“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. The rural pocket of Silver Hills where we live is so remote as to be virtually uninhabited, though I am delighted to be among the virtual uninhabitants here. This status comes with some logistical […]
Rants from the Hill: How many bars in your cell?
Posted inGoat
State parks problems
State budget shortfalls have hurt many public amenities – including state parks. Starting in 2009, many Western states cut back on hours, staffing, and maintenance at their parks, and even closed some outright. Just about the only park system that didn’t suffer was Oregon’s, which uses lottery money to fund its parks. Now, in California, […]
Posted inRange
Oh, give them a home …
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Imagine the nerve of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) suggesting that wild bison be managed with the use of wildlife management areas (WMA). That was the message they got last week at a meeting in Shelby, Mont., where local ranchers told an FWP representative that bison were […]
Posted inRange
Enjoying the aspens despite what may come
For weeks I’ve looked forward to a short stay — working vacation, really – at my tiny cabin in southeastern Utah. September is a brutal, blazing hot month in the Phoenix area, made worse by frequent reminders in the news and elsewhere that nearly every other part of the U.S. is experiencing the beginning of […]
Posted inGoat
Return of the corn
The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Management by mega-fire
A few years ago on a bright spring day, I decided to burn our small hayfield. With perhaps a little too much glee, I dropped a few matches on the edge of the field. For an hour, nothing happened; I could hardly get the grass to light despite going through an entire box of matches. […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Killing for conservation in national parks
To work for the National Park Service is to undergo a kind of transformation. I wake up in boxers and an oversized T-shirt, and, 20 minutes later, I’m standing outside my cabin in pressed green jeans, a buttoned and tucked-in gray shirt, bulky brown belt and hiking boots. At 5 feet tall, 100 pounds, I’m […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
In national parks, where are all the fossils?
When it was established in 1922, South Dakota’s Fossil Cycad National Monument possessed the world’s most significant beds of fossilized, Cretaceous Age cycads, large, fern-like plants. But management was left to local ranchers, and paleontologists working the site received limited federal support. By the time the state historical society offered to take over in 1955, […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
California dings homeowners for wildfire protection
As taxpayers across the country cover the multimillion-dollar costs of protecting private residences from wildfires, subsidizing people who choose to live near combustible wildlands, California has begun to try to shift more of those costs to the homeowners. In 2003, the California Legislature passed — but then quickly repealed — a bill that would have […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Good policy and good intentions won’t stop big wildfires
Southwestern wildfires are known to be fast-moving and destructive, but this summer’s conflagrations astonished even veteran observers. On May 29, two cousins abandoned a campfire in a ponderosa pine forest in eastern Arizona. The resulting Wallow Fire, encouraged by dry, windy weather, burned for the next five weeks. It became the largest wildfire in the […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Chronicles of the ‘Cowboy Candidate,’ a review of Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands
Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American WestRoger L. Di Silvestro320 pages, hardcover: $27.Walker Books, 2011. With its obsessive inclusion of seemingly every grouse the future president shot, every letter he wrote, and every meeting he chaired during his stay in the West, Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
A lovely and restless autumn
Art Director Cindy Wehling is taking a much-deserved sabbatical through the end of the year, after more than 20 years of HCN deadlines. (That’s more than 500 issues!) While Cindy’s traveling the West and working on an addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house she and husband Don Olsen built, Denver freelance designer and editor […]
Posted inArticles
What we take and leave when wildfire comes
She had three dogs at her feet, and her girlfriend sat beside her on a motel lobby couch. The two cats were at a kennel. Their VW van was full of climbing gear, and their motel room had a couple changes of clothes. “I’ve been thinking a lot about impermanence,” Ashley Woods told me. That […]
Posted inRange
It pays to be walkable
One of the things I like best about living in Salida, Colo., is that this town of 5,500 offers a good pedestrian environment with narrow streets and wide sidewalks though much of town, Although it’s not quite so easy as it used to be, we can still manage most of life’s routine commerce on foot. […]
Posted inGoat
U.S. House attacks Clean Air Act
Even in these politically polarized times, one might be forgiven for presuming that breathing clean air could muster bipartisan support in Congress. But a quick look at what the House of Representatives has been up to roundly dispels such a quixotic notion. Two bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on cement kilns and […]
Posted inWotr
How can “woofers” stay on the farm?
This summer, my eyes were opened to a new movement. My teachers were a bunch of young adults who worked for free in exchange for learning and a place to stay — interns, but interns of an unusual kind. My partner and I co-direct a sustainability education program in a small town in western Colorado, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Of Segways and stickshifts
MONTANA There’s a new way for cops to enjoy their jobs while still looking out for bad guys. In Billings, Mont., Police Chief Rich St. John said that all of his officers who tried out two-wheeled Segways on their beats found the vehicles “fun,” though the men pictured in the Billings Gazette story looked just […]
Posted inGoat
Weighing water
Updated 10-19-2011 For the past 20 years, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger was a chief arbiter of many California water disputes, parceling water to farmers, urbanites and sensitive fish species. Appointed in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush, Wanger made more than 90 decisions in regard to California’s water before stepping down Sept. […]
Posted inWotr
Not all government programs need cutting
For much of our country’s history, chopping down forests and plowing up prairie were considered patriotic acts. Farming, which rid the earth of so-called non-productive land and transformed it into fields of grain, was a necessary nation-building activity. It took a few decades, but we finally realized that in our rush to control nature, we […]