Every journalist is biased. Scribes-for-hire have opinions, just like anybody else. However most readers expect some approximation of fairness and balance. The reporter’s job is to lock his personal views in a cage until press time. This professional obligation was very much on my mind last winter when I wrote “The Snow War,” a summary […]
Snowbowl Redux: The Question of Balance
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Sci-fi conservation
Enviros create forcefields around wilderness areas and parks
Posted inWotr
The real Washington vampire story
Vampires are taking the West by storm, descending on rural communities like Forks, Wash. Is this a reference to Twilight, the now cult-classic book and movie? No, in this case, the malevolent outsiders are agents of ICE, which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Border Patrol. There is a strong parallel here […]
Posted inGoat
The “Bennett Thaw”, at last
Last week, President Obama signed legislation putting an end to a time warp in Indian land. For more than 40 years, Navajos and Hopi living near Tuba City, Ariz., had been prohibited from building new roads or new homes. Nor could they improve existing homes, or even install electricity and running water when those services […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Gimme wheels
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 […]
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 […]