I went to Mesa Verde National Park to see the ruins — not the cliff dwellings, which the Ancient Puebloan Indians mysteriously abandoned 700 years ago, but the ruined land itself. Since 1996, three major fires have torched more than half of the 55,000-acre park in southwest Colorado. You can’t help but notice the miles […]
Learning to live with fire
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Heard Around the West
NEVADA Las Vegas’ drought has gotten so serious that some golf courses are replacing grass with crushed rock. But course managers aren’t ripping out their turf without casting verbal stones at homeowners, who use 65 percent of the area’s water, spraying three-quarters of it outdoors, according to The Associated Press. Golf courses are just the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Rising from the ashes
HUSON, Mont. — The early morning temperature has already reached the 80s, as our six-person Forest Service silviculture crew starts up a steep ridge, our tools stuffed into the pockets of our orange vests. We carry clinometers for measuring the steepness of the slopes, compasses and maps for finding our way, and logger’s tapes for […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Once more unto the breach: Dams could fall in the Northwest
Many in the Northwest thought they’d killed the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River in Washington when they convinced the Clinton administration to pass on it, and then George W. Bush became president. They celebrated too soon. On May 7, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland threw out the salmon-protection plan […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Who should pay when houses burn?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” CONNER, Montana Greg Tilford and his wife, Mary, pursued a dream when they quit their jobs as cops in California and moved here. They built a two-bedroom cabin on a forested ridgetop above Dickson Creek, installed solar panels and a garden, […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
History is full of big fires
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” “Investigating the … arid lands, I passed through South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho by train. Among the valleys, with mountains on every side, during all that trip a mountain was never seen. This was because the fires […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Firespeak Catastrophe
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” Firespeak catastrophe #1 “Wildland-urban interface.” This catchall phrase describing the forest fringe includes cabins and watersheds in the woods around Salmon, Idaho — a remote town of only 3,200 people that can hardly be described as urban. It also includes Lowman, […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Big blowups will continue, whether we like it or not
We’re spending billions to fight ‘catastrophic’ forest fires. But the big blowups will continue, whether we like it or not. For the forests, this may be good news.
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
A native son of Oregon writes of heartbreak, determination
As its subtitle suggests, David James Duncan’s latest book of essays, My Story as Told by Water, has a little bit of everything: “confessions, Druidic rants, bird-watchings, visions, prayers.” At its core, the book is about how this native son of Oregon — author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K — […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
The tangled messages of a servicewoman killed incombat
I live among the remote mesas, canyons and scattered towns and villages of the Hopi and Navajo reservations in northeast Arizona. A desolate and foreboding place by conventional standards, it’s a quiet, starkly beautiful land to the people who have called it home for centuries. But it is, by anyone’s reckoning, far removed from the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Agriculture exacts a price in the High Sierra
Scientists home in on what’s killing frogs, and raise new questions about how far the damage could spread
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Congress jousts over forest health
With fire season on the way, lawmakers again take up the battle over Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Dear Friends
A new look, same old spunk Here it is, at long last — the new High Country News. As promised, the paper has a lively new look, but what’s inside remains largely the same: sagacious reporting, balanced perspective, a skeptical edge. Here’s hoping you like what you find. To research the cover story, our editor […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Fire in the West
A losing battle High Country News launches its redesigned print edition with a critical look at fire in the West. Since the 1960s, the ‘let it burn’ approach to wildfire has gained wider and wider acceptance. But as fires increasingly come up against the West’s phenomenal population growth – and as some scientists warn that […]
Posted inWotr
Environmentalists made a deal with the devil
In its effort to gain support from Americans whose connections to the natural world have become less direct and more emotional, environmentalists made a deal with a devil that is coming back to haunt them. The devil in question is the animal-rights movement. For nearly four decades, it has skillfully manipulated the media to propagate […]
Posted inWotr
Sometimes you have to fight
I may not be a fan of George Bush’s foreign policy, but I fully agree with one point the president repeatedly made in the months before the Iraq war. The president told us that “sometimes you have to fight.” As Mr. Bush explained, when the other guy just doesn’t get it, he needs a punch […]
Posted inWotr
It’s buyer beware when it comes to Atlantic salmon
When Dan Wasil plucks a white package of “Fresh Atlantic Salmon” from the grocery store cooler, he hardly glances at its label. “I assume that it comes from the Atlantic,” says Wasil, a fundraiser who has lived in Portland for over 30 years. While he says he’s careful to check labels to see if chicken […]
Posted inWotr
Real ranches don’t have “ette” in their name
Listen up, folks, here’s a vocabulary lesson from a rancher and writer who’s tired of bad writing distorting Western history. A ranch is not just any patch of rural ground, and the saying, “All hat, no cattle,” is more than a joke. It’s true most ranchers prefer not to reveal the size of their places, […]
Posted inWotr
The West loses an unsentimental guide
Historian David Lavender was the best sort of guide a traveler in the West could have: A quiet man with a wry sense of humor, he was passionate about this region, refused to romanticize it and was happy to share his knowledge if asked. He was never sentimental about the West, writing about cowboys: “Although […]
Posted inWotr
Once more into the breach: Dams could fall in the Northwest
Many in the Northwest thought they’d killed the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River in Washington when they convinced the Clinton administration to pass on it, and then elected George Bush president. They celebrated too soon. On May 7, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland threw out the salmon protection plan […]