Mountain bikers are finally winning respect, along with increased access to trails, but a growing breed of gonzo riders with heavy, fast, high-tech bikes — and a thirst for riding in wilderness — could threaten all that.
Also in this issue: National pundits say the nation’s political parties are moving toward the extremes, but in the West, Republicans — unhappy with some far-right politicians — seem to be heading back to the middle.
Two weeks in the West
“The farmers respect the law. (But in Sun Valley) people get mad and call their lawyers. This is typical America, the land of greed, where people just take, take, take.” —David Murphy, an Idaho water-rights cop, who is ticked off at wealthy owners of vacation homes for illegally taking water from rivers and streams to…
Keep power generation close to home
Regarding your Aug. 8 article, “Clearing a path for power,” as a veteran of a successful 11-year battle to stop a 345 KV power line from being built across the Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico, I know how complicated and time-consuming stopping these power lines can be. Sadly, most large new power…
A little wild
Percentage of land in each Western state that is federally owned, versus what is designated as wilderness. 47.2 | 6.2 Arizona 45.1 | 14 California 36.2 | 4.8 Colorado 61.6 | 7.5 Idaho 27.9 | 3.6 Montana 83 | 4 Nevada 33.8 | 2.3 New Mexico 52.4 | 3.7 Oregon 62.2 | 1.5 Utah 28.3…
Energy Colonizes the West
Since 1982, the federal government has offered more than 225 million acres of public and private land for lease to gas and oil companies. In the Western states, there are approximately 35 million acres of active leases, nearly half of which are in Wyoming. New Mexico, Colorado and Montana each contain more than 4 million…
Diversity, Schmiversity
I’m writing in response to your “Dear Friends” column of June 12. I found your focus on diversity at a recent Saturday morning gathering of staffers and board members to be troubling. I cannot fathom the weak, irrational deduction that goes, “because the (fill in the blank) is diverse, our staff or our movement or…
Will Montanans reject their bagman?
The answer may determine which party controls the Senate
Hits and missives from Cactus Ed
Writers today: When they’re not updating their blogs or prepping for that tell-all Oprah interview, they’re indecently exposé-ing themselves in another provocative, tragicomic memoir. But there was a time when insight into the person-behind-the-pages was hard to come by, when peering into an author’s inner narrative meant waiting until some enterprising scholar published the author’s…
Ballot box hangover
Repairing Oregon’s model land-use system will take years
Duke City dustup
The nation is watching the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District
Unpaved with good intentions
New easements keep farmland in production despite spiraling property values
Running on empty in Sin City
The Colorado River states pin thirsty hopes on Las Vegas’ lust for Great Basin groundwater
Golfers and greenies unite
Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore have popularized a misperception of golf as a game played by rich white guys who wear funny clothes, bet large amounts of money, drink too much, and regularly invent new terms of profanity. There certainly are golfers whose sense of ecosystem management is having sufficient Cuban cigars to play 18 holes.…
Life (after the lawn) is good
Of COURSE there’s life after the lawn. I transformed my typical suburban front lawn in Loveland to a Xeriscaped yard that won a gardening contest, and looks far better than the previous featureless expanse. True, it was no longer suitable for whiffleball, but with family grown and living elsewhere, play space was less important. The…
Go native
I found “life after the lawn” several years ago. I have lived in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert all my life, but I let myself be led astray. When I was younger, I let Easterners and other assorted city slickers influence me to plant a Bermuda grass lawn and even a winter rye grass lawn. Both are…
Rainbows are people, too
Ranchers have it tough, a huge understatement, but Sharon Salisbury O’Toole’s complaint in her Aug. 7 essay, “There was no green in this Rainbow gathering,” sounds like a selfish indulgence. I was surprised that it was published by HCN. Ranchers enjoy the use of public lands most of the year and make a profit while…
The wilderness has been ‘trammeled’
It appears that just about any place can qualify as wilderness these days if the political will is there to make it so. This certainly is the case for the Jerry Peak area in Idaho. The truly beautiful picture accompanying the Aug. 21 article, “Wilderness cliffhanger,” shows the area as emerald green. Most of the…
Planning lives
I am an Oregon planner. Yes, I repeat: I am an Oregon planner. Despite what you hear about Measure 37, we’re still here. The sky fell and we’re still around picking up the pieces. Life’s never been better. Years ago, some of us said it was time to go out to the public, statewide, and…
Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people push the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, now…
Fractures on the right
The West’s moderate Republicans battle their party’s extremists
Undoing the myth of Western exceptionalism
Despite vociferous opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal Aug. 30 to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act. California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the state to cutting those emissions 25 percent by 2020. It’s…
The memory of mountains
A long time ago, I climbed a mountain with my mother. It was back in the early ’80s, when she was only slightly older than I am now — hard for me to believe, even though I’ve done the math and know it’s true. The mountain was Pikes Peak in Colorado. We climbed it from…
Heard around the West
MEXICO AND THE BORDER Believe it or not, some well-heeled people in Mexico pay for the privilege of pretending to sneak across the United States border illegally. They are, in a word, tourists, mostly upper-class professionals who pay $15 each to mimic their less-fortunate countrymen, reports Cox News Service. Though safely in a nature park…
A pilgrim with a battered Nikon
Name: Jaelyn deMaría Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico Age: 26 Vocation: Photographer at the Albuquerque Journal Pet: Tweak, a Chihuahua Favorite food: Her grandmother’s Sunday breakfasts of eggs, beans, fried potatoes, tortillas and homemade chile. She says “When we decide to become a pilgrim on any sort of religious pilgrimage, what is important is just the…
Going Big
Mountain bikers, long vilified as unruly renegades, are finally winning respect — and regaining access to trails. But does a new generation of gonzo riders threaten it all?
Leave the wheels out of wilderness
A few winters back, a buddy of mine did a lot of backcountry skiing. So much skiing, in fact, that he was convinced he’d discovered a new law of physics: “The faster you go,” he told me, “the farther apart the trees become.” This is your brain. This is your brain on skis. “There’s a…
Dear friends
WELCOME, EVAN AND FLETCHER New HCN intern Fletcher Jacobs arrived in town only to find that the “off-the-grid” solar-powered house he’ll be living in for the next few months was recently struck by lightning. Until the home’s electrical system can be repaired, it’s back to flashlights and candles. Fletcher spent the last two years in…