in the cold, cold ground
As anyone who knows her will tell you, my mother is opinionated. She knows exactly what she wants in life, and — as I recently learned — in death as well. She and I have been discussing her funerary wishes off and on since her own mother passed away a year ago. It was an […]
Posted inRange
Make anglers allies for endangered species
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 failure. […]
Posted inWotr
Rachel Carson’s redwood dreams, and 50 years of “Silent Spring”
As a child of the 1950s, I remember hot summer nights that were only relieved when a truck came by spraying a cool mist that would kill mosquitoes. We kids ran after that mist like it was the ice cream truck. Several years later, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, parents […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
How to dispose of frozen cows
COLORADO Time has run out for the frozen cows of Conundrum Hot Springs, the immensely popular, 11,200-foot-high stopover for hikers in western Colorado’s White River National Forest. According to the Aspen Daily News, several cows jammed themselves into a Forest Service cabin this winter, apparently to get warm, though unfortunately they were unable to figure […]
Posted inGoat
The time for oysters
Next time you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area, which for your own sake will be soon, I hope, there are a few things you ought to do. Walk across the Golden Gate, go one of the Thursday “NightLife” events at the Academy of Sciences and drive north to Tomales Bay and feast […]
Posted inRange
Treaty tribes dedicate final replacement fishing site
DALLESPORT, Wash. – On April 25, 2012, representatives from four tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Army Corps of Engineers all stood by the Columbia River to mark the end of a construction project both useful and symbolic. It was the completion of the 31st — and final — fishing access site on […]