If the bumpy mountains that rise up between the California desert city of Twentynine Palms and the western flood plain of the Colorado River don’t look like anything else on this earth, it’s because they aren’t: The living things that flourish here can’t get a toehold anywhere else; once they’re gone from here, they’re gone […]
Solar energy on public lands: The 80,000 have spoken
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Western voters love ballot initiatives — and sometimes make a mess
When Colorado voters go to the polls in November, they’ll consider Proposition 103, a ballot initiative that would raise taxes to help fund public education. It’s an attempt to fix some of the huge problems created by previous ballot measures that strangled education funding. It’s also a messy habit: For decades, Colorado voters have repeatedly […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Western scientists study the past to predict the future
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, far above the deserts of the Great Basin, stands the Methuselah Grove, a group of gnarly, thick-bellied bristlecone pines sculpted and polished by centuries of blowing snow. All of the trees are ancient, and one of them — the Forest Service won’t say which — is more […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Wanted: a few good board members
Wanted: A few good board membersThe High Country News Board of Directors and several staff members met in late September in Reno, Nev. They approved a new budget and discussed everything from HCN‘s editorial coverage and the new technologies shaping the media industry to the composition of the board itself; currently, it has 10 members […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
To die fighting: a review of Jesse’s Ghost: A Novel
Jesse’s Ghost: A NovelFrank Bergon224 pages, hardcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. “The story of how I came to kill my best friend keeps pressing on my brain like a bad dream so I can feel it, but I can’t remember it whole.” So begins Jesse’s Ghost, the account of a man’s attempt to understand a murder he […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Mapping the Hi-Line: A review of Honyocker Dreams
Honyocker Dreams: Montana MemoriesDavid Mogen227 pages, hardcover: $21.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Colorado writer David Mogen grew up along Montana’s Hi-Line, just below the Canadian border and east of the Rockies, as his father moved the family from one small town to the next. Honyocker Dreams begins with Mogen’s return to the Hi-Line many years […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Development near national parks impacts park ecology
Though many Western national parks are buffered by other public lands, housing development on their outskirts has been on the rise. Between the 1940s and 2000, the number of homes within 30 miles of national parks grew from 1.5 million to 6.6 million, according to a study which appeared in the Proceedings of the National […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Uranium — To mine or not to mine?
Though not as movie villain-worthy as its cousin plutonium, uranium, the naturally occurring element used to make nuclear weapons and fuel nuke plants, is just as contentious, as illustrated in this week’s headlines. On Wednesday, the Obama administration released a plan for a 20-year ban on uranium mining within a million acres of public land […]
Posted inWotr
Living the news, publishing every week
In the remote mountain valley where I live in northern Washington, people are talking about two members of a local family who have been indicted by the federal government and charged with killing as many as five endangered gray wolves. A third member of the family is charged with conspiracy to smuggle a wolf pelt […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Cruising the ocean, counting seabirds
The lone-flier screams, resistlessly urges the heart to the whale-way over the stretch of the seas.–“The Seafarer,” an Old English poem, author unknown At 120 feet wide and 951 feet long, the MS Golden Princess is nearly as big as an aircraft carrier. At 109,000 gross tons, she weighs more than one. She has 15 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Surfing on a shark
OREGON In the derring-do department, Doug Niblack certainly stands out: The surfer found himself standing on the back of a great white shark and lived to tell the tale. Niblack, who was surfing off the Oregon coast near Seaside, north of Portland, was paddling some 50 yards from shore when his board hit something that […]
Posted inGoat
Will Valles Caldera become a national park?
Around 3,000 elk, the second largest herd in New Mexico, spent the summer munching on Valles Caldera National Preserve grasslands before migrating to nearby Bandelier National Monument for the winter. A menagerie of other wildlife also stake claim to the collapsed volcano’s mountain forests: black bear, mountain lion, bobcat and 60 species of birds. A […]
Posted inWotr
At last, Yellowstone bison catch a break
Bison live to wander, but bison with the audacity to wander beyond the invisible northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park have long been chased back into the park, sent to the slaughterhouse or simply killed outright. Recently, Montana has been trying some new approaches, and this is a very good thing for North America’s only […]
Posted inRange
How coal is already congesting Washington’s railways
By Eric de Place, Sightline.org This post is part of the research project: The Dirt on Coal Washington’s rail system is congested in places. Adding dozens of coal trains each day, without also big new capacity improvements, could cripple the system with gridlock. All that is common knowledge. Less well-known is this: coal shipments are […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Washington’s Hanford Reservation and nuclear plant may lie on faults
Updated 11/7/11 “You’re going to see some really cool geology,” Brian Sherrod says, running his finger across the screen of his laptop in the cab of his pickup. Sherrod, a U.S. Geological Survey paleoseismologist with a salt-and-pepper mustache, tents his hands and interlocks his fingers, illustrating how seismic forces created the craggy hillsides and deep […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Why so defeatist?
“Getting weeds out of the national parks is an endless war that can never be won, but many Park Service employees are willing — and happy — warriors (HCN, 10/17/11, “Among the processes of place”).” This strikes me as rather biased. It is possible to remove invasive plants from many areas, or to keep them […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Unloved survivors
Rightfully enthralled with the Northwest’s magnificent cathedral-like old-growth forests, most people seem unaware of the existence of ancient species like the diminutive shrub Kalmiopsis leachiana (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). It inhabits an ancient hardscrabble wilderness home with other survivors of climate change, ice age and millennia. To me, the primordial genetic code […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
“Pristine” is in the eye of the beholder
Nice essay (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). I guess my only gripe with it is how “pristine wilderness” is defined. If pristine means that there has been no human influence, then there is no such thing, and hasn’t been for hundreds or thousands of years. But personally, I’ve always thought that pristine wilderness […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
It’s a perilous profession
Wildland settings make for terrible places to get injured (HCN, 10/17/11, “The golden hour”). Unfortunately, injuries often lead to death, as time becomes the killer. Nobody is to blame for this, and changing a pretty damn good system — that which is used by the U.S. Forest Service — will do no good, and could […]