Even as a kid, I recognized an obsession when I saw one. My father’s began late in the Eisenhower years when he got his first subscription to Arizona Highways. A rural route mailman in northern Illinois, he used to rise at 4 a.m. and be home by 1 p.m. As soon as each month’s issue […]
Traveling Arizona Highways, in your dreams and on the ground
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: The leprechaun trap
In April’s Rantcast, also available in written form at our community blog, the Range, Mike mistakenly thinks a garden gnome is a good Mother’s Day gift, and then creates an elaborate leprechaun trap with his two daughters. If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy West of 100, our mid-month podcast covering nature and […]
Posted inGoat
Exchanging for public good
A 20-acre parcel of Forest Service land has been managed with special use permits at the base of Mammoth Mountain since 1954. It’s more a forest of development than a forest of conifers and aspen. There are two ski lifts, a snowmobile and snowcat rental service, parking lots, the Mammoth Mountain Inn and a hokey […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Montana’s hard core school bus drivers
COLORADOThe city of Grand Junction, in western Colorado, just loves controversy, or so you would think from reading the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. First, there was the flap over a high school student who refused to sing an Urdu song because its lyrics translated into an Islamic hymn; then there were the members of the […]
Posted inWotr
Fracking is the big new gun
New technologies are riderless horses. They have a mind of their own and go where they want. Someone invents the personal computer, and 40 years later you spend hours each day surfing the Internet. Travel agents disappear, software engineers are born. Outside Las Vegas, soldiers sit in darkened rooms piloting drones with joysticks, raining hellfire […]
Posted inArticles
The sound of silence
There are few places left in the world where you can experience the sounds of nature uninterrupted by planes, cars, off-road vehicles. Scientists are now working to quantify the impact of all that noise on the natural world, and to monitor how soundscapes — the collection of sounds in a landscape made by critters, wind, […]
Posted inRange
Should a Washington utility prop up a polluting Montana power plant?
By Jennifer Langston, Sightline.org Attention Puget Sound Energy customers: Don’t feel bad if you missed the connection between your electricity bills and today’s headlines about reducing air pollution in scenic Montana. It’s not obvious. But news that the federal government wants owners of the Colstrip coal plant to invest in expensive new equipment to reduce […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Loggers give unique Oregon ponderosa pine a lifeline
On a gray February afternoon, rain falls in huge drops on Chuck Volz’s 65-acre property near Springfield, Ore. It drips from the brim of his faded camouflage baseball cap and rolls off his tan jacket as he walks down a muddy path crisscrossed by deer hoofprints. He stops at a young ponderosa pine and frowns: […]
Posted inGoat
Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
Posted inGoat
Is that MRSA in your porkchop?
I’ve not written much about antibiotic use (or overuse) in livestock facilities. It always seemed like one of those perennial important-yet-not-going-anywhere topics where a group of concerned scientists write research-based, impassioned letters to the federal Food and Drug Administration listing all the potential consequences, but the agency never takes action. Which is not to say […]
Posted inRange
Being “green” doesn’t make you a radical
I’m far from the first to notice the increasing popularity of the phrase “radical environmentalist” and its close cousin “environmental extremist” in political discourse lately, but I’m getting darn sick of it. Rick Santorum’s “phony theology” dust-up in February was a prominent national example; as I’m sure you remember, he accused President Obama of adhering to […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: field changes, from football to strawberries
For avid news hounds, this week saw some shake-ups, showing us that we can be ever surprised. Let’s start with the important stuff. TEBOW TRADED FROM THE DENVER BRONCOS! The West will lose Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow, whose “polarizing skill set” brought us some of the most memorable football moments of 2011. Thus, Tebowmania heads eastward, […]
Posted inWotr
The lure of skiing in avalanche country
After dancing out on the edge of winter some years ago, I returned to solid ground with a good story. Unfortunately, others haven’t been as lucky. My adventure occurred in thebackcountry beyond Colorado’s Beaver Creek ski area. A buddy and I took the lifts in late afternoon, then crossed throughthe backcountry gates to create our own adventure in the Holy Cross Wilderness. I think […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make […]
Posted inGoat
The superweeds are coming!
The enemy grows among us, and it’s spreading. Worse, its powers stand to increase. Invading legions of superweeds have taken root in our fields. In California, growers battle at least 24 different types of herbicide resistant weeds, in nearly 2,000 sites across more than 200,000 acres. Idaho weed scientists report infestations across 240,000 acres. Around […]
Posted inWotr
Deadly handouts, dependent deer
My neighbor feeds deer. He says he’s actually feeding birds so that his disabled wife and her pre-teen daughter can enjoy watching them. But when he tosses chunks of stale white bread out in his front yard, it’s not just crows, ravens and starlings that come to call. (And why anyone would think it was […]
Posted inGoat
Desert Water for Coastal Lawns?
If you accept the interpretation of the Santa Margarita Water District — Orange County, California’s second-largest water supplier — nature has been terribly wasteful with water in the desert. Take, for example, the little bit of rain that falls in the far-away Cadiz Valley, near California’s border with Nevada in the Mojave Desert. About four […]
Posted inRange
A monumental proposal
Things have sure changed around here. When I moved to Salida in 1978 to work for the local newspaper, I covered many hearings about roadless areas and their suitability as wilderness. And invariably, the local business community was opposed to “another federal land grab” that would “lock up valuable resources” and “deprive us of a […]