Off-roaders in the Mojave Desert must yield to the desert tortoise, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. In early April, the agency, acting under a court agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity, closed 18,000 acres in the western Rand Mountains to dirt bikers, in an effort to help the desert tortoise, which continues […]
The Latest Bounce
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Zion’s geriatric cottonwoods
UTAH Steep river canyons lined with cottonwood trees are the signature landscape in Utah’s Zion National Park. But a new report issued jointly by the park and the Grand Canyon Trust finds that without intervention, the giant trees will likely vanish in the next few decades. That’s because the trees in the lush forests that […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Muscle car of the prairie
I drove out east in the car with the crumpled front end. It was a vintage 1966 Pontiac LeMans with no muffler. At 60 miles an hour it roared like an F-16. The dry western wind whipping through the open windows made me feel alive and powerful. A year earlier, when I was 15, my […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Heard around the West
Alligators have arrived at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where they are enrolled in a research project. The fanged fauna from Florida must wear plastic masks over their long snouts, and once they’ve begun tooling along on a treadmill at one mile per hour, scientists start measuring their breathing. Alligators are peculiar […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Leave my town out of your ‘Top 10’
Help me with a quick survey: Pick the “10 Best Towns” that people call home in America. Go ahead, take a minute. I’m betting Driggs, Idaho, wasn’t your top choice. But that’s assuming you didn’t pick up the March issue of Men’s Journal while waiting for a root canal and see its list of the […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Lake stops sprawl in its tracks … for now
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As Salt Lake City and its suburbs have sprawled across the Wasatch Front, little sleep has been lost over Great Salt Lake. So it was hardly a surprise to anyone last August when bulldozers started rolling through lakeside marshes, laying the foundation for what […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Suburbanites compete for the lake’s freshwater
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Great Salt Lake’s fate largely turns on three rivers that flow out of the Wasatch and Uinta mountains. But as population booms along the Wasatch Front and water-use rates remain among the highest in the nation, development pressure is mounting on the Bear, Weber […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Are Wyoming’s feedgrounds a hotbed of disease?
Conservationists’ proposed phaseout could cause elk herds to plummet
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Wilted West staggers into summer
Meager snow pack leaves reservoirs low, fire danger high
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Dear Friends
Ex marks the spot We love those ex-interns, especially when they land in some Western locale and start sending in stories. This issue is an intern tour de force: Tim Westby, who spent time here in the summer of 1999, penned our cover story on the misunderstood and much abused Great Salt Lake, near whose […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Researchers scramble to understand one of the West’s most neglected ecosystems
Posted inAugust 19, 2002: The Great Western Apocalypse
Can the tide turn for Walker Lake?
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Walla Walla Basin sidesteps a water war.” SCHURZ, Nev. – Robert Quintero, the chairman of the Walker River Paiute Tribal Council, apprehensively surveys the sun-baked view of his tribe’s 360,000-acre reservation near the Nevada-California […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2002: The Great Western Apocalypse
Walla Walla Basin sidesteps a water war
MILTON-FREEWATER, Ore. – For more than 100 years, the Walla Walla River has dried up each summer like clockwork, as its water is shunted off to farms on the river’s journey from Oregon’s Blue Mountains to the Columbia River in eastern Washington. Endangered bull trout and steelhead have been stranded in shallow pools, and volunteers […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Raising a stink
Factory dairies catch Idaho’s Magic Valley by surprise
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Getting better all the time
Dear HCN, As a long-time reader of HCN, I must say that your paper just keeps on getting better all the time. The last two issues were, in my opinion, great! Not to say all of them aren’t, these just seemed to appeal to me on a different level. Keep on doing what you do […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Eucalyptus smells nice, anyway
Dear HCN, I was amused by the vehemence of Ted Williams’ essay, “The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?” (HCN, 2/18/02: The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?) as a native Californian living on the other coast. My moldering 1968 copy of Munz’s A California Flora and Supplement lists four species of eucalyptus as native. At the time the […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Sibley a brilliant equivocator
Dear HCN, An absolutely brilliant essay by George Sibley (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town). Memorable lines, sweeping flourishes, paragraphs that could stand alone as poetry. But when you take it all in, Sibley never “had” a town or “had” any place else. Missing was some call to action. It was kind of nihilistic. […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Those darn capitalist tendencies
Dear HCN, I appreciated George Sibley’s essay, “How I lost my town” (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town), and I can certainly empathize with his loss. In 1981, I spent a month near Crested Butte as a student on an environmental policy field course. Locals were celebrating AMAX’s cancellation of the proposed Mount Emmons […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Charter forests and the Valles Caldera don’t mix
Dear HCN, While there’s no question that U.S. Forest Service management and decision making could use some progressive reform, the Bush administration’s proposal to establish “charter forests” takes it in the wrong direction (HCN, 3/18/02: Can ‘charter forests’ remake an agency?). Putting the future of our public national forests in the hands of any narrow […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Salmon poison
Ten years after Pacific salmon were first given federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, the fish are still swimming in pesticide-laced water, and the Environmental Protection Agency is ignoring the problem, says a report recently issued by the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides and the Washington Toxics Coalition. Besides directly killing the fish, […]