It’s about time someone talked about how the snowmobile issue in Yellowstone National Park has been defined by two opponents that don’t really represent the public at large (HCN, 4/27/09). Fall and winter travel is mostly regional, a large group of people who truly love the park and visit often. Over-snow travel has effectively locked […]
Gimme wheels
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
It’s a dam mess
The “Salmon Salvation” article misses the point badly (HCN, 5/11/09). The obsession with the lower four dams on the Snake distracts from a much larger and more tangled problem. Although I, too, would like to see those dams go, the four lower Snake Dams are a relatively minor component of a vast set of problems; […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Open season on white males?
In many ways, the perspective piece “Last Rites and Forgotten Landscapes” by Laura Paskus was profoundly moving. She mourns the deaths of these women and justifiably decries investigators for labeling them as prostitutes even before the bodies were identified (HCN, 4/13/09). However, Paskus goes too far when she pointedly casts men as the perpetrators of […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
New urbanists
Regarding your recent story “The Growth Machine is Broken”: The real estate bust is the best thing to happen to the Sonoran Desert, although fears that the bulldozers will be on the crawl again in a few years are legitimate (HCN, 4/27/09). Yet I believe important changes are taking place that were not mentioned in […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The rest of the story
Terray Sylvester’s Uncommon Westerner profile of the legendary Harold Klieforth alludes only obliquely to Dr. Klieforth’s contributions to the meteorology of mountain lee waves, and the awe-inspiring Sierra wave in particular (HCN, 4/27/09). Dr. Klieforth’s knowledge of the airflow over the Sierra Nevada is unequalled, both from a lifetime of research and from personal experience […]
Posted inGoat
Beyond adventure porn
Adventure sport films can be a lot like pornography. Claiming little-to-no real artistic merit, they are produced explicitly for the excitement of the viewer and the ego-gratification of the performers. They have predictable soundtracks. They provide the chance for adrenaline junkies to sit, slack-jawed, and live vicariously through someone else’s physical abandon. Other adventure sport films […]
Posted inGoat
John Sutter’s paramour was named Manuiki
Native American sovereignty, trans-Pacific tribal ties, an intriguing new twist to the Gold Rush and centuries-old gossip about John Sutter’s love life: all that in a surprising article that recently ran in the Sacramento Bee. It’s a must-read for anyone who gets a kick out of learning that western history is more complicated than most […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The Rise of the Minotaur
Bull riding explodes from its Western roots into a modern spectacle
Posted inGoat
New Ag-Jobs bill hits Congress
As High Country News noted last Fall in a story called Field Day, these days it’s hard for growers to find enough agricultural workers to tend and pick their crops. With tougher enforcement on the Mexican border, stiffer penalties for hiring undocumented immigrants, and a cumbersome H-2A guest worker program, many growers are in a […]
Posted inWotr
Democrats and Republicans can work together
Like a ghost from the 1970s, when Republicans and Democrats teamed up to pass major environmental laws, bipartisan politics has reappeared in Washington, D.C. The just-passed Omnibus Public Land Management Act has something for nearly everyone, including more than 2 million acres of new wilderness, more than 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers; expansions […]
Posted inGoat
Jaguars A to Z
For years, HCN contributor Tony Davis has been following — and writing about — the Southwest’s endangered jaguars. The rare cats are in danger of being wiped out in the U.S. by the border fence that isolates them from their Mexican counterparts (see our story Cat Fight on the Border). Recently, a huge male cat, […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Rodeo remains a Western spark
About a mile outside of High Country News‘ hometown of Paonia, a stone’s throw from railroad tracks where trains piled high with coal chug by every few hours, sits a small arena. There, on warm evenings around the Fourth of July, my family and I join a few hundred of our neighbors to savor the […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Borne on the wind
Editors of Eco Forum, the newsletter of the South Dakota Resources Coalition, seem thrilled about the prospect of a compressed-air car coming to America. Indian carmaker Tata bought the rights to manufacture it from a company called Zero Pollution Motors. The technology seems almost too good to be true: The stripped-down six-seater averages 106 miles […]
Posted inWotr
For the love of wastelands
Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would load my brother, my sisters and me into our van and haul us from Colorado to eastern Wyoming and Montana, where we searched for fossils left by ancient inland seas. We drove to places with names like Froze to Death and Dead Horse Point, broke […]
Posted inGoat
Poor Lake Powell
The snow’s melting fast here in Western Colorado’s mountains, thanks to a sudden surge in temperatures after a cool spring. A lot of dust on the snow is also contributing: The dust diminishes the snow’s reflectivity, meaning more of the sun’s heat penetrates the snow, meaning the snow melts quickly. As a result, the streams […]
Posted inRay
New grazing technology might save streams
I’m not sure how feasible this is for widescale installment on the many grazing parcels in the West. But it’s worth spreading the word to help it catch on. A grad student, Adam Sigler at Montana State University, has designed and tested a new technology that changes the way cattle use streams. It looks like […]
Posted inGoat
Dancing to the Tohono O’odham polka
“Waila” is taken from “baila,” which means dance in Spanish. Blending polka, waltz, tejano, cumbia and Norteno, Waila’s roots go back as far as the late 1700s, when European immigrants brought their accordions with them to work on the railroads. When electricity came to the reservations in the 1950s and ’60s, the Joaquin Brothers amped […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Drop-dead bargains
Bargain hunters found an unusual offer recently in the Mountain Valley News of western Colorado. For a limited time — until Memorial Day, May 25 — Mesa View Cemetery in Delta breathlessly announced, “If you purchase one grave space at our regular price in the Garden of Peace, our upright headstone section, you will receive […]
Posted inGoat
Get to know the locals
Encana has a bit of a reputation for looking out for wildlife. Though predictably, it’s an ambiguous one. High Country News has covered the oil and gas company’s efforts to trade habitat restoration dollars for sweetheart lease deals, and its practice of padding drill sites to minimize vegetation impacts. Those moves may not add up […]