Why not burn trees where they’ll do some good — in your woodstove?
In defense of wood heat
Posted inBlog
News of a parched West continues to flow
How many times must it be written that in the West, the story is water, and how many times must the story of the West’s dependence on the Colorado River for its water be told? Many readers probably know by now, but it bears repeating. The current running beneath many environmental justice stories is water. […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
‘The music of men’s lives’
Work SongIvan Doig288 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Riverhead Books, 2010. “My train journey had brought me across the Montana everyone thinks of, mile upon hypnotic mile of rolling prairie with snowcapped peaks in the distance, and here, as sudden and surprising as a lost city of legendary times, was a metropolis of nowhere. …” In his latest […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Once More Unto The Breach
Into Utah’s Black Hole with guidebook author Michael Kelsey
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
No walk in the park
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human HeartLynn Schooler272 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2010. Hoping to gain perspective on his troubled marriage, the deaths of friends, and the vagaries of male middle age, Lynn Schooler (author of The Blue Bear) embarks on a walkabout along one of the wildest stretches […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Deadly crossing
The number of people entering the U.S. illegally has plummeted by nearly half since 2007, but 2010 promises to be one of the deadliest years on record for undocumented migrants. The group Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, which keeps count of those who die crossing into Arizona from Mexico, says 236 bodies have been found this […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
A tight — but stable — budget, and a big bash
Eight members of the High Country News board of directors joined staff for a meeting in Fort Collins, Colo., Sept. 17-18. The main business was passing an annual budget, a task made easier by the tremendous financial support from readers during our 40th Anniversary. Despite the recession, HCN’s reserve remains at nearly $500,000, about the […]
Posted inWotr
Second best is OK with me
My wife and I have had the good fortune to visit some of the iconic landscapes of the Colorado Plateau in the years BG — before guidebooks. Back in those days, you could enjoy an hour’s solitude anywhere in the Escalante River’s side canyons. We recently returned to an old favorite in Utah, a colorful […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Breathing easy
West Oakland’s Breathmobile combats inner city asthma
Posted inWotr
Climate of denial
We’re a nation in denial. Record heat waves and shrinking snowpacks surround us, yet our appetite for fossil fuel remains unwavering, and, incredibly, some still doubt that it’s a threat to a stable climate. Witnessing this from southeast Alaska, where I work as a wilderness ranger, is a trip right into this odd realm of […]
Posted inRange
Coming home?
A favorite quotation of my early twenties was by none other than the archdruid himself, David Brower, from an essay he wrote for the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1935. Having spent the previous summer wandering around and over the high peaks, Brower wondered whether his adventure was “the limit? Could the Sierra offer only transitory […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Who can capture the Forest Service?
As an impressionable teenager who had fallen in love with the wild landscapes of the American West, I was shocked to discover that the vast public lands were not all that wild, nor even fully public. That was particularly true of the deserts, grasslands and forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau […]
Posted inWotr
Landlocked in New Mexico
It covers only 16,000 acres, but eastern New Mexico’s Sabinoso Wilderness could easily provide the backdrop for a spaghetti Western movie. Scrub juniper and cactus shade cow plop among the clumps of buffalo grass and blue grama, while stark cliffs, canyons and deeply cleft trenches loom in the distance, looking a lot like the handiwork […]
Posted inRange
Feline justice
Life is full of many painful decisions, but ending a beloved pet’s life has got to be right up there among the worst. Last Saturday morning saw us staring at x-rays on a monitor in our vet’s office, dutifully listening to her description of the effects of fluid on the lungs and dreading where all […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Frack forward
Wyoming’s fed-bucking approach to environmental policy
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Pro-social justice, pro-environment, pro-Mormon
I am a regular subscriber and practical environmentalist. I am also a practicing, if not entirely orthodox, Mormon. HCN seems to miss few opportunities to rant on my fellow Mormons, as if we were somehow a monolithic group of ultra-conservative Tea Party real estate developers. This is not the case. Were you to substitute “Jew” […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
No spike too small
In the article “The Second Second City,” Jeremy N. Smith states that William Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor, was president of the Union Pacific and that he hammered in the Golden Spike (HCN, 9/13/10). William Ogden was the first president of the Union Pacific, but he was not president in 1869 when the Golden Spike was […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Forget the ultralights
In your recent essay “Still Cranish After All These Years,” the caption under the photo on page 15 reads “Sandhill crane in flight over Nebraska’s South Platte River,” but by the time the South Platte reaches crane habitat in Nebraska, it has been joined by the North Platte and has become the Platte (HCN, 9/13/10). […]