Let’s leave them at home more often
The trouble with guns
Posted inRange
Celebrating Martin Luther King Day
I know how to celebrate most holidays. On Independence Day, I reread the Declaration of Independence and watch fireworks after dark. To bring in the New Year, I try to stay up till midnight. On Thanksgiving I feast with family, and so on. But I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to celebrate on Martin […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: In Defense of Missiles
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. The hill from which I rant is good for many things: to hold our house up high into the teeth of the desert wind and generate an updraft on which harriers kite; to give […]
Posted inRange
Saving Montana’s trees, one ranch at a time
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House When forestry experts in Montana concluded last week that December’s cold snap did little to kill beetle larvae nestled under lodgepole and ponderosa pine bark, it was harsh news for those watching the ever-growing bands of reddish-brown beetle-killed forests across the West. It would take at least a […]
Posted inWotr
Keep a public hand on water
The history of the West is peppered with water cowboys. Just recall William Mulholland, whose role in Los Angeles’ secret grab of water from Owens Valley, Calif., was made famous in the movie Chinatown, or Colorado’s contemporary water baron, Aaron Million, who’s pushing a $3 billion, privately funded scheme to funnel water to Colorado’s Front […]
Posted inGoat
In Western water law, “first come, first serve” has limits
Three miles south of the Tongue and Yellowstone Rivers’ confluence near Miles City, Montana, an oxbow parts Roger Muggli’s alfalfa fields from the rough gray hills on the other side. Most days, Muggli walks the diversion dam from the Tongue through ditches that feed water to his flood-irrigated crops. He works the old-fashioned way: no […]
Posted inBlog
Putting the 40th Anniversary Blog to Bed
2011 marks 41 years that High Country News has been in existence. While another year is certainly noteworthy, especially in this age of disappearing print publications, it won’t carry the fanfare of the past year. This last year was anything but ordinary here at High Country News. To celebrate the organization’s 40th anniversary, subscribers hosted […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 2
Snow has the amazing ability to visually soften the land. Here, snow has transformed a small boulder field on Colorado’s Grand Mesa into a sensuous series of drifts. I shot this one in color, but like it better in black and white. For a lively and informative update of this year’s remarkable snow conditions in […]
Posted inBlog
Tree equity
The Los Angeles community Sherman Oaks sounds like a place that should be verdant and laden with leafy trees. Not surprisingly, the students of Arbol University found that to be exactly true. Yet the students, who were using trigonometry and other tools to collect data about Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, were shocked at the […]
Posted inRange
New hope for old mines
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House For all their knowledge of the land, miners, whose legacy lives long in Colorado, had little thought of the long-term environmental consequences of their work. For over 150 years, coal, gold, silver, uranium, gypsum and limestone, among other resources, have been drilled, blasted and hauled from their hiding […]
Posted inGoat
New Mexico governor sucker-punches enviro regs
On January 1, 2011, New Mexico’s new governor, Republican Susana Martinez, took office. Nine minutes into her first day, she got right down to business with executive order 2011-001 [PDF], the innocently-titled “Formation of a small business tax force,” which not only created said task force but, more importantly, placed a 90-day hold on most […]
Posted inArticles
Foraging for fungi in the Pacific Northwest
Mushroom hunters and the science behind a bumper crop
Posted inGoat
La Nina vs. Western Snowmaggedon
Walking my dog at 6 a.m. this morning in Paonia, I could sense a presence in that exposed-fingers-will-break-off-any-minute-cuz-it’s-so-friggin’-cold feeling: Winter. A brutal minus-10-degrees-Fahrenheit kind of winter. A snow-makes-creepy-banshee-squeals-under-your-feet kind of winter. And it’s a lot of snow for Paonia, HCN‘s home base in western Colorado, with more than a foot on the ground and the […]
Posted inRange
A Moment of Opportunity for Counties with Public Lands
By Mark Haggerty, 1-11-11 U.S. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack just announced that this year’s “transition” payments to counties from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) will again “contribute to rural communities becoming self-sustaining and prosperous.” The Secretary stressed that these payments ($389 million) fund local roads and schools—important for communities still feeling […]
Posted inBlog
The age of loudness
“No age is louder than ours,” Ken McAlpine writes in his book, “Islands Apart.” “We have reached a crescendo of clamor, and it is both curse and comfort,” he continues. “Solitude, in our times, is rare and, for many, profoundly unnerving.” What might solitude offer those who never have a chance to experience it? Can […]
Posted inGoat
Rep. Giffords — moderate, and green
By now, we’ve all read and heard the tragic and horrifying accounts of the attempted assassination of three-term Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), which resulted in 6 dead and 14 injured, including the Congresswoman. It’s not clear if the mentally-ill shooter also had political motivations. Giffords is known as a moderate and has voiced strong criticism […]
Posted inGoat
Happy New Year, pronghorn!
At a site called Trapper’s Point about six miles west of Pinedale, Wyo., the New Fork and Green rivers sweep toward one another and then away, creating an hourglass shaped strip of land. Every spring and fall more than 3,000 pronghorn and mule deer pass through this bottleneck as they travel between winter range in […]