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, […]
The Other Bakken Boom: America’s biggest oil rush brings tribal conflict
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 […]
Posted inGoat
Predator aversion
The delisting quickly led to state-sponsored wolf hunts in Montana and Idaho that were supposedly aimed at responsibly reducing wolf populations to protect game species like elk. But for many wildlife conservation groups, the hunts have amounted to little more than the state-sponsored slaughter of a still-endangered species sacrificed for the sake of politics. Last […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When a boom is not a boon
Dark nights have long been a hallmark of the West’s vast rural High Plains. But a 2010 nighttime satellite photo from the National Geophysical Data Center reveals a striking change in the arid, once-empty sweep of western North Dakota — a smear of light that spreads far wider than any of the state’s cities. This […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Tales from the Edge: A review of Extremophilia
Extremophilia, River Rats, Timber Tramps, Biker Trash, and Realtors: New and Selected WritingsFred Haefele145 pages, softcover: $16.95.Bangtail Press, 2011. If you’re not familiar with the term extremophilia, don’t worry. As Missoula, Mont., author Fred Haefele explains: “It’s a genuine neologism. A freshly minted word. It refers to someone with an intemperate love of extremophiles, those […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Redefining “renewable” to get a clean energy bill through Congress
Seven times since the 101st Congressional session in 1989, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has sponsored or co-sponsored some bill establishing a national energy policy to reduce global warming. Each in some way called for U.S. utilities to get a certain percentage of electricity from renewable sources by a certain year; a few had bipartisan support. […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
New books from friends of High Country News
In mid-March, former intern Jeff Chen (winter 2009) came by our Paonia, Colo., office to say hello. After his stint at HCN, Jeff founded Pick Up America — a “youth-inspired nonprofit conducting the nation’s first coast-to-coast roadside litter pickup to encourage a transition toward zero waste.” So far, Jeff and his team have walked over […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Living on faith: A review of The Man Who Quit Money
The Man Who Quit MoneyMark Sundeen272 pages,softcover: $15.Riverhead Trade, 2012. The title grabs your attention: The Man Who Quit Money. Intrigued, you open the book and read: “In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings — thirty […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Diverters be damned
HCN‘s story about Bob Rawlings is a classic tale of one influential man’s moral conflict and hubris, yet the story is incomplete (HCN, 3/19/12, “Water Warrior”). Like Rawlings, the author disregards the damaging consequences of the original water diversion. Rawlings will be remembered for maintaining a distinct tribal myopia for decades, and perhaps for overlooking […]