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 […]
There’s a power in pedaling a country road
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 […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
The population bomb
The article by Valerie Brown illustrates our country dancing around the gorilla in the kitchen (HCN, 9/3/07). No amount of mitigation for stopping climate change will work unless we stabilize population. Nothing will solve this civilization’s spiral into irreversible consequences and unsolvable problems unless we stop population growth. The March 2006 population projections from Fogle/Martin […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Two weeks in the West
In southern Arizona’s Tumacacori Highlands, the tropics meet the desert. Black bears roam steep canyons and oak-covered hillsides alongside Mexican vine snakes, cuckoos and jaguars. Located just north of the border, the region is one of the most biologically diverse in the country. In September, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., introduced a bill that would protect […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Heard Around the West
COLORADO Hikers passing any of 284 high mountain lakes in western Colorado this fall may get to see some flying fish. First, a small plane will appear, flying low. Then, “at precisely the correct time,” the pilot will open a bay and send a stream of fish-filled water into the lake. It’s a native fish-stocking […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
What’s it like to live in the West?
Here and there when I am traveling people ask What’s it like to live in the West? And they always ask it with that capital W on West, you can really and truly hear it, And this just happened in Illinois, in the seething earthy redolent middle of nowhere, A young man asked it, and […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Spinner of yarns, maker of floats
Name: Black George Simmons Occupation: Volunteer ranger at the White Grass Ranger Station in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming Unofficial duties: Making root beer floats for hikers, tallying mouse deaths, publishing The White Grass Morning Report newsletter Business White Grass Dating – For Ladies: “The Alice’s Restaurant of the Dating Services” Claim to fame: Chief […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
My, what a small family tree you have
In the Northern Rockies, gray wolves may face the problems of inbreeding
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
A downside to downing dams?
Freeing up stopped rivers isn’t always the panacea one might expect
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Underground movement
In northern Colorado, newcomers to the area lead the charge against planned uranium mining
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
Dear friends
WELCOME, MARTY AND LISA HCN’s new online editor, Marty Durlin, is glad to be back home in Delta County. She grew up in the nearby town of Delta, where her father was a state representative and her mother taught school. Marty holds a B.A. in humanities from Colorado Women’s College, and studied music and creative […]