There were rumors of night-time guerrilla activity when I lived in Tucson, Ariz., during the 1980s. Under cover of darkness, people scurried around using chainsaws and flammable liquids to destroy billboards. Ed Abbey, the edgy desert author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, was reportedly among them; so were some other founders of the […]
Billboard corporations and other big industries make their own rules
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
A second chance at love: A review of Liberty Lanes
Liberty LanesRobin Troy192 pages, softcover: $22.University of Nevada Press, 2011. Robin Troy’s second novel, Liberty Lanes, is a big-hearted story of ordinary people, their hopes, secrets and longings. It begins quietly in a bowling alley in a small Montana town, where Nelson Moore, a 74-year-old stalwart of the senior bowling league, waits for an early […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
A former Green Mountain fire lookout tells his story
“Lightbulb” Winders recounts his experiences as the last lookout on Green Mountain, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness near Darrington, Washington.
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Beauty and the Beast
It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Colorado’s green(ish) gas baron
When the sun gets in Ed Warner’s eyes, he turns his chair – and his whole desk, too. Set into the floor in the middle of his home office, a giant turntable from an old mine quarry rotates the entire workspace, including a 7-foot-high wooden cabinet wall. The ingenious setup has appeared in Architectural Digest, […]
Posted inArticles
Picking ranchers’ brains, from Colorado to Mongolia
As a college student in the mid-1980s, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez worked as a seasonal interpreter for the National Park Service. That’s when she was first exposed to the great Western debate over public-lands ranching. She soon became familiar with environmentalists’ gripes about grazing impacts, but realized she knew nothing about the ranchers’ point of view. So […]
Posted inRange
Lessons From the Musselshell: The Careless Creek Experiment
Editor’s note: This is the second blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana’s Musselshell River. Careless Creek is one of the main tributaries feeding the Musselshell River. Its flow begins in the Big Snowy Mountains and is augmented by Swimming Woman Creek as well as by a canal […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Defense goes solar and helicopter bear shooting goes legal
While presidential opponents dropped like flies, news affecting lands west of the 100th meridian continued to spit and sputter out onto the interwebs, mimicking the sleet-snow we got here in Paonia this weekend. Here’s a roundup of the important news of the week: ENERGY President Obama announced his rejection of the Keystone XL project on […]
Posted inWotr
An Obama-Huntsman ticket would get my vote
Here’s a dramatic way we might break through the partisan gridlock and mutual demonization that dominate our politics these days: President Barack Obama, the top Democrat, should ditch his vice president, Joe Biden, and recruit a reasonable Western Republican — Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. — as a running mate. As unlikely as it sounds, there’s […]
Posted inWotr
Getting a ski pass the hard way
With others to the left and right of me, we’re on the job, stamping our feet backward down an icy slope of manmade snow recently sprayed into the air by the Aspen Skiing Company. The slope drops off steeply for about 100 yards before ending in a brush-choked gully, and I’m about to get to […]
Posted inRange
Home, home on … a significant portion of its range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House There’s potentially change in the works for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the public can weigh in on it through February 7. The proposed draft rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA)—the two federal […]
Posted inGoat
Dead man working
There are plenty of ways for roughnecks to kill themselves fast. Working as a roofer in Deer Lodge, Montana, they’d repeat that old joke that’s been amended for every blue-collar occupation in which I’ve ever been employed. “If you fall off the roof, you’re fired before you hit the ground.” “I want to (expletive) kill […]
Posted inWotr
How to find a 13,000 year-old mammoth
It takes a long time to find a curved-tusk mammoth, especially if it’s been obscured beneath tamarisk, oak brush and tenacious Russian olive bushes. I’d heard stories about mammoths once roaming the land that’s now San Juan County in southeastern Utah, but a beast from the Pleistocene is hard to locate on rock cliffs and […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
China hearts cowboys
THE WEST AND CHINAIt’s no secret that many Germans adore the Old West, but who knew that prosperous second-home buyers in China would also succumb to “cowhide, antler chandeliers, saddle blankets, lodgepole chairs, wagon wheels, Navajo rugs, iron light fixtures, wildlife-scene fireplace screens, wooden snowshoes, leather throw pillows, horseshoes, Charles Russell prints and plaid curtains”? […]
Posted inGoat
Sheep vs. bear, agency vs. agency
In many ways, the tale of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears is one of remarkable success. When the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, there may have been as few as 136 of the bruins wandering in and around Yellowstone National Park. By 2006, there were more than 500, and in […]
Posted inGoat
Video of trapped bobcat riles Las Vegas
If you’re interested in how animals struggle when they’re caught by trappers — and how trappers think and act — here you go: This video was made by Tracy Truman, a lawyer and longtime trapper who serves as an adviser on “wildlife matters” to the Clark County government (around Las Vegas) and the Nevada Wildlife […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Words and Clouds
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Our corner of the western Great Basin is tucked into the rain shadow of the Sierra crest, which knocks the bottom out of those big, wet storms that rise in the Pacific and cross […]
Posted inGoat
The Sackett Saga
It’s hard not to feel for Mike and Chantell Sackett, the Idaho couple who in 2007 saw their plans for a dream home on a remote Idaho lake kiboshed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last week, when their case against the agency became the first case of 2012 to go before the U.S. Supreme […]
Posted inGoat
Genetically modified or no, farmed salmon a risky proposition
Get ready, folks: A genetically modified salmon, AquAdvantage, may soon be approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in U.S. commercial fish farming. That is, assuming that an opposition bill that made it halfway through Congress last session doesn’t derail the 15-year permitting process, and fierce opposition from environmental groups doesn’t convince the […]
Posted inGoat
Amid scandal, a top Alaska wildlife official quits
Alaska’s politically-charged system of wildlife management — detailed in a 2011 HCN cover story — is looking disgraceful now. Corey Rossi — the controversial director of wildlife conservation, within the Alaska Department of Fish and Game — has been charged with 12 counts of violating hunting regulations. Rossi, 51, has resigned — and many of […]