We’re excited to announce that author Craig Childs has just joined our list of contributing editors. Many of you are already fans of Craig’s work, which appears regularly in these pages and in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Outside and Orion. His writing focuses on natural sciences, archaeology and his remarkable […]
Craig Childs is HCN’s latest contributing editor
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Bucking the stereotypes: A review of West of 98
West of 98: Living and Writing the New American WestEdited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland380 pages, softcover: $21.95.University of Texas Press, 2011. Any anthology is a collage, a series of snapshots imperfectly melded into one composition. That’s why we read them: They allow us to look at a topic from a variety of angles, […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
A life measured in cordwood: A review of Into the Heat: My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws and Men
Into the Heat: My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws and MenCindy Bellinger159 pages, softcover: $14.95.High-Lonesome Books, 2011. What does it mean for one woman to take an active, eventful life and root it ever more deeply in one spot, settling down in the mountain foothills where a nearby pine forest becomes a close companion, […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Inside the world of climate change deniers
Amid the excitement of the week’s federal budget proposals, an exposure of climate-change deniers’ tactics and GOP candidate reshuffling (Romney, what’s happening to you?), we at HCN headquarters were battling winter colds and coughs, reaching for DayQuil, NyQuil and Benadryl, when we weren’t keeping up on the news. Here’s what caught our watery, itchy eyes: ClimateDocuments […]
Posted inWotr
It’s time 23,000 elk got off the dole
In western Wyoming, feeding elk seems as normal as long winters, Grand Teton views and oil and gas wells. But of the 1 million elk that now roam North America, only 3 percent are fed by government employees, and three-fourths of those animals are fed in Wyoming at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, […]
Posted inRange
Churches use punk culture to reach Montana teens
Editor’s note: These stories were produced for High Country News by students in the University of Montana’s online news class. They will be running over a period of two weeks in the Range blog. See a list of all the stories here. By Billie Loewen It’s an especially cold December night, with the kind of […]
Posted inWotr
West to East, and a world away
A few months ago, after 20 years, I moved from the West to the East, reluctantly, carting a truckload of artifacts and memories, literal stones and actual stories, each one a product of the forests, mountains or deserts of Bend, Ore., Missoula, Mont., Argenta, British Columbia, Canada, and beyond. My little 4-cylinder truck labored under […]
Posted inGoat
Anger over the lion’s share
In a classic cartoon, a hulky lion sits in a rink as a frenetic lion-tamer waves a stool in front of its face. The smug beast represents a nameless corporate lion watching patiently as the government espouses threats. As the cartoon suggests, federal regulators often talk a big game, but cracking down on misbehaving industries […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Winning the wildfire jackpot
THE WESTMany of us harbor a sneaking suspicion that Westerners aren’t quite real to D.C. Beltway officials, particularly to the Easterners in their employ. The habitat of these politically engaged men and women so close to power is usually a crowded room where they toil from morning to night, and so the poor wretches rarely […]
Posted inRange
Tribes use funds to restore westslope cutthroat trout
Editor’s note: These stories were produced for High Country News by students in the University of Montana’s online news class. They will be running over a period of two weeks in the Range blog. See a list of all the stories here. By Russell Greenfield On the west-facing foothills of the Mission Mountain Wilderness, about […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Following the Oregon Trail, digitally and on foot
As a kid, I loved playing Oregon Trail, a popular and notoriously difficult computer game in which avatars inevitably drown, run out of water or die of dysentery en route from Missouri to the Promised Land at the Pacific’s edge. An imaginative child, I took my virtual pioneer adventures offscreen, loading up my small red […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Anecdote of the Jeep
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. 1919 was a pretty decent year, all in all. The Grand Canyon received protection as a national park, the 19th Amendment finally gave women the vote, the world witnessed the end of the war […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Montana court defends law defying Citizens United
Judge William Clancy, who presided over a state district court in Butte, Mont., was a heavy drinker who often dozed off during lawyers’ arguments; when awake, he showered a spittoon with tobacco juice gobs. Another Butte judge, Edward Harney, cheated on his wife with an employee of a mining company that was a defendant in […]
Posted inGoat
The clean blue line
California State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) remembers the day he picked up a local newspaper and read the shocking news: A 940-passenger cruise ship had chucked a 18-ton load of sewage, dirty water and oily bilge perilously near to the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary off the California coast. Simitian, then serving in the California […]
Posted inGoat
Oil and gas water use: the real issues
When I read Tasha Eichenseher’s recent Land Letter article (sub reqd) about fracking’s use of water, I was alarmed by the numbers. In Colorado, alone, hydraulic fracturing operations use about 4.5 billion gallons of water per year. That’s expected to increase to more than 6 billion gallons over the next few years. The takeaway is […]
Posted inRange
“The Way Home: Returning to our National Parks”
The beauty and grandeur of our national parks may best be witnessed through the eyes of those visiting them for the first time. And in a new film by Amy Marquis, a vision of Yosemite is revealed to a group of people absent from the parks not just over their own lifetimes but for many […]
Posted inRange
Exploring the myths of the Yellowstone supervolcano
Editor’s note: These stories were produced for High Country News by students in the University of Montana’s online news class. They will be running over a period of two weeks in the Range blog. See a list of all the stories here. By Tor Haugan When bestselling alternative-history writer Harry Turtledove published a recent novel, […]
Posted inRange
Boy Scout habitat takes a hit in Idaho
The US Forest Service maintains habitat for endangered owls and salmon — so why is the agency retreating when it comes to habitat for Boy Scouts? Today, the Idaho Panhandle National Forest is reviewing its forest plan, including its plan for one of the most special places it manages — the Mallard-Larkin Area. Mallard-Larkin is […]
Posted inGoat
Green Revolution 2.0? Using molecular markers to speed up Mendel
In agricultural technology circles, when talk turns to plant breeding as a way to boost crop yields, combat plant diseases, and adapt to a hotter, drier world, genetic modification has frequently dominated the conversation. This includes the Roundup-ready suite of crops, resistant to herbicides, or BT corn and soy, which are modified to manufacture their […]
Posted inGoat
Good news for pine, bad news for spruce
For years now, towns in the Mountain West have watched as the green needles of their surrounding lodgepole pine forests turned a burnt orange. That orange signifies the tree’s death from pine bark beetle, a native pest whose populations have been boosted by climate change, resulting in the killing of enormous swaths of trees across […]