The Magazine

The number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years, creating conflict between ranchers, land managers and those who see the animals as a last remnant of the Wild West.

“It sucks” is what an unidentified staffer for U.S. Department of Energy concluded about his agency’s choice of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation as a candidate for the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste dump.

The jerry-built system of wildlife management on a mix of state-owned, federal and private lands is under pressure from private landowners.

An acid rain-causing copper smelter in Douglas, Ariz., closes.

A spill at a United Nuclear Corp. uranium mill highlights problems in New Mexico’s uranium belt.

The closure of Camp Grisdale, a planned community for a permanent workforce of loggers on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, marks the end of a sustained-yield program that was supposed to last at least a century.

Art Cuelho, in his 20-by-24-foot garage studio in Big Timber, Mont., runs Seven Buffaloes Press, perhaps the only independent rural press still around.

People in the West voted as Nevadans, North Dakotans and Oregonians, not as participants in a national plebiscite. See election results from 10 states and the Navajo Nation.

Part 4 of the award-winning four-issue series Western Water Made Simple.

Part 3 of the award-winning four-issue series Western Water Made Simple.

Part 2 of the award-winning four-issue series Western Water Made Simple.

Part 1 of the award-winning four-issue series about water in the West.

As grizzly bears cause trouble for ranchers near Choteau, Mont., a father and son see the issue differently.

The collapse of the Wolf Creek Pass ski resort snares 80 partnerships, 800 investors, $65 million in partnership capital and $170 million in real estate.

A federal sting stirs up Blanding, Utah, which lies in one of the richest archaeological regions in the United States.

The Colorado Trail — a Denver to Durango mountain path for hikers, horses and mountain bikes — is being built for a pittance by volunteers after a well-funded professional effort collapsed several years ago.

In Part 3 of a three-issue series on agriculture, a sheep-ranching family struggles against the Production Credit Association, a bank meant to help farmers but that sometimes appears to turn on them.

Part 2 of a three-issue series on agriculture. From roughly 1970 through 1985, the beef industry put money and research into improving productivity instead of learning the marketing techniques that would have addressed America’s changing eating habits — and now it’s in trouble.

Part 1 of a three-issue series on agriculture explores the breakdown on the ever-expanding fringes of the farm economy that has made long-fixed attitudes and policies about rural America negotiable.

Are grizzly bears thriving or vanishing?