Watch out, Nevada! It’s gonna rain shovels. In case you haven’t heard, the Montana timber boys are teaming up with Nevada cow-punchers. The loggers are sending 10,000 shovels to Elko, Nev., as a sign of solidarity against the federal government. I think collecting stepladders might be a more appropriate gesture. The way the B.S. is […]
Essays
Posted inMay 8, 2000: After the fall
A new day
Note: this front-page editor’s note introduces this issue’s feature story, “After the fall.” The “giant sucking sound” that presidential candidate H. Ross Perot described in his 1992 campaign can be heard today in the Northern Rockies, where the major timber companies are about done liquidating their private land and are busily moving cash, jobs and […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
In Wyoming, academic freedom is an endangered species
Mention the term academic freedom, and some people picture professors sitting in ivory towers, writing arcane articles and books for each other. They’re wrong. Academic research and higher education may be specialized, but they are not arcane or irrelevant. Ask the students who flock to this nation’s major universities, or visit the industries that have […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
The West ‘ain’t no cow country’
Whatever might be said of the arid West, it “ain’t no cow country.” That’s what Henry Fonda, playing Wyatt Earp, said of Arizona in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). That’s also the bottom line of a book I wrote, The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity. In it, […]
Posted inFebruary 14, 2000: Land of the fee
‘Hunting’ for elk in the salt pits of the upper Yellowstone
This October, on a slant-sunny day, I rode with friends just outside Yellowstone Park’s southeastern corner, where an old hunting practice called salt baiting still occurs. For 30 years, commercial big-game outfitters in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness have strewn salt in the meadows of the upper Yellowstone River and along the park boundary. They do it […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
Salmon crisis is a kaleidoscope of complexity
My mother was fascinated by the Columbia River and the fate of the salmon. This was partly because I work with these issues, but also because they have the kaleidoscopic complexity and human idiocy that all really hard problems have. She thought those were the only problems worth our time. From her home in Salt […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Coming home to the country
EKALAKA, Mont. – We called it the Mother Tree: a mature ponderosa pine on the crest of a small hill, with an acre or so of seedlings and saplings draping the hill’s leeward side, a mini-forest in the making that was the product of scores of pinecones shed by that lone adult. We drove past […]
Posted inOctober 25, 1999: Monumental chaos
Finally, a National Grassland Wilderness?
LONG X DIVIDE, N.D. – The green Forest Service rig pants like a winded dog on the rim of this canyon. The two-track ahead is washed out; I’ve taken the vehicle as far as it will go. But the view from the edge is breathtaking. On the horizon, a dusky cerise sky. Below lie rugged […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A bittersweet victory in the New West
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 […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
All our backs are a bit wet
RIO RICO, Ariz. – While driving to the supermarket, I spotted a border-crosser trudging north. He clearly was an illegal Mexican National. He looked weary, but I resisted an impulse to ask if he needed help. On my way home, I saw the man slumped alongside an unmarked Ford Taurus, nabbed by a plainclothes police […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Red Desert: Wyoming’s endangered country
RED DESERT, Wyo. – Fossils of tree limbs were all around, most the size of my fingers, a few the size of horse troughs. Prehistoric bits of turtle shell, horse bones and arrowhead chippings also lay scattered, testimony to the diverse inhabitants who once frequented this ocean-turned-desert. I suddenly looked up. Our group had flushed […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Isn’t it about time for a New West celebration?
This summer, every town big enough to boast a high school, and more than a few that have trouble keeping a post office in business, hosted a festival. Even though these small-town celebrations go by different names – Wild West Days, Gold Rush Days, Pioneer Weekend, Founders’ Day, Old West Festival – they hold much […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Save the Earth! (Drop dead)
I have a plan to get us out of this environmental mess we’re in. But first I’ll need some volunteers. I’m looking for anyone who thinks there are too many of us, that our consumptive tendencies are squeezing the life out of this planet and that our very presence is a cancer. Environmentalists and zero […]
Posted inAugust 16, 1999: Standing up for the underdog
An ugly message marches down an Idaho street
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – The teenage kid standing next to me at the start of the July 10 Aryan Nations parade here had worked hard on his anti-Nazi sign. Using a variety of colors, he had painstakingly drawn the leader of the north Idaho neo-Nazis – Richard Butler – having, let’s say, non-missionary intercourse with […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
The river comes last
Deep in the Wyoming wilderness and high above tree line, glacial cirques collect and funnel pure alpine waters from Cloud Peak’s 13,000-foot summit down to the muddy torrent of the Bighorn River. Draining north into Montana, the river transects the Crow Indian reservation, where it is joined by the Little Bighorn, famous as the site […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
Tom Chapman: A small-town boy who made good
PAONIA, Colo. – Many Westerners see Tom Chapman as a scourge who extracts millions from taxpayers by threatening to develop private land within national parks and wilderness areas. To me, he is just a local Paonia boy who made good. Starting in the 1980s with nothing more than a real estate broker’s license, an ability […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Happy campers we shall always be
Every summer, my husband and I head for the woods, flushed with optimism and giddy with anticipation. The maps are crisp, the fuel cans are full and the road is open. And every summer, I forget that the reality of camping is different than that pictured in Dodge Dakota commercials and my mind. I imagine […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Walking the path between light and dark
Good guys. Bad guys. It used to be pretty clear which side was which. When I was a kid back in the straight-arrow ’50s, I knew that the Lone Ranger wore the white hat. He was on the side of justice, law and order. In the topsy-turvy ’60s, as I learned how the West was […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
My beautiful ranchette
My name is Susan; I live on a ranchette. In the growth-pained West, this is as serious a confession as alcoholism or cruelty to animals. A year and a half ago, I picked up my local newspaper in Bozeman, Mont., and there under the headline TRACKING SPRAWL was an aerial photo of the Bridger Mountain […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Enough nature writing already!
In a column by Anne Lamott in the online magazine “Salon,” she made the following proposal: “Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies not to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers?” […]