Bull riding explodes from its rural Western roots to become a modern spectacle along the lines of NASCAR.
Stewardship award for HCN
Stewardship award for HCNHigh Country News is this year’s recipient of the Jane Silverstein Ries Award. The award, presented annually since 1983 by the Colorado Chapter of the Association of Landscape Architects, honors “a person, group or organization that demonstrates a pioneering sense of awareness and stewardship of land-use values in the Rocky Mountain region.” …
Of moose and mandolins
AGE 30HOMETOWN Broadview Heights, OhioOCCUPATION Environmental scientist with the EPAHCN READER SINCE 2002 Elaine Lai stopped by High Country News on a sunny day in early May. She works for the wastewater unit of the Environmental Protection Agency, and had driven over from her Denver office to write a permit for the federal fish hatchery…
Ken Olsen responds
I stand by the story I wrote (HCN, 5/11/09). I don’t believe the facts support BPA’s arguments. Take publicly subsided hydropower: My story says that the region enjoys publicly subsidized hydropower at national taxpayer expense and that is accurate. Here’s why: The hydropower dams were built at national taxpayer expense and for about the first…
Salmon simplification
The article, “Salmon Salvation” offers a simple answer to a complex problem (HCN, 5/11/09). “Many scientists,” it says (without naming any), think taking out the four Lower Snake River dams will simply bring back salmon. That’s like saying many people voted for John McCain: perhaps true, but blind to the big picture. Scientists realize 150 years…
Time to breathe
Stargazing and geology satisfy the spiritual needs of a Utah writer and teacher
Paddling toward shore
Northwestern tribe takes a new/old approach to stemming the Native health care crisis
The bizarre intersection of humanity and nature
Rancho WeirdoLaura Chester212 pages, softcover, $18.00.Bootstrap Press, 2008. The cover of Laura Chester’s Rancho Weirdo features a cartoon of an armless human bound in a black sheath, banging its bloody head against a boulder. The image could be a metaphor for the stories in this collection — tales in which middle-class people, wrapped in conflicts…
Western water in the age of climate change
Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the WestJames Lawrence Powell304 pages, hardcover: $27.50.University of California, 2008. In 1893, at a meeting of the International Irrigation Congress, Major John Wesley Powell, known for his daring exploration of the Colorado River, stood up to grand applause in front of men eager…
Bring in the cows
Grazing may be the best hope for a threatened butterfly
Science under glass
Biosphere 2 gets a second life
Sci-fi conservation
Enviros create forcefields around wilderness areas and parks
Gimme wheels
It’s about time someone talked about how the snowmobile issue in Yellowstone National Park has been defined by two opponents that don’t really represent the public at large (HCN, 4/27/09). Fall and winter travel is mostly regional, a large group of people who truly love the park and visit often. Over-snow travel has effectively locked…
It’s a dam mess
The “Salmon Salvation” article misses the point badly (HCN, 5/11/09). The obsession with the lower four dams on the Snake distracts from a much larger and more tangled problem. Although I, too, would like to see those dams go, the four lower Snake Dams are a relatively minor component of a vast set of problems;…
Open season on white males?
In many ways, the perspective piece “Last Rites and Forgotten Landscapes” by Laura Paskus was profoundly moving. She mourns the deaths of these women and justifiably decries investigators for labeling them as prostitutes even before the bodies were identified (HCN, 4/13/09). However, Paskus goes too far when she pointedly casts men as the perpetrators of…
New urbanists
Regarding your recent story “The Growth Machine is Broken”: The real estate bust is the best thing to happen to the Sonoran Desert, although fears that the bulldozers will be on the crawl again in a few years are legitimate (HCN, 4/27/09). Yet I believe important changes are taking place that were not mentioned in…
The rest of the story
Terray Sylvester’s Uncommon Westerner profile of the legendary Harold Klieforth alludes only obliquely to Dr. Klieforth’s contributions to the meteorology of mountain lee waves, and the awe-inspiring Sierra wave in particular (HCN, 4/27/09). Dr. Klieforth’s knowledge of the airflow over the Sierra Nevada is unequalled, both from a lifetime of research and from personal experience…
The Rise of the Minotaur
Bull riding explodes from its Western roots into a modern spectacle
Rodeo remains a Western spark
About a mile outside of High Country News’ hometown of Paonia, a stone’s throw from railroad tracks where trains piled high with coal chug by every few hours, sits a small arena. There, on warm evenings around the Fourth of July, my family and I join a few hundred of our neighbors to savor the…