In the tangle of gear in my daypack, the phone started ringing. It was a wholly inappropriate moment: My phone is pink, and its jaunty notes clashed with the traditional hunter’s world of blaze orange and camouflage. I sat on a rock by the trail and cringed. Everything about this — my first hunting trip […]
Hunting deer on a mountain bike
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bringing it home, keeping it wild
IDAHOYou might call it a minor movement, but “reshoring” — a new word that means bringing offshore jobs back home — is buoying some residents of rural Idaho. About 12 years ago, Buck Knives sent up to half its production to China, thinking it would save money. Unfortunately, many customers were steamed by that decision. […]
Posted inGoat
Landing a land transaction
A Wyoming congressional representative is trying to resurrect a federal land sale act to reduce the budget deficit and help the National Park Service end a long quest to capture a Grand Teton inholding. The Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (pronounced “flit-fah”) was enacted in July 2000 to allow federal agencies to sell off disposable […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
The forgotten North Cascades grizzly bear
Scott Fitkin started his career chasing ghost bears. As a biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in the late ’80s, he stalked grizzly bear sightings in the Cascade Mountains. Over two decades, he verified a few tracks but never glimpsed a grizzly or even a photograph of one. Until this June. That’s […]
Posted inGoat
Trampled by tourists
In the five years I’ve been an environmental journalist, and during the previous several seasons I worked in conservation, helping manage and mitigate recreational impacts on public trails in Colorado, I’ve often heard the argument that maintaining a constituency for environmental protection depends on getting as many folks as possible out into the places most […]
Posted inWotr
Thanks to Obama, cattlemen lose out
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would admit there’s a high potential for market manipulation. This is the case in the world of meatpacking today, where four giant packers — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — rule the market. And that is why, […]
Posted inRange
Does Pew’s ad on the roadless rule get it right?
Editor’s note: Sharon Friedman blogs on forest policy at “A New Century of Forest Planning” and will be posting occasionally on the Range blog. In the Denver Post this morning, I saw the full page ad you see here below. I couldn’t figure out how to link to it, since it was an advertisement, but […]
Posted inGoat
Obama sides with big business over small cattlemen
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would likely admit the potential is high for market manipulation. This is the case in the world of meatpacking, where four packers — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — rule the scene. That’s why, last year, the […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Behind the scenes in the lives of captive wolves
When we started the 2 o’clock tour at the Colorado Wolf & Wildlife Center in the mountains above Colorado Springs, the wolves were napping, just as wild wolves do in the middle of the day. A woman in jeans and cowboy boots served as guide for our group — eight random travelers, most of whom […]
Posted inRange
Changing the way renewables are funded
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House In the months since Solyndra’s collapse, there have been many inquiries into who knew what and when, and why this particular company was chosen to receive $528 million in loan guarantees. Did the White House hand-pick Solyndra as a quid pro quo for campaign contributions? Did the Department of Energy […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Road rage and a wild lands successor
Several Utah counties and the state think the Bureau of Land Management is playing troll in a billy goat saga by limiting access to several hundred road segments that cross public lands. County and state officials want to wrest road control from the BLM, and hope U.S. District Court Magistrate Brooke Wells will grant them […]
Posted inWotr
Breathing clean air comes in second in Congress
Even in these politically polarized times, one might think that breathing clean air could muster some bipartisan support in Congress. A quick look at the bills the House of Representatives has been passing lately should dispel that naïve notion. Three bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on coal-fired power plants, cement kilns and […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Daniel Marlos shares his knowledge and love of the insect world
In early June, Daniel Marlos, an eccentric, cherubic-faced Los Angeleno, received an intriguing message from a friend: “If there weren’t two little, scrawny legs, I wouldn’t think it was a living thing!” she said, describing a creature loitering on her porch. She emailed Marlos a photo of a tawny, wingless insect, its legs cartoonishly splayed […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Of things falling
WYOMING Marvin Bass, a Florida man who hadn’t taken a vacation in five years, didn’t get to enjoy his visit to Yellowstone National Park as planned. He was driving a borrowed 42-foot motor home up 8,431-foot-high Teton Pass when he realized how much it was laboring on the 10 percent grade. So Bass parked the […]
Posted inGoat
A Flood of Fault
—John McPhee, Atchafalaya, 1987 The Army Corps of Engineers’ Missouri River Division is not the place to work if you have a pathological need to be liked. That’s because the Corp’s water management priorities on the Big Muddy involve a crazy-making number of stakeholders, each with different and often conflicting interests. There are downstream barge […]
Posted inWotr
Of marigolds and a day with the dead
Living close to the Mexican border, I’m often asked if I have problems with drug smugglers or “illegals” trekking across our land here in the mountains of southern Arizona. When I tell friends in the Midwest or New York or Oregon that my main worry is walking into a Safeway parking lot in Tucson and […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: After 10,000 years
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Wanting to climb one last mountain before winter shuts down the high country until June, on Veteran’s Day I headed with my buddy Steve to Mount Augusta, a 10,000-foot peak in the remote Clan […]
Posted inGoat
The (slowly) changing face of energy country
Change often comes quickly to energy country. Take Williston, N.D., at the heart of an oil boom which has more than doubled the state’s oil production since 2008. Williston mayor Ward Koeser recently told NPR that in just a few years’ time, the town’s population has grown from 12,000 to an estimated 20,000. And he […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Feds attempt to speed complicated process of building power lines
On a brisk October day, Paul Christensen is helping harvest sugar beets on his southern Idaho farm. His work as a Cassia County commissioner keeps him busy, he says, but he still enjoys “playing in the dirt.” He’s not the only one: Cassia is among Idaho’s most productive agricultural counties. That’s partly why it has […]
Posted inGoat
Spotty enforcement in the gas patch
Multiple choice question: Last year, Colorado collected $1.2 million, Wyoming $15,500, California $13,123 and New Mexico $0, for fines associated with what activity? A. Poaching of big game animals B. Misleading labeling of food items C. Oil and gas drilling D. Late returns of library books Unless you’ve been in solitary confinement for the last […]