Flying over Washington’s Puget Sound from SeaTac Airport, the view today is a wash of blues and whites. Low-hanging soupy, humid air vagues the sharp edges of an industrial waterfront. Blurred boatwake lines sketch the harbors and bays. The ocean looks smooth from here – unbroken and dull in the flat light save for a […]
What’s for dinner?
Posted inWotr
Famous or obscure, our rivers are priceless
I have never visited the Louisiana Gulf Coast or Alaska’s Valdez Bay, but like you, I carry indelible mental images of spewing pipelines and oil-soaked seabirds from the environmental disasters that happened there. Now the images are hitting closer to home. The Yellowstone River runs the length of my home state of Montana like a […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: The Hills are Alive
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. From a very early age I’ve held the deep and unwavering conviction that musicals–especially movie musicals–represent the most intolerable and misguided aesthetic form in the checkered history of human civilization. In addition to being […]
Posted inRange
If polluting was a criminal offense, would it happen as much?
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Whenever I hear the term oil “spill” — which seems too often lately — I cringe. Not just because the environment has taken another one on the chin, but because it makes the incident sounds like a tipped glass of milk that can be mopped up with a napkin. […]
Posted inArticles
Rocky Mountain wolf recovery leader was not your average bureaucrat
Ed Bangs has long been a lightning rod for the controversy around the return of wolves to the U.S. Northern Rockies. Based in Helena, Mont., he led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf-recovery effort from 1988, when the region had only a few naturally occurring wolves, through the reintroduction of Canadian wolves in 1995 […]
Posted inGoat
After Yellowstone River oil spill, domestic water well testing trickles in
When nearly 42,000 of gallons of crude oil rushed down the Yellowstone River July 1, the Environmental Protection Agency said its first concern was human health. Individuals and communities downstream of the spill who have long used it as a clean drinking water source must now await results as the agency tests their wells for […]
Posted inWotr
Going down the road feeling bad
It’s the morning after surgery. My chest throbs. Is it time for pain medicine? I grit my teeth and roll over to check the clock on the bedside table. Except there is no clock on the bedside table, just a blocky beige phone on an unrecognizable bureau. I remember where I am just before I […]
Posted inArticles
Leadville, an old Colorado mining town, may resume mining
For more than a century, Leadville was to Western mining towns what the Rolling Stones were to rock ‘n’ rollers: the biggest, richest, wickedest and longest-lasting act around. It’s also among the highest, nearly two miles above sea level at the headwaters of the Arkansas River in central Colorado. Now, after an absence of a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tourist trouble
THE WEST A tourist from North Carolina received a chastening lesson during a guided fishing trip on the Colorado River. Trenton Austin Ganey’s group had stopped at a beach below Glen Canyon dam, leaving Ganey, 29, free to hike up to a petroglyph known as the “Descending Sheep Panel.” Alone there, Ganey scratched “TRENT” in […]
Posted inGoat
Montana Fly Shops Welcome New Customers: Hair Stylists
Despite their reputation as hangouts for brawny hook and bullet types, fly-fishing shops–particularly the fly-tying sections–have always been a tad swishy. No matter how you slice it, scores of straight-faced men poking through purple Krystal Flash and pearl Flashabou or inquiring about the next shipment of pink chenille isn’t exactly manly. But a recent women’s […]
Posted inWotr
Justice delayed but finally delivered
When federal District Judge Thomas F. Hogan approved a $3.4 billion settlement with several hundred thousand Native American plaintiffs last month, it was the largest court-ordered payout in the history of the United States government. The restitution finally closes an unsavory chapter in American history that began more than a century ago, when Congress passed […]
Posted inGoat
California firefighting agency gives up its Very Large Air Tanker
When the news broke last week that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection canceled its contract with the company that supplies its biggest chemical-dropping jet – literally, the Very Large Air Tanker — I was reminded of an argument Andy Stahl, Executive Director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) had made […]
Posted inGoat
Pipeline politics
updated 7/13/2011 The Yellowstone River oil spill is a stark reminder of something we often forget: oil spills aren’t just for coastal folks. In case you missed the news, here’s what happened: On July 1, the Silvertip pipeline, an underground conduit for ExxonMobil, split open, spewing some 42,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River […]
Posted inArticles
A right to be protected: Gary Marbut’s case for gun rights
This video was produced in association with the University of Montana School of Journalism.
Posted inArticles
Montana’s top gun-rights advocate has a national impact
Guns are Gary Marbut’s life. A self-employed, self-sufficient jack-of-all-trades who lives outside of Missoula, Mont., Marbut says that if he didn’t cast his own bullets, he couldn’t afford to shoot as much as he does: 10,000 to 15,000 rounds per year. He shoots in both rifle and handgun competitions, teaches concealed weapons classes (he’s had […]
Posted inGoat
A walk in the (burned) woods
The largest fire in New Mexico’s recorded history, the Las Conchas, is 45 percent contained; its footprint covers 146,000 acres (not all of that land has been charred, though, since wildfires burn in patches). The blaze started on the afternoon of June 26 when an aspen tree fell onto a powerline southwest of Los Alamos. […]
Posted inRange
You don’t live in the Twitterverse
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. He surely didn’t know it, but journalist David Dobbs recently put his finger on a problem that’s been bugging me for some time. Writing in his Wired blog, Dobbs made the observation that, In my own life, many if not most of my most vital social connections — […]
Posted inJune 27, 2011: Hydrofracked?
For steelhead, dirty water might be better than clean
The West Fork Little Bear Creek in northern Idaho winds through sloping hills and Palouse Prairie farmland on its way to the Potlatch River. The cool, shaded stream seems like typical steelhead habitat. But just above a narrow basalt canyon sits a wastewater treatment plant, which handles 110,000 gallons of sewage and other municipal waste […]
Posted inRange
Clean coal still mostly a dream
By Paige Huntoon, Guest Writer at NewWest.net ABOUT THIS SERIES: Students from The University of Montana School of Journalism, with the help of American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, reported and wrote stories for New West on the energy economy of the Rocky Mountain region. The project originated as part of the Green Thread initiative […]
Posted inWotr
Tuning out and finding local
Global thinking has its good points; it may broaden our viewpoints or remind us that we could be Haitians or Tunisians. But in the West, the most visible representatives of the global economy are the super-stores where forklifts rearrange cartons of goods made somewhere besides America. Here in South Dakota, we specialize in local experiences, […]