“The task is great. So is the need. And there is no time to lose,” said Exxon executives in their infamous “White Paper” of 1980. Those bombastic words came at the conclusion of Exxon’s plan to help solve the nation’s energy crisis of the 1970s. Long lines at the pump and oil embargoes had prompted […]
“We’ve seen this movie before”
Posted inHeard Around the West
A little taste of … something
COLORADOPot dispensaries may be proliferating on Main Streets across the West, but a new sign that weed is going mainstream can be seen in Durango, a college town in southern Colorado that attracts lots of hikers, climbers and mountain bikers. Just turn on Durango’s public-access television channel, and you can watch pot-inspired recipes come to […]
Posted inGoat
The great Colorado non-scandal
Last week, I talked to one of my daughters in Oregon, and she asked me about “the Romanoff scandal,” adding that it was much in the news out there and so it must be a really big deal in Colorado. It hasn’t been getting that much play in Colorado — I don’t recall anyone bringing […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Health studies gas up
Colorado launches one of the nation’s first health assessments of gas-drilling impacts
Posted inWotr
Fighting fire and memories
It’s been almost 16 years since a firestorm ignited on Storm King Mountain in western Colorado, killing 14 firefighters, including my friend, Roger Roth. A lot can happen in 16 years. I’ve married and divorced. I’ve moved three times. My knees have turned cranky, my hair gone grayer. Now I swing a pulaski beside men […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
New world, new canvas
Ex-priest reconstructs a working-class history from Basque arborglyphs
Posted inGoat
Cheap grass
Grazing fees aren’t exactly bringing home the bacon … er, beef … for the feds. As we pointed out earlier this year, in the past 40-plus years the fee to graze a cow and calf on public land has gone up a measly 12 cents: from $1.23 to $1.35. That increase hasn’t even come close […]
Posted inWotr
Springtime in the Rockies
The Mancos Valley reverberates with the gush of its namesake river in an annual rite of spring runoff. These waters are a perfect metaphor for starting a new life — allowing winter’s rigidity to melt and wash away. In this high mountain ranching valley of Colorado, the first water flows through irrigation spigots and onto […]
Posted inRay
California voters OK reform of primary system
The biggest message in Western elections yesterday was California’s Proposition 14 — the ballot measure that aims to reduce the power of hardliners in both political parties. More than 54 percent of the California voters — fed up with extremists who cause gridlock — approved the reform. From now on, if the reform isn’t stalled […]
Posted inRange
Joshua Tree instructs students about climate change
When Joshua Tree National Park Ranger Caryn Davidson announced, “We cannot do much to change the course of climate change,” 30 students moved to the corner of the Black Rock Visitor’s Center under a large paper sign with the words “strongly disagree” written in black magic marker. “Mankind has the intelligence to destroy the world […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Nature illiteracy
Pine grosbeak? How about just seeing a bird as a bird.
Posted inWotr
Boots on the trail ought to pay up
My first introduction to Colorado’s 14,421-foot Mount Massive was, quite literally, a pile of crap. Several piles, actually, just off the trailhead where I’d wandered to pee. Some were flagged with toilet paper; others disguised with a thin sprinkling of pine needles. I walked with care. It was a skill that I would have to […]
Posted inBlog
The summer the dam almost didn’t
“We could as well have been sticking two chewing gum companies together, or merging an anti-vivisection group with a professional society of biology teachers,” wrote the new staff in the Sept. 5, 1983 issue of High Country News, the first published from its new home in Colorado. Click for larger version Ed and Betsy Marston, […]
Posted inRange
Do you need to see a doctor? Queue up.
Part one in a two-part series “I need to see a doctor.” These six words have been written into our programming as modern humans. We wait in line at the clinic. We make an appointment. We know instinctively that this is the one person to see who can check out our health, fix us up […]
Posted inBlog
A Culture of Failure
[O]ur investigation revealed an organizational culture lacking acceptance of government ethical standards, inappropriate personal behaviors, and a program without the necessary internal controls in place to prevent future unethical or unlawful behavior. – Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Interior, Investigative Report, MMS Oil Marketing Group, Aug. 19, 2008 As if you needed a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Taking matters into their own hands
OREGONWhy would you bring pepper spray to a cooking contest for local chefs in Portland? Well, let’s just say that it was not employed to spice up one of the entrees. Instead, it was used by police to halt what Willamette Week Online described as a brawl featuring “drunken head-butts, chefs being ejected from a […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
One Tough Sucker
The razorback sucker evolved in a wild Colorado River. Now, humans are its biggest problem — and its only hope.
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Stories from the shadow sides
Boys and Girls Like You and MeAryn Kyle225 pages, hardcover: $24.Scribner, 2010. Writer Aryn Kyle, who was raised in Grand Junction, Colo., examines the frontier between childhood and adulthood in 11 stories threaded by themes of solitude and unrest. The characters — precocious girls, a middle-school boy, women caught in adulterous or unstable relationships — […]