FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It is over. And, we have won. The Dry Lake ephemeral wetland and volcano crater outside Flagstaff, is safe from a golf course and million-dollar home development. The county supervisors close their thick notebooks. For a long instant, the big auditorium is silent. Then it is as though 200 people let out […]
A bittersweet victory in the New West
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Heard around the West
It began with an insult. Thirteen years ago in Boise, Idaho, radio announcer Paul Schneider defined a prairie dog as “a woman from Fairfield,” a rural town of 450. Instead of reacting with outrage, one woman resident of Fairfield decided to start an ugly contest, and “Mz. Prairie Dog” was born. Competitors lip-synching to songs […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A water empire in the desert
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Albuquerque, N.M. — “I can talk,” says Subhis Shah. “But first, my wife says I need to take a coconut to the river.” The river is the Rio Grande, which flows through a bank of greenery not far from Shah’s downtown office. […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A tiny fish cracks New Mexico’s water establishment
Note: a sidebar article, “A water empire in the desert,” accompanies this feature story. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sitting in his office on the outskirts of this sprawling desert city, Jeff Whitney remembers a poster that hung at an Arizona ranch where he worked as a teenager. A crotchety old cowboy smirked from the wall and […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Acequia culture feels under the gun
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Nicasio Romero lives in the village of El Ancon, Spanish for the elbow, or riverbend, about 30 miles from the Pecos River, between Santa Fe and Las Vegas. In 1986, he helped found the New Mexico Acequia Association. An artist and scholar, he has […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Mayordoma works hard to go unnoticed
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. DIXON, N.M. – On a thunderous afternoon in this unusually wet New Mexico summer, likely the world’s only flaming red-headed, Sicilian-Danish acequia mayordoma (that’s long for ditch boss) is quite literally in over her head. “This … eeeeyunk!… is the … augghgh! … hard […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A home-grown Water War
Note: two sidebar articles accompany this feature story: “Mayordoma works hard to go unnoticed” and “Acequia culture feels under the gun.” DIXON, N.M. – As Western water wars go, the five-year-long dispute between a “50s-style family ski resort in northern New Mexico and its rural downstream neighbors appears to lack the naked greed and slimy […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A fresh breeze hits Western utilities
You can count on the wind in Wyomin’, beer when it’s foamin’, the road when it’s roamin’ … – Song by Rob McLaren and Spencer Bohren of the Gone Johnson Band MEDICINE BOW, Wyo. – Just south of this tiny hamlet stands the world’s largest windmill. Reaching almost 400 feet in the air when its […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Another wilderness developer pops up
PARADISE VALLEY, Mont. – Chain saws are running in the middle of the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness. There’s a miniature backhoe there, too, along with a regular series of noisy helicopters, hauling in work crews. The man responsible is having a blast, like a kid with a new toy. All this would be illegal on public […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Dear Friends
The Research Fund High Country News is a hybrid – partly a creature of the marketplace and partly a nonprofit organization. The price of a subscription pays for our basic needs, but it is tax-deductible contributions to the Research Fund that put words on the paper, voices on the air, and electronic images at www.hcn.org. […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Imagine a River
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature stories. For centuries, humans have come up with ingenious ways of putting the country’s second-longest river, the Rio Grande, to work. Pueblo Indians built brush dams that shunted water into fields of maize. Spanish farmers dug networks of dirt irrigation ditches, or acequias, that still sustain and […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Endangered boreal toads
Colorado hikers will find “WANTED” posters at trailheads this fall. The state Division of Wildlife, which posted the signs, is not looking for fugitives, but endangered boreal toads. The toads are often confused with chorus frogs or Woodhouse toads and biologists are trying to track legitimate sightings. They hope hikers will help with pictures, postcards, […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Environmental Protection and Growth Management in the West – 1999
Everyone from planners to community activists and lawyers is welcome at a continuing education program workshop, Environmental Protection and Growth Management in the West – 1999. The Oct. 29-30 gathering will focus on what works to protect open spaces and what doesn’t. To register, write to the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute at the University […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
A gem of a park
Great Basin National Park is a modest gem. Set in Nevada, within a stone’s throw of Utah, deep in the stillness of the Great Basin, the park was formed out of other public land in 1986. Like many parks, it was the child of compromise: Cattle were permitted to continue to graze the alpine meadows […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Up in the air
Currently offering: rent-free co-op housing in upper and middle canopy condos, 150-230 ft. above reality, with suspended sidewalks winding between 500/600/700-year-old Doug fir and hemlock trees. * from a poster by Red Cloud Thunder, a group protesting the Clark Timber Sale near Eugene, Ore. It’s amazing what gets done in treetops these days. Julia Butterfly, […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Blurring the landscape
In southern Idaho’s irrigated landscape, the boundaries between what’s natural and what’s not appear to be definitive: Canals and huge water sprayers on central pivots draw stark lines between fields of green produce and sagebrush desert. But historian Mark Fiege says in Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, that […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Is help from a federal agency a “charade’?
Is the federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) a pawn of the mining industry? The Denver-based Citizens Coal Council says “yes’ and points to documents it obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The Citizens Coal Council, a federation of 48 citizens’ groups in 21 states, sued the OSM to release its files. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Glen Canyon unplugged
Michael Collier, a river-runner, geologist, pilot and photographer who sometimes masquerades as a physician, has been using his “bushy sort of airplane” to take river pictures from the air since 1975. Slides from Collier’s recent book Water, Earth and Sky: the Colorado River Basin, co-authored with Dave Wegner of the Glen Canyon Institute, will be […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
A rare vote on water
For decades, water conservancy districts across the West have been shielded from the ballot box. Almost always, judges or governors appoint the board members, who have the power to levy taxes. This summer, for only the second time in 62 years, voters in Colorado had the chance to elect board members to a water district. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Downwinders speak up and pay up
More than 500 residents of Jackson Hole, Wyo., packed a meeting hall in late August to fight a nuclear-waste incinerator planned for eastern Idaho. The crowd rallied to the evangelical fervor of Gerry Spence, the flamboyant lawyer who has built a national career on high-profile cases. By the end of the evening, everyone from movie […]