Following a tip from HCN contributing editor, Craig Childs, I purged 500 words for this blog in 30 minutes, a stick-‘em-up way of pilfering my brain for production and creativity. I scored a good foundation, but since I’m still an apprentice, the rest was babble. The guiding rule for now is that haste makes waste. […]
Haste makes waste
Posted inRange
Lessons from the Old West: Don’t ban it, brand it
By P.J. Hill Last Saturday was roundup and branding day at my ranch in the Madison River Valley, about 20 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. Neighbors came to help and I put the P J (my registered brand) on the left side of my calves. As I carefully placed the irons on each calf (yes, […]
Posted inGoat
Could Arizona go blue?
To gauge how conservative Arizona is, look no further than the national headlines over the last few years: Its state legislature passed one of the most stringent immigration laws in the country, allowing police officers to check the immigration status of people who are dressed suspiciously, or otherwise strike an officer as likely to be paperless. […]
Posted inWotr
Wolf management in Idaho is not ready for prime time
Idaho’s treatment of wolves has not yet sunk to the bygone days of state bounties and federal poisoning that exterminated all the wolves in the Lower 48 states, except for a few in northern Minnesota. But it’s not far off the mark. With at least 378 of the state’s approximately 1,000 wolves already trapped and […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When Peter Gleick fell, California’s water world lost big
updated 4/17/2012 On Feb. 14, an anonymous source released internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago-based nonprofit that casts doubt on global warming science, to more than a dozen climate bloggers. The documents revealed Heartland’s major funders, including the Charles Koch Foundation and many large corporations, detailed a nearly $1.6 million program to […]
Posted inGoat
Last in line
The outbreak started in February. Migratory waterfowl heading south along the West Coast found the wetlands of northern California’s Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge — a major stopover point on the Pacific Flyway — half dry. Nearly 2 million birds passed through the area as winter edged toward spring, many crowding into the remaining 15,000 […]
Posted inWotr
When wolf-trapping goes viral
Something new and provocative came through my Facebook feed last month. The anti-trapping organization, Footloose Montana, posted photos of three trappers, all posing with wolves that they’d killed in Idaho. It wasn’t the pictures of dead animals that startled me; to motivate its membership, Footloose Montana regularly posts grotesque images of suffering animals caught in […]
Posted inRange
Earth Day — Gone Fishin’
Earth Day was once again full of stark warnings about global doom and scolds over my level of recycling and my carbon footprint. So I went fishing. In particular, I took my 8-year-old to an old gravel pit that has been landscaped into a pond and stocked with rainbow trout straight from the hatchery. One […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
The Other Bakken Boom: America’s biggest oil rush brings tribal conflict
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, a lilting swath of prairie in western North Dakota, was once a quiet place. Though thrice the area of Los Angeles, it had only 5,000 residents. Even New Town, a more populous district east of a reservoir called Lake Sakakawea, looked sparse and ephemeral. There was a granary, a fire station, […]
Posted inRange
Sagebrush rebellion rides again
I don’t relish this role, you know. If you happened to have read some of my other posts you may have noticed a certain pattern. Sure, there’s the occasional outlier column that addresses toilets, or aspen trees, or what have you, but on a pretty regular basis I’m the lady who sheepishly discusses all the […]
Posted inGoat
Friday new roundup: froze-to-death hot springs
Back in 2010, as an employee of the Forest Service, I watched fire line explosives obliterate a dead cow to the dust that flies eat. It’s not uncommon forestry work, though it is spectacular. And White River National Forest employees might get the same opportunity this spring near Aspen, Colo. A small herd of cows […]
Posted inWotr
A good ranger stands up to bad bureaucrats
When a woman ran to the front door of Yellowstone Park Ranger Robert M. Danno with a small bundle in her arms and a panicked look on her face, he grabbed the medical kit the National Park Service had issued to him. Danno, whose duties included emergency medicine as well as law enforcement, carried the […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Librotraficantes smuggle controversial books to Arizona
Outside Casa Ramirez, a Houston, Texas, cultural center, a group of friends feasted giddily on pan dulce and café. It was the morning of March 12, a Monday. Nothing about the assembly seemed subversive. Yet 28 of them would soon cram a commuter bus with boxes of prohibited books and drive toward Tucson, Ariz., calling […]
Posted inGoat
Downsized cleanup plan for Idaho Superfund site
The mines of Silver Valley, Idaho, east of Coeur d’Alene Lake were once the richest silver producers in the world. The valley’s flush days, however, are long gone. In 1981, thousands of miners lost their jobs when the sinking price of silver forced the mines to close (a few have since reopened). Two years later, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Don’t shoot that grizzly; she’s combing her hair
ALASKA AND THE WESTGrizzly bears never cease to amaze. The latest news about the powerful bruins comes from The Economist, which reports that a British biologist observed a grizzly in the shallows of Glacier Bay National Park doing something unique. The animal would pick up rocks and then discard them until it seemed to find […]
Posted inGoat
Got the gold bug? Tour a mine.
All of us know at least one person who, as a hedge against imminent financial collapse, is stockpiling gold (not to mention Dinty Moore stew and guns). The idea is to have some kind of solid form of currency when the dollar and Euro go up in smoke, whether brought on by Obama, big banks […]
Posted inWotr
A future of big fires and tiny bugs
My dad was a Forest Service ranger, one of the battle-hardened generation just stepping back into real life from World War II. Rangers like him moved to tiny little towns like Luna, N.M., and Custer, S.D., to work 24-hour days, and their wives were often their chief assistants and sometimes even served as firefighters. The […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Braving landfills, dodging avalanches, all for the sake of geoscience
On a chilly October morning, Fred Jenkins strides across the West Garfield County landfill. Past hunkered-down dumptrucks and mountains of appliances alive with chattering magpies, he stops at what appears to be a tripodal alien spore. It’s a global positioning system (GPS) monument that Jenkins helped install in this sage-speckled swath of western Colorado five […]
Posted inArticles
Lost and found waterways
How is it that, in a region where we allocate and litigate many rivers down to their last drops, others are entirely forgotten? In this episode of West of 100, we explore waterways in Los Angeles and Tucson that have fallen into obscurity, despite the fact that they’re largely responsible for those cities existing where […]
Posted inGoat
Hunters ask for protection from enviros
This week, the U.S. House of Representatives plans to consider the “Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012,” a package of bills intended to benefit hunters and anglers. The bill seeks to open additional federal land for hunting, allows polar bear trophies to be imported from Canada, and removes the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate lead […]