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 […]
In Western water law, “first come, first serve” has limits
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 […]
Posted inRange
Arizona shooting poses another threat to democracy
There’s already been ample commentary about the Jan. 8 horror in Tucson, Ariz. Six people, ranging from a 9-year-old girl to a federal judge, were killed, and 14 were wounded, among them Gabrielle Giffords, who represents that part of Arizona in the U.S. Congress. The suspect, 22-year-old Jared Loughner, was captured at the scene. Responses have […]
Posted inRange
Public transportation systems come at a high price
Last weekend the New York Times reported on efforts to develop a fast train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Being a rider myself—I am writing this on the Cascades run south—and knowing how appealing European trains are and how outdated, inefficient, and unreliable North American trains are, I read the article with a sinking […]
Posted inArticles
Ronald Reagan: The accidental environmentalist
Former president’s economic decline was enviro boon
Posted inGoat
Proposed Colorado uranium mill gets key state go-ahead
Web only: Watch an audio slideshow about the proposed Piñon Ridge uranium mill. Colorado took one step closer to kickstarting a new Western uranium boom this Wednesday, when state regulators approved a license for the Piñon Ridge uranium mill. The western Colorado mill — which could be the first in the nation in over HCN […]
Posted inRange
Klamath River clean-up takes a step forward
On January 4th the EPA announced that it had adopted a clean-up plan for the California portion of the Klamath River Basin. Known officially as a TMDL (an acronym for total maximum daily load, or the total amount of pollution a water body can handle in one day without exceeding legal limits), the clean-up plan […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Cock-a-doodle-brouhaha
COLORADO Don’t even think of toting roosters along if you’re moving to Ridgway in western Colorado. The birds are unwanted, and not just because they tend to cock-a-doodle-doo at the crack of dawn. They’ve become the symbol of a town that’s no longer rural, relaxed and live and let-live. For proof, just ask resident Janet […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 1
Drive the back roads of Delta County, Colorado, these days and you have a good chance of spotting a bald eagle atop some old cottonwood tree, or sometimes on the ground in a pasture of cows, tearing into some nutrient rich afterbirth. Baldies show up every winter here, and seem to be increasing in numbers. […]