What farmer hasn’t wished for a weather-predicting crystal ball? Now, growers in the Yakima Valley have the next best thing: a high-tech climate model that may benefit the entire West. The climate model is adapted from a West-wide model developed by the Department of Energy, which predicts that, over the next 50 years, Western snowpack […]
Climate model may help farmers know what to grow
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Surprise bequest to protect Columbia Gorge
A scrappy conservation group in Portland has received a giant gift. The $4 million windfall for the Friends of the Columbia Gorge came from Norman Yeon, the son of a legendary Oregon timber and real estate baron. Yeon’s father, John Baptiste Yeon, earned $2.50 a day as a logger when he first arrived in Oregon […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Follow-up
The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, plans to investigate allegations that bunk science led to her agency’s claim that hydraulic fracturing poses “little or no threat” to drinking water. “Frac’ing,” a technique pioneered by Halliburton, increases the production of a gas or oil well by injecting it with liquid, which can include […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA California’s Highway Patrol sees a lot of silly stuff, like the guy crouched down in an open trunk, gamely trying to hang on to lawn chairs, or the driver in the carpool lane pretending that a life-size doll of “SpongeBob SquarePants” was a passenger. Officer Rob Rusconi says he watched a driver struggle to […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Death Valley wakes up with a bang
I stood among the multicolored stones of Death Valley, gazing at the greatest wildflower bloom I’ve ever seen — the greatest bloom of a generation. I had driven from my home in Oregon through the night to see this spectacle, and now that I’d arrived, I found I was unprepared for the power of its […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Montana tells the federal government to butt out
No one knows just when the West decided it had had enough of being run from Washington, D.C. The indications that Montanans have had it with federal mandates became evident in the state Legislature this March. Although the capital routinely ignores the opinions of a state like Montana, which boasts fewer than a million people […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Drought and spring rains portend an explosive summer
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “What happened to winter?“ Where there’s drought, there’s fire, and this year, the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies are bracing for a fierce summer. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, D, whose Department of Ecology declared a statewide drought emergency on March 10, has requested […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
A mountain of books becomes a library of the land
Names Jeff Lee and Ann Martin Vocations Bookseller and graphic artist Home Base Denver, Colorado Claim to Fame Founders of the Rocky Mountain Land Library She says “This is just Jeff’s kind of project. I go day to day, he has the big vision.” “To really know the West, to be at home here,” says […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Skiing, or wheeling and dealing?
New resorts smell a lot like real estate bonanzas
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
A chemical cocktail pollutes Western water
Traces of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, other compounds turn up in streams and wells
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
‘Sound science’ in doubt at Yucca Mountain
E-mails show federal employees circumvented quality assurance procedures
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Dear friends
KIDS THESE DAYS … Nature, with a capital N, is going to hell — or so we’re told. The venerable wilderness warhorse Dave Foreman recently e-mailed around an essay detailing exactly how it’s doing so, and why. Among other culprits, he blames High Country News (too preoccupied with “happy little resource-extraction communities”), The Nature Conservancy […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
On the trail of global warming
Weird weather stole the headlines in Western newspapers this winter. We read about a mudslide in the Grand Canyon, Seattle’s jet stream showing up in southern Utah, and the appearance of shorts in Bozeman, Mont., in February. The weather has been downright bizarre, and the media have been there to report every dramatic detail. But […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
What happened to winter?
A bizarre season leaves Westerners wondering what’s next
Posted inWotr
What the West needs is an honest discussion
Life was much simpler when I viewed the battle to “save” the West through a black-and-white lens. As a young environmentalist, it was easier to condemn my adversaries’ beliefs without scrutinizing my own. And it was easier to attack my adversaries when I didn’t know them. I have agonized over this for years now. At […]
Posted inWotr
Pets gone wild have no place in nature
I recently learned that an old acquaintance died — was killed, in fact. No, tortured to death, actually. It was a threatened desert tortoise I knew in Yucca Valley, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park. Its home was the scrub and rocks near a former neighbor’s rural home, and it would trek to her doorway […]
Posted inWotr
Mickey Moose and the West’s newest frontier
The Walt Disney Company is coming to Yellowstone National Park, and already the “Mickey Moose” jokes have started. What’s not funny is the way this venture by a multinational corporation marks a new frontier for the West. In a quiet announcement last month, Disney said it intended to test-launch a “Quest for the West” weeklong […]
Posted inWotr
Religion loses to recreation in Arizona
Jones Benally stands in the city park of Flagstaff, Ariz., and holds a chunk of basalt as if it is an injured bird. He looks down at his cupped hands and the words come steady and soft: “Everything has a life. You got to respect it and think about what you’re doing. Like when you […]
Posted inWotr
Bumper stickers are a serious thing
I have two bumper stickers on my truck, and one I’d like to add if I could find it. The sticker I’ve had the longest is also the best, making Gary Snyder’s poem, “Jackrabbit eyes all night, breakfast in Elko,” seem wordy. Some of you will recognize it: SILT HAPPENS. It was, for years, the […]
Posted inWotr
If Pedro needed help, I would have given it
Last September, while on an early morning walk with my dogs, I spotted an orange knapsack on a steep west bank of the Santa Cruz River here in Rio Rico, Ariz. I also saw two baseball caps lying near the water’s edge. I waded across the foul-smelling river and opened the orange knapsack. Inside, I […]