I stopped. Swallowed. Looked around my feet, my eyes burning with sweat and light. A hundred and nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, at least. This was the hottest July on record for Arizona. It was, in fact, the hottest single month recorded in all of North America. If I prayed for rain, the sky would laugh at […]
The rise and fall of a desert stream
Posted inWotr
Floating past ghosts on the Green River
The White Rim is a strip of manila sandstone on the edge of the Green River canyon. We’ve been following it for three days now, floating this 60-mile flatwater stretch above Cataract Canyon in Utah, one small raft and a kayak; 20 miles yesterday, 15 or so today. Sometimes delicately thin, sometimes robust and thick, […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Yucca Mountain coverage biased
Dear HCN, Nobody has more distrust of the government in affairs radioactive than I do. My credentials are impeccable. My brother and I both had occurrences of thyroid cancer 20 years after leaving Richland, Wash., where we grew up at the Hanford plant in the ’40s and ’50s. Most likely we were contaminated by drinking […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Rainbow family vs. environment
Dear HCN, I find the “essay” on the back of the July 30 issue full of hypocrisy. Writer Bill Cope would have the reader believe that the Rainbow Family of Living Light was a very environmentally conscious group. Come on, now. I saw firsthand what that group did to the lands of the national forest […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Harvesting ancient farming
Western agriculture is a risky business. Even if crops survive the frequent summer droughts, their soil can be washed away by fast and furious monsoon rains. Brook LeVan, co-director of the nonprofit Sustainable Settings in Aspen, Colo., wants to help farmers avoid this annual double jeopardy. This summer, with the help of two teachers and […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Arctic Refuge
“When a lone wolf howls it sounds distinctively alone. When a pack howls, the sounds harmonize and mix until the voices of a few blend into the chorus of a multitude. A call answered and passed on. A call to gather.” – Lentfer & Servid in Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony That the call […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Small steps for change
A third-generation Coloradan, Jessica Sherwood remembers returning to her hometown of Boulder after a 10-year hiatus in Washington, D.C. “I actually cried,” she recalls, on seeing the once-pastoral corridor between Denver and Boulder transformed into an almost continuous mass of houses and malls. Determined to make a difference, Sherwood decided to tout alternative transportation to […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Dangerous parks
National park rangers say inadequate funding is adding new risks to their jobs. Crime in parks is on the rise, and most parks don’t have the money to beef up their law enforcement. To publicize the problem, the U.S. Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police has listed the top 10 most dangerous […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
The wild West lives
Jack Hunter abandons his Sierra Club lobbying job in D.C. and a marriage gone sour, eager to settle on life’s placid surface near the Diablo National Forest of southwestern New Mexico. He takes up horseshoeing and jumps into a meaningless affair, enjoying the respite from strenuous work for hopeless causes. But then he meets a […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Fire plan gets a scolding
NATION The $1.6 billion National Fire Plan, approved by Congress last September, promised a cooperative, interagency approach to fire management (HCN, 9/25/00: Fires bring on a flood of federal funds). But the government’s in-house watchdog says that promise is far from fulfilled. In his testimony before a House subcommittee on July 31, General Accounting Office […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Four-wheelin’ for fee
COLORADO Known as the “Jeep Capital of the World,” Canyon Creek, just south of Ouray, Colo., leads four-wheel-drive enthusiasts into alpine areas that are world-renowned for their abundant wildflowers and sweeping vistas. But if you’re planning to visit, don’t forget your wallet. This summer, the Forest Service has begun charging $5 per vehicle to enter […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Who mans forest flows?
NATION Streams on Forest Service land may soon be a little more vulnerable. For the past eight years, the Forest Service has been able to insist on “bypass flows,” or minimum instream flows, when towns and other water users divert streams on national forests. The agency says it has the right and responsibility to demand […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
The Latest Bounce
Cara might yet become the girl she used to be (HCN, 11/6/00: CARA’s not quite the girl she used to be). Last year, Congress whittled the $3 billion Conservation and Reinvestment Act, or CARA, down to a $1.6 billion appropriation in the Interior budget. Now, a resuscitated CARA has been approved by the House Resources […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Minnow melee continues
NEW MEXICO As the battle for scarce Rio Grande water pits central New Mexico farmers against the three-inch silvery minnow (HCN, 8/28/00: Shaky truce on the Rio Grande), a controversial federal-state agreement is aiming to ensure the survival of both species. Under the three-year plan, signed June 29, the state will sell 100,000 acre-feet of […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
A former oilman says no to drilling in the Arctic
I come from a long line of Texas earth-divers: prospectors, trappers and explorers who have spent their lives in the successful pursuit of oil and gas. I am proud of our part in supplying the world with energy – in feeding this country – and am proud of how today’s geologists have survived the volatility […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Heard around the West
One hundred and ninety million years ago, give or take a few millennia, a meat-eating dinosaur walked to an oasis in a place now close to Vernal, Utah, and bent down for a drink. The 12-foot-tall beast was heavy, and its clawed, three-toed feet sank deeply into what is now wonderfully preserved sandstone rock. Scores […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Cows aren’t wanted here
Dick O’Sullivan stands in a lush meadow near Mount Lassen. What he sees is excellent habitat for an uncommon and drab little bird called the willow flycatcher. It’s also plush green forage for his cows. He thinks there’s room for both. The upper third of the meadow is Forest Service land. The lower third is […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Forest Plan has plenty of appeal(s)
VALLEJO, Calif. – If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Sierra Nevada Framework did something terrible to burglar-alarm companies. The staff at Giotto’s Alarm Tech in Tulare, Calif., accounts for 10 appeals – more than the Forest Service received from all the timber companies combined. “We’ve got a real activist office here,” says the […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
‘The fire group is in a real building process’
Berni Bahro, 43, directed the fire analysis team for the Sierra Nevada Framework. He is a fire specialist in the Region 5 office of the Forest Service in Sacramento, Calif. “The information that we used to plan fuels management for the Framework was the best we’ve ever had. But at the site-specific level, there are […]
Posted inAugust 27, 2001: Restoring the range of light
Sierra loggers get the ax
EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. – It is not yet 10 a.m. on a rainy spring morning, and a computer in the Wetsel-Oviatt sawmill already reads 797 trees turned into boards since dawn. Sawdust fills the air as workers wearing ear plugs roll white fir through an assembly line of blades. This mill in the hills […]