Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” If the climbing community has a unified public voice, it’s the Boulder, Colo.-based Access Fund, a group that fights to keep crags open to climbers. The group isn’t just about “all access all the time,” says Access Fund board […]
Climbers: More than just fun-hogs?
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
One park clamps down on climbers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” In November 1992, managers at Hueco Tanks State Historic Site were gearing up for another busy climbing season, when vandals scrawled what staffers suspected was gang-related graffiti across one of the park’s most visited rock art sites. Known as […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Who’s managing climbers?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” Devils Tower National Monument, Wyo. Twenty-three Indian tribes claim cultural ties to this 1,200-foot volcanic butte, which, on busy summer days, crawls with upward of 120 climbers. To ease conflicts between climbers and Native Americans using the site for […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Trees help clean the West’s dumps
Phytoremediation tackles everything from dry-cleaning solvents to formaldehyde
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
A ravaged river gets a new life
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Reinstating the heir to the Truckee River.” Twenty miles east of Reno on the McCarran Ranch, downstream from the famed Mustang Ranch brothel, there’s a 75-foot wide, meandering — and bone-dry — riverbed. Less than 200 feet […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Reinstating the heir to the Truckee River
A mammoth trout, thought to be extinct, could live again in a Nevada river
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
‘New Homestead Act’ would boost dwindling towns
Law aims to attract young entrepreneurs to the West’s depopulating fringes
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
As fires rage, governors counsel discretion
The Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative gets little support from the Western Governors’ Association
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Dear Friends
We need a vacation! Don’t be surprised that High Country News isn’t in your mailbox two weeks from now. Each summer, we skip an issue, to give staffers a chance to crawl out of their cubicles and frolic in the hills. Your next issue should arrive August 4. The board comes to Paonia The High […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Speak up, ‘quiet recreationists’
At long last, the good people who make our beloved backpacking tents and climbing ropes and kayaks have taken some responsibility for helping us trample freely about the Western wilds. In May, Peter Metcalf, co-founder of the climbing-gear company, Black Diamond, gave Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt an ultimatum. Leavitt had just signed deals stripping 2.6 […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Invasion of the rock jocks
Have rock climbers turned from environmental crusaders into an environmental menace?
Posted inWotr
Risk important in outdoor adventures
We watched the steady stream of tourists snake its way toward Spruce Tree House, the only Anasazi cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado where the federal agency allows visitors to guide themselves. It had been single file since leaving the museum, so we heaved a collective sigh. Petroglyph Trail, which runs one and […]
Posted inWotr
We can still do right by the Yellowstone
Last summer, my wife, Katie Gibson, and I travelled the length of the Yellowstone River, 678 miles from its source on Yount’s Peak in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness, to its confluence with the Missouri River, just inside North Dakota. We walked through the wild headwaters country and Yellowstone Park, then paddled over 500 miles from the […]
Posted inWotr
Cheap salmon, hidden costs
Salmon, once a delicacy, is now cheap and fresh and available year-round, appearing the embodiment of all that is good about progress. But behind that cheap price tag are costs — to our oceans, wild salmon and native cultures and economies. Off the coast of British Columbia, Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens dropped […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Inside HCN
“If the EPA is going to dive into prime time, why not do it Hollywood-style? Take the leftover $28 million from the dregs of the Superfund account and put on a reality show!” In “Who needs Superfund when we have reality TV,” Joshua Zaffos considers the EPA’s plan to clean up pollution through a television […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Have no doubts, go higher
To have lived in the highlands has rendered the lowlands incomplete. My intellect rebels at such thoughts, but in my heart I feel it to be true. I am inflated by the mountain. Tendrils of perfection reach out from my past, usurping the present. Randy LaChapelle When In Doubt, Go Higher I opened When In […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Do not abandon your roots
The timeworn “A Paper for People who Care About the West” apparently has been sent to the T-shirt. Alas. I care about the West. I am not alone. That is why I read you. Do not abandon your roots. At least take the new moniker “Independent Journalism for the American West” and put it somewhere […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Spicy HCN to go
At last! I can finally read High Country News when traveling (often the only time I have available) without incurring the wrath of everyone sitting near me. The “old” format was so hard to manage — noisy folding, bashing people in the face or having a loose section fall under the seat in front, etc. […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Give us the full story
There’s an active debate among fire ecologists over whether wildfire intensities have indeed increased to “unnatural” levels following a century of fire suppression, as many are now claiming, and if so what should be done about it. This debate and the complex evidence surrounding it were shortchanged in Ray Ring’s article “A Losing Battle,” which […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Let the fires burn
Ray Ring’s HCN article on fire is one of the best pieces on the topic I’ve read anywhere (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle). By promoting an understanding that today’s superfires result from a combination of human insults to the environment and natural climate cycles enhanced by global warming, we can begin to look at the […]