“The farmers respect the law. (But in Sun Valley) people get mad and call their lawyers. This is typical America, the land of greed, where people just take, take, take.” —David Murphy, an Idaho water-rights cop, who is ticked off at wealthy owners of vacation homes for illegally taking water from rivers and streams to […]
Two weeks in the West
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Heard around the West
MEXICO AND THE BORDER Believe it or not, some well-heeled people in Mexico pay for the privilege of pretending to sneak across the United States border illegally. They are, in a word, tourists, mostly upper-class professionals who pay $15 each to mimic their less-fortunate countrymen, reports Cox News Service. Though safely in a nature park […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
The memory of mountains
A long time ago, I climbed a mountain with my mother. It was back in the early ’80s, when she was only slightly older than I am now — hard for me to believe, even though I’ve done the math and know it’s true. The mountain was Pikes Peak in Colorado. We climbed it from […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Undoing the myth of Western exceptionalism
Despite vociferous opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal Aug. 30 to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act. California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the state to cutting those emissions 25 percent by 2020. It’s […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people push the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, now […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
A pilgrim with a battered Nikon
Name: Jaelyn deMaría Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico Age: 26 Vocation: Photographer at the Albuquerque Journal Pet: Tweak, a Chihuahua Favorite food: Her grandmother’s Sunday breakfasts of eggs, beans, fried potatoes, tortillas and homemade chile. She says “When we decide to become a pilgrim on any sort of religious pilgrimage, what is important is just the […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Fractures on the right
The West’s moderate Republicans battle their party’s extremists
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Dear friends
WELCOME, EVAN AND FLETCHER New HCN intern Fletcher Jacobs arrived in town only to find that the “off-the-grid” solar-powered house he’ll be living in for the next few months was recently struck by lightning. Until the home’s electrical system can be repaired, it’s back to flashlights and candles. Fletcher spent the last two years in […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Leave the wheels out of wilderness
A few winters back, a buddy of mine did a lot of backcountry skiing. So much skiing, in fact, that he was convinced he’d discovered a new law of physics: “The faster you go,” he told me, “the farther apart the trees become.” This is your brain. This is your brain on skis. “There’s a […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Going Big
Mountain bikers, long vilified as unruly renegades, are finally winning respect — and regaining access to trails. But does a new generation of gonzo riders threaten it all?
Posted inWotr
How do you enter a roadless area?
How do you enter roadless lands in the West? Quietly, with a walking staff, a sketchbook, a camera? Not according to the Bush administration: It enters with a chainsaw. On Aug. 7, loggers arrived at the Mike’s Gulch timber sale in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, fired up their chainsaws, and began cutting trees. […]
Posted inWotr
Garage-kept in Colorado
When I moved West 10 years ago, there was one thing I never dreamed of seeing: a garage in my backyard. A mountain lion, sure, John Elway and a real cowboy. But not a garage. I once had a garage, back East, in college. It was handy for storing junk, my weights set and a […]
Posted inWotr
Welcome to the conflicted West
“Welcome to the New Old West” reads the sign outside Pahrump, Nev., as you drive from Death Valley Junction along the California border. Given the meaning of these two terms, it’s a funny juxtaposition. The Old West has always meant open spaces, riding the range, cowboys and gunfire, freedom in the early 20th century sense […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Navajos pay for industry’s mistakes
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Navajo Windfall.” Dr. Bruce Baird Struminger spends his workdays screening Navajo uranium workers who believe their jobs have made them sick. After four years, he can predict how most will react to getting a clean bill of health: “When we find out […]
Posted inWotr
How to be alone with a lot of other people
Since I live in Chaffee County, Colo., home to an even-dozen 14,000-foot peaks, I’m used to encountering what we call “peak-baggers” — people bent on climbing all 54 “Fourteeners” in Colorado — often in the shortest time possible. In recent years, the baggers have become so numerous that old trails have to be rebuilt or […]
Posted inWotr
Gutsy science wins the day
For any scientist, publishing in Science magazine marks a giant success. It’s one of the world’s premier scientific journals, and only about 7 percent of submitted manuscripts are accepted. But Dan Donato, a second-year graduate student at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, overcame the odds. Donato was lead author of a study on the […]
Posted inWotr
California steps up to lead the nation
Despite vociferous opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal on Aug. 30 to pass the much-heralded Global Warming Solutions Act. California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the state to cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
‘Big Daddy Drought’ will be a complicated matter
I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s story, “The Tamarisk Hunter.” (HCN, 6/26/06: The Tamarisk Hunter) It was a good piece of science fiction and intriguing thinking as well. But I need to make a correction to Greg Hanscom’s thinking in his editorial. The Upper Basin states are NOT obligated to deliver an average of 7.5 million acre-feet of […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
A life of brutal grace
Montana writer Swain Wolfe’s memoir, The Boy Who Invented Skiing, might be more aptly titled The Writer on His Way to Being An Alchemical Cartographer. Wolfe’s writing maps transformations, in a style both gritty and magical. Wolfe was born in the hardscrabble West of the late 1930s. His boyhood was spent in the Colorado Springs […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Destroyer of worlds
A group of scientists, a secret city and a weapon of unimaginable power: The story of the creation of the atomic bomb is straight out of a spy novel, but its impacts are all too real. After the weapon was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I […]