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 […]
For the love of wastelands
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Why a sheep rancher never needs to go to Las Vegas
Shearing is risky: We could visit Wyoming’s reservation casinos, but we choose to run sheep. For us, the essential annual task — shearing — must happen during a particular moment in time. Our sheep recently left their Red Desert wintering grounds for the 80-mile trek to our lambing grounds. Ideally, the shearing crew shows up […]
Posted inRay
How the rightwingers hold Interior hostages
Republicans in the U.S. Senate today stood up for a downtrodden victim — the oil and gas industry. That’s how they described it anyway. Really a lot more is at stake. The superficial news: On behalf of their chosen industry, using classic Senate martial arts, the Republicans blocked the Obama administration’s nominee for the Number […]
Posted inGoat
Gratuitous displays of ignorance
Yesterday morning I got sucked into a vortex of reader comments on several articles about Native American issues. One story by NPR echoed our January feature story by Andrea Appleton, “Blood Quantum,” describing the controversy over what percentage of Indian blood is required to enroll in a tribe. The second, from the Great Falls Tribune, described the Little Shell […]
Posted inWotr
Call me a local and forget about my grandpappy
I live in Lemhi County, Idaho, but nobody else in my family ever did, and recently, that’s become a problem. I love the boiled-down democracy of city council meetings, the frank discussions of local school boards, the drama of planning and zoning hearings – and no, I’m not kidding. I find local politics fascinating, and […]
Posted inGoat
Western Imagery
When we look out our windows, do we always see the real West out there, or do we often perceive what photographers have taught us to to see? The question comes up with an exhibit of 120 photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Called “Into the Sunset, Photography’s […]
Posted inGoat
Notes from el Mundo Nuevo
We are not talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert. The hungers grow. Fewer crumbs reach the global economy’s bottom-dwellers, so they abandon the slums and failing campos to take their best shots at something more. For this, they must be hunted. I am in the Altar Valley to look at the […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
High Noon
As the climate warms, environmentalists square off over Big Solar’s claim to the Mojave Desert
Posted inHeard Around the West
Get angry… or get a squeegee
The president of the University of Washington, announcing the elimination of 1,000 jobs at the Seattle college, plus a yet-to-be determined number of layoffs, wants people to become furious and do something about it. Budget cuts this deep are unprecedented, Mark Emmert told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and will take 10,000 students per year out of […]
Posted inRay
No conspiracy in Libby, despite hundreds of deaths
Maybe it’s more incompetence by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors — kind of a holdover from the Bush era. Maybe it’s because a criminal conspiracy charge is always difficult to prove. Or maybe it’s a form of justice. A jury in Missoula, Montana, just decided that the W.R. Grace corporation and some former Grace executives […]
Posted inWotr
Flagstaff harnesses the forces of darkness
It was back in the 1950s, a bustling time when searchlights stabbed the sky to ballyhoo the opening of a new store. But while additional businesses were welcome in Flagstaff, local astronomers noticed a problem: Their chances to see the heavens were getting dimmer. The Flagstaff astronomers were people well connected to the stars, who […]
Posted inWotr
Semi-wild in the new West
The convoy of five cars heads slowly up the mesa through a patchwork of open fields and cedar woodlands. Binoculars around my neck, I sit in the backseat of a well-used Subaru station wagon amid a scattering of stray goldfish crackers and one, apparently unused, diaper. The driver is Jason Beason, a young father and […]
Posted inWotr
Following your passion
The bones of the young artist Everett Ruess, identified last month through DNA analysis, have at last been found in Utah. They were 100 miles from where he was last seen 75 years ago, and from where his mules were found bya search party in early 1935. So ends the legends surrounding Ruess’s disappearance and […]