I step out of my shack beneath a waxing half moon. Milky light pours down on northern Arizona. Scattered ponderosas march across the bunchgrasses of Government Prairie, casting oval shadows to the west of each tree. As usual, my walk takes me along the fence line. A cloud shutters the moon. Across the barb-wire, two huge silhouettes emerge […]
Blue horses: riding on moonlight
Posted inArticles
The Hungry Intern: Lunch
Jeff’s zany local food adventure continues with his second meal of the day
Posted inWotr
Go beyond dams to save salmon
Amid the drumbeat of litigation that surrounds Columbia River salmon and the ever-present debate over dam-breaching, it’s easy to miss one remarkable achievement: We now have a salmon-protection strategy that most of the region agrees on. That has never happened before. Most of the affected Native American tribes support it. Three of the four Northwest […]
Posted inWotr
The salmon’s last best hope
If ever there were a news story that supported physicist Hugh Everett’s theory of parallel universes, surely the debacle over the looming extinction of Columbia and Snake river salmon is just that story. While Everett was a doctoral student at Princeton University, in 1957, he devised an elaborate mathematical proof for the premise that an […]
Posted inGoat
The glorious Fourth
Like hundreds of small towns around the West, Paonia will celebrate the Fourth of July with a parade down the main drag (Grand Avenue, in our case) and festivities in the park. It’s the annual Cherry Days event, some 62 years old, awash in tradition and punctuated by occasional sparks of innovation. There will be […]
Posted inGoat
Three strikes for the Forest Service
Yesterday, a federal judge once again struck down an attempt to revise the rules governing national forest planning (see our story “The End of Analysis Paralysis“). Environmentalists had filed suit, charging that the changes would weaken protections for wildlife (by getting rid of the viability requirement) and exempt national forest plans from formal review under […]
Posted inWotr
The battle against beetles
Four summers ago, I enlisted in the war against the pine bark beetle raging on Wyoming’s Togwotee Pass. I started to fight by inspecting every pine on the two-acre lot where my partner and I spend much of the summer. Sawdust at the base of one tall lodgepole indicated that the humpbacked killers had already […]
Posted inArticles
The Hungry Intern: Breakfast
A zany attempt to eat locally, on a starving journalist’s budget. Episode 1.
Posted inGoat
Alternative alternative energy in the West
The West’s renewable energy resources — especially the wind, solar and geothermal energy concentrated on our vast public lands — are in the limelight a lot these days. With that in mind, HCN put together this summer’s special issue around the concept of alternative alternative energy — as in, not just those big solar and […]
Posted inGoat
Catch a falling drop
Who owns the rain? In Colorado, you generally didn’t have any right to use the rain that fell on your property. But that’s changing, as the New York Times explained in a recent article. Now some property owners will be able to use rain barrels legally. Colorado’s water laws are arcane […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
The Renewable Energy Landscape
A look at renewable energy in the West
Posted inGoat
Wilderness Dedux
During the eight years of the Bush Administration a number of bills which included designating wilderness in the West were passed by Congress, signed by President Bush and became law. Most mainstream national and regional environmental organizations praised them as great victories. A few long-time activists, including this blogger, raised an alarm. Grassroots activists’ concerns […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
Renewables: The Final Frontier
Why historian Vaclav Smil thinks there are no easy solutions to our energy problems
Posted inGoat
Fracking, fracing or fraccing?
Most of us have heard of “hydraulic fracturing.” It’s a way to get fluids out of the ground by drilling a well, then pumping liquid under pressure down the hole. The liquid fractures nearby rocks, thereby releasing a substance (generally natural gas these days) that has been trapped in the rocks. “Hydraulic fracturing” […]
Posted inGoat
Kitten caboodle
After two kittenless years, Colorado’s Canada lynx are breeding successfully again. The Colorado Division of Wildlife, which has reintroduced 218 of the large-pawed cats to the state over the past decade, located 10 new lynx kittens during their annual spring survey this year. That total includes two dens of kittens whose parents are native to […]
Posted inArticles
Still wild
Not far from my house in the high desert of northern New Mexico is a large tract of land run by the Bureau of Land Management. Some years ago, two horses were dumped there and left to fend for themselves. Nobody looks after them, but they seem to do pretty well. They have the Galisteo […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
“God ain’t a great co-pilot”
Christopher Hitchens and his godless views attracted only a dozen cadets from the Air Force Academy recently, probably because the get-together, which took place at a Colorado Springs restaurant, was forbidden on campus. An Academy spokesman said Hitchens was not welcome because he’d made comments that were “degrading to others,” reports the Colorado Springs Independent. […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
From Pickups to PV
Utility brings solar power to far-flung Navajos
Posted inGoat
Mountain people
Let’s start with this: mountain people do not curse the weather. They have slept out in the rain and know that the weather will change. They know that just to be around—under any sort of sky—is good luck enough. Mountain people have crooked grins and broken hearts and dirt under their fingernails. They are unimpressed […]