Are environmentalists re-enacting Don Quixote’s crusade against windmills — while ignoring the real monster of climate change?
Modern-day La Mancha
Posted inGoat
What dreams shale come
Yesterday I read, “What every westerner should know about oil shale,” a report published last week by the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West. It left my ears ringing with a sort of dull reverberation that, while it lasted, actually seemed to be getting louder. I think that ringing sound had something to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Houseboaters beware
During the West’s last nine years of drought, the level of Lake Mead, which backs up behind Hoover Dam, has plummeted 100 vertical feet, causing unexpected and peculiar things to happen. Where there used to be flat water with no pizzazz on the reservoir’s edge 120 miles east of Las Vegas, a dangerous rapid has […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Visitors from underground
VISITORS FROM UNDERGROUNDPat Jablonsky and Bill Yett of nearby Delta stopped in to our Paonia, Colo., office to renew their subscription and tell us about their recent trip to New Mexico’s Fort Stanton-Snowy River Cave National Conservation Area. They showed us astonishing photos of the Snowy River passage, named for the miles-long formation of bright […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
Let’s Get Small
Can ‘hamster power’ help save the West’s landscapes — and the world?
Posted inGoat
Going it alone
It’s fairly common knowledge that the poor, though they’ve released far less than their share of the world’s greenhouse gasses, will feel the nastiest effects of climate change. Usually, we take “the poor,” in this case, to mean residents of Tuvalu, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea or other developing states whose governments lack the resources or […]
Posted inWotr
The lands less traveled are a treat
After a late-February snowstorm left western Colorado frosted with white, I decided to check out the cross-country skiing at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. It turned out to be an experience I can only call “manicured.” I drove to the visitor center on a paved road, then skied along a well marked trail […]
Posted inGoat
An end to the “Snow War”?
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, Arizona skiers may soon be spared the inconvenience of living in one of the Union’s warmest and driest states. Last week the high court removed the final legal hurdle blocking Arizona Snowbowl from making artificial snow with reclaimed sewage effluent on the San Francisco Peaks—a plan which 13 southwestern tribes […]
Posted inGoat
Landscapes of power
A few miles north of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a big interpretive sign is titled, Landscapes of Power. Yes, the landscapes are powerful: The massive piece of earth that seems just to have awakened and violently ripped itself out of the land up the Green River from Vernal, Utah; or the cloud enveloped Wind River range, […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
The other Trail of Tears
Selling Your Father’s Bones: America’s 140-Year War Against the Nez Perce TribeBrian Schofield 368 pages, hardcover: $26.00.Simon & Schuster, 2009. A white 30-something British guy might not seem like the obvious source to turn to for a definitive history of the persecution and flight of the Nez Perce — one of the most complex, tragic […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
See you in July
This will be the last issue you receive for a month; we skip an issue four times a year. Look for the next HCN to hit your mailbox around July 20, and in the meantime, visit hcn.org for fresh blog posts, new Writers on the Range columns and other exciting content. VISITORSOn her only day […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
And you think times are tough
At a yard sale, I bought several boxes containing nearly a half-century’s worth of American Heritage magazines, that richly illustrated compendium of the nation’s history through good times and bad, with special attention paid to the droughts, downturns and disasters that tried the souls of our forebears. I paid $10 for more than 600 magazines. […]
Posted inJune 15, 2009: Let's Get Small
Catching the sun
This March, a massive photovoltaic panel at SunEdison’s Alamosa solar power plant broke loose in a strong wind and began to spin atop its pillar. So plant service technician Joe Valdez, a thick-armed 36-year-old with an easy grin and expertise in everything from alfalfa farming to hydraulics, got creative. He lassoed the sun-sucking device and […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Yuck
Here’s a conundrum: How do you convince 2,000 backpackers to use human poop bags at a crowded camping area high in the mountains this summer? Over the years, Conundrum Hot Springs has become the most heavily visited overnight wilderness destination in the Aspen area. You might also call the 11,000-foot-high hot springs slob central: The […]
Posted inGoat
2008 wildfire redux
Recently I had the opportunity to backpack in Northern California’s Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness. The wildflowers were wonderful and among the many birds I got a close up look at a Lazuli Bunting. One day I climbed Black Rock Mountain which provides spectacular 360 degree views – including a view of several of last summer’s […]
Posted inGoat
Adobe Town drilldown
The tussle over Adobe Town continues. This spectacular chunk of Wyoming’s Red Desert has been in the sights of energy companies for years (see our story The desert that breaks Annie Proulx’s heart) . But the area has also been designated “Very Rare or Uncommon” by the state, in recognition of its unique geology, fossils, […]
Posted inGoat
Government hunters become poachers?
Among the subsidies we taxpayers provide for agriculture, especially stock-raising in the West, is an agency euphemistically called “Wildlife Services,” which sounds like an organization that provides salt licks or improves habitat or something along that line. But it’s the old Animal Damage Control agency under a new name. It has the same […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Land of many uses?
As the Denver Post blithely put it, “the geyser was not erupting at the time.” The time, that is, when two seasonal workers at Yellowstone National Park urinated into Old Faithful. But something almost as startling was happening, thanks to technology: The destructive silliness was covered live by a Webcam. As NewWest.net put it: “If […]