When I started working for High Country News eight years ago this month, there was no shortage of issues to write about. Natural gas drilling was going nuts, nearly every sector of the economy was on fire and immigrants were streaming through the desert to live the dream. Perhaps most bewildering to me, however, were […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The Latest: Southern Colorado protected from proposed Army base expansion
BackstoryWhen Fort Carson proposed expanding its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in 2003, nearby ranchers worried. The 235,000-acre training ground, in southeastern Colorado, was slated to grow to more than 650,000 acres, and though the U.S. Army promised to work with “willing sellers,” locals feared land seizure through eminent domain, as happened in the 1980s when […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
A demographer predicts big changes for the West’s housing landscape
Are we all headed to “megapolitan” areas like the Wasatch Front and Sun Corridor?
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
Witness to the floods
As a working geologist, I am used to assessing the land, considering the flow of fluid and mass. However, it is one thing to see it after the fact in a rocky outcrop or rolling topography, and quite another to experience it firsthand (“The flood-prone Front Range,” HCN, 10/14/13). I was camping that fateful […]
Posted inNovember 11, 2013: Cosmic Prospecting
Cosmic Prospecting in Lead, South Dakota
What happens when an old mining town recruits a physics lab and pursues Big Science?
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Towering Cell Phone Trees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. For a couple of years back in the 1970s, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, […]
Posted inGoat
Americans are driving less, but Westerners still love their cars
Fellow Westerners: We are pathetic! Sure, we’ve got our redeeming qualities, I guess, but one of them is not our ability to mitigate the environmental impact of our commute. We Westerners are a tribe of steering-wheel-gripped, fossil-fuel-burning, trapped-in-a-tin-can-in-traffic creatures, guided along highways not by eyes and mind, but by the tinny, seductive voice of our […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Lessons from the flooded Front Range
Learning to live with the inevitable.
Posted inWotr
In describing weather, remember the caveats
The numbers get squirrely when it comes to explaining massive flooding.
Posted inGoat
Colorado floods will leave long-lasting impacts
Massive flooding along Colorado’s Front Range last week is finally starting to abate. In most areas water levels are dropping (although they’re now rising in some downstream communities, threatening to create further chaos). Assistant Editor Cally Carswell wrote on Monday about how geography and development made such a disaster inevitable. Five to 18 inches of […]
Posted inGoat
First settlement reached in Utah’s contentious road claims
If you’ve spent much time wandering around the rural West, especially in southern Utah, you may have come across an extensive network of highways. You might not have recognized them as such, though — these “highways,” in many cases, are nothing more than cow paths, faint two-tracks, and sandy washes. But an antique Western law […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
Conservation and affordable housing can coexist
I appreciated the nuanced description of Jackson’s affordable housing issues in “Paradise at a Price” (HCN, 6/10/13). I serve on the boards of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust, and both are concerned that some people may not read past the statement that “conservation goals collide with the need […]
Posted inWotr
Durango life requires a hefty commute
Could this Colorado town benefit from high-density development?
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
The death of the working class
The most unfortunate legacy of the development over the last 50-plus years of “paradise resorts” for the wealthy like Aspen, Vail, Telluride and Jackson is primarily that the middle-class and working-class folks who perform the day-to-day work that keeps those resorts running have been shut out of affordable housing by the wealthy and by conservationists […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Conservation goals in Jackson Hole collide with a need for worker housing
Jackson, Wyoming As I roam around this resort town in April to meet conservationists who battle affordable housing projects, I’m struck by a tongue-in-cheek take on the argument in the Jackson Hole Daily. Smack on the front page is a photo of a pair of geese facing off against two ospreys over possession of a […]
Posted inGoat
A swim through housing data
Home prices climbed again this spring, even in Las Vegas, where the crash hit so hard that entire neighborhoods of brand new, foreclosed-upon houses were virtually abandoned. We’re supposed to greet the news with glee. It is, after all, an indicator of the strength of the economy. If folks can afford to pay more for […]
Posted inGoat
Help the economy: Start a fire.
Now that wildfire season is (already) upon us, some old-timer will surely start reminiscing about the days when “work fires” were common; when, on hot summer days, locals set forest fires in the hope that they and their buddies would get jobs on the federally-funded fire crews. A few dozen acres of brush gone up […]
Posted inWotr
Mammoth Hot Springs and the question of density
Most Americans know about the geothermal extravaganza called Mammoth Hot Springs, nestled in a spectacular landscape in Yellowstone National Park. It is also a place that must serve visitors as they enjoy this exceptional place and its amazing sights: A male bison weighing well over half a ton, with a toss of his head and […]
