We started the list on Interstate 80, somewhere east of Lovelock but most definitely before the blue-dome skies and dun hills around Dunphy. We passed them, one by one. Dutch Star. The Manor. Wanderer Wagon. The Contessa. The drivers looked down at us while their tailpipes coughed black. Southwind. Four Winds. Trade Winds. Sea Breeze. […]
RV Nation
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Nothing out there can be a very good thing
“You want to go where? There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even Wyomingites forsake for mountains and […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Salvaging the atmosphere
The Forest Service joins the carbon offsets game
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Eminent domain’s poster children
Ranchers fight a military proposal to expand training ground in southeastern Colorado
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Seeds of change
Post-fire restoration can affect Western rangelands for centuries
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Dear friends
A FORESTER, A FARMER, AND A FAMILY REUNION Sara Mattes, a selectman from Lincoln, Mass. (“where Paul Revere was caught”), came in while visiting the Western Slope. She noted that a lot of HCN’s reporting filters down to her advocacy work – including opposing anything that was supported by former Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. Penny […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
Bordering on crazy
I’m not going to enter the dispute about whether it was Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin or someone else who first defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I’ll just suggest that the U.S. government’s program to build miles – and then more miles – of fences along the […]
Posted inArticles
Public lands precedent?
Recently, the Utah Bureau of Land Management cancelled an oil and gas lease sale, citing the need to further study the impact of drilling on wildlife habitat. Conservationists think the cancellation – the first in over 25 years – sets a national precedent for protecting wildlife habitat from energy leasing. But the BLM disagrees and […]
Posted inWotr
The BLM plays with fire in Oregon
Everyone here in Oregon loves our forests. These lands — most in public ownership — are the cornerstone for both the economic and ecological health of the state, and are central to our identity. Indeed, more and more of us are making our homes in the woods every year, in the so-called “wildlands-urban interface.” And […]
Posted inWotr
There’s a power in pedaling a country road
Biking year-round in Dillon, Mont., means experiencing the extremes of August’s suffocating heat and smoky forest fires, to January’s sub-zero frozen nostrils and fingers too numb to grip. But the scenery and sparse traffic makes me appreciate bicycling and living in southwest Montana, even when the view is what I see from a mud-encrusted mountain […]
Posted inWotr
It’s never too late to go back to school
I just got home from my second job, but there’s no time to kick back. I only have enough time to grab a bite to eat and kiss my wife and son goodbye. Though I’m almost 30, I’m in high school again and can’t be late for class. I dropped out of high school midway […]
Posted inArticles
Hatching a plan for sage grouse
In 1834, ornithologist John Townsend described flushing hundreds of grouse from the sagebrush as he rode through the Green River Valley, and in the 1880s, naturalist George Grinnell reported flocks of the birds darkening the skies near Casper. But by 1906, Wyoming’s sage grouse population was declining, and, except for a few short-lived rebounds, it […]
Posted inArticles
The road more traveled
Trevor Leach remembers riding horses on Bald Knoll Road as a child in the 1920s. During the ’60s, Arlene Goulding and her kids used the route for hunting trips. The testimony of these Kane County residents helped the Bureau of Land Management piece together the history of Bald Knoll Road, which laces across public lands […]
Posted inWotr
Nobody likes regulation, but look where we’re moving
Most dry summer months, somewhere in the country, a wildfire fills the sky with flames and forbidding columns of smoke. During the rest of the year, state and local governments would do well to keep that specter in mind when they determine where many American communities will be growing. In too many places, people have […]
Posted inWotr
Nothing out there can be a very good thing
“You want to go where? There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even Wyomingites forsake for mountains and […]
Posted inWotr
Hard lessons from Colorado’s concentration camp
On the southeastern plains of Colorado, on 560 acres of stunted elms, yuccas and broken concrete, you can find the remains of Colorado’s only concentration camp. Here, from 1942-1945, over 14,000 men, women and children were held against their will, patrolled by military police and surrounded by barbed wire and eight guard towers. Their crime? […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Portrait of the artist – as many young men
In the opening chapters of the extraordinary new novel Flight, Sherman Alexie’s narrator, a lonely, orphaned, biracial teenager who calls himself Zits, fires two guns in a bank and is quickly shot dead by a guard. What follows is a series of scenes, all violent and each of increasing personal significance for the protagonist. They […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
It’s another disaster
I am glad to see HCN finally writing about the BLM’s plan to aerial spray nearly 1 million acres of public land annually for the purpose of controlling invasive plants (HCN, 9/3/07) The West is a storybook of public-land calamities and this is yet another. Most of these have been foisted upon us by public […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
He probably hates Johnny Cash, too
This response to Jonathan Thompson’s essay is not about the right to bear arms and the purpose of firearms (HCN, 9/3/07). (I do bear arms and I hunt with firearms.) Rather, it is more about the changing West. Thompson’s encounter with the Lexus-driving “bird man” reminds me of the sneer I got when I drove […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Fault lines
Valerie Brown is to be congratulated for pursuing the story line in “A Climate Change Solution?” that some of the greenhouse carbon dioxide (CO2) that human activities are adding to the atmosphere could possibly be sequestered deep within a stack of basalt lava flows (HCN, 9/3/07). But the article fails to describe how scientist Peter […]