The new water plan represents an evolving moral algebra that transcends more primitive water law.
George Sibley
Posted inArticles
A Wilderness Act skeptic comes out of the closet
Westerners celebrated two birthdays worth noting toward the end of summer, but most paid attention to only one, the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. The other was the 50th anniversary of the start of construction of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in Colorado, which eventually moved a lot of water from the Colorado River Basin to […]
Posted inWotr
On the ground with economies built on snow
It has been snowing in Crested Butte, Colo., where people pray and dance for snow; the whole winter economy is predicated on snow. Crested Butte’s old miners used to call snow “the only crop that never failed.” They also used to say, “You can’t eat the scenery.” But Crested Butte and most mountain communities have […]
Posted inWotr
Remembering Ed Quillen, that prodigious writer of the West
Western writer, historian, thinker, polymath Ed Quillen, 61, died suddenly on Sunday, June 3. He had been a Denver Post columnist since the mid-1980s, a small-town journalist before that, and founded a regional magazine, Colorado Central, in the early 1990s. But that hardly begins to describe Quillen. When the news of his sudden passing began […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
Still Cranish After All These Years
Homo sapiens, evolution and becoming a crane
Posted inNovember 23, 2009: After the Floods
How wild is a managed wolf?
Another wolf made the news last month: SW266M received capital punishment in Wyoming for the crime of eating woolly domestic mammals. His “name” means he was the 266th male wolf captured and tagged in southwestern Montana. His record yielded the further information that he was born in May 2007 on the east side of the […]
Posted inWotr
Government capitalism can be a very good thing
This year marks the 70th anniversary of an important event in western Colorado: the first annual meeting of the Gunnison County Electric Association. The group had only 116 members when it started and just $275 in the bank, but it went on to bring electric power to the area’s ranches, thanks to the federal government’s […]
Posted inWotr
The caveguy within holds us back
I’ve been puzzled by people I know to be intelligent who nonetheless find it inconceivable that the earth’s climate could be affected by human activity. Then I saw one of those “cavedude” commercials on television, and a glimmer of insight began to flicker. In the commercial, a Neandertal in modern dress is talking to a […]
Posted inWotr
Down on the ground looking for culture
The topic for the Gunnison, Colo., master-plan meeting not long ago was “community culture,” and the rambles of that discussion have been lurking in my mind ever since. The talk went fast to complaints about a really junky property on the west approach to town, a collection of shacks and sheds with stuff lying around. […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
A long walk into hope
This is a book by a tall skinny guy with a goofy warm smile who took “a long walk across America’s most hopeful landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.” Along the way, he meets up with old friends, many of whom also seem to be tall skinny guys with goofy warm smiles, who […]
Posted inWotr
Bring on those ‘redneck hippies’
There’s a lot of buzz these days about a “creative class,” the discovery of Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Florida’s ideas are laid out in one of those books more discussed than read: The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and […]
Posted inWotr
Maybe a good work ethic requires real jobs
A specter is haunting the mountain resorts of the West, not the specter of a working-class revolt against the owning class, but the specter of no working class at all. In western Colorado in recent years, some restaurants and shops have had to cut business hours due to a lack of workers to fill their […]
Posted inMarch 29, 2004: Who Will Take Over the Ranch?
One national park could tell the truth about the West
The Black Canyon in western Colorado is one of the world’s most splendid examples of the depths to which erosion and uplift can go. A steep gash in ancient granite, nearly 3,000 feet deep — only 40 feet wide at its narrowest, and not a whole lot wider at its rim — the Black Canyon […]
Posted inWotr
One national park could tell the truth about the West
The Black Canyon in western Colorado is one of the world’s most splendid examples of the depths to which erosion and uplift can go. A steep gash in ancient granite, nearly 3,000 feet deep and not much wider at its rim, the Black Canyon is the kind of geological anomaly we like to single out […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
How I lost my town
The land was ours before we were the land’s …Something we were withholding made us weakUntil we found out that it was ourselvesWe were withholding from our land of living,And forthwith found salvation in surrender. – Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” I know I’m starting to lose it. My sense of place. It really hit […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain
“We’ve done our best and worst and a lot of inattentive average work in settling this our Western place.” – Colorado Justice Greg Hobbs, at Bishop’s Lodge 1997 “It would be quite a remote period before (the Upper Colorado Basin) would be developed – 50 or 100 or possibly 200 years.” – Delph Carpenter, testifying […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Glen Canyon team dismantled
The man who oversaw the research that led to the historic “man-made” flood in the Grand Canyon last spring has resigned. River ecologist Dave Wegner quit after Interior Department officials closed down his Glen Canyon Environmental Studies office and replaced it with a research center headed by a biologist with little experience in river management. […]
Posted inJuly 22, 1996: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
In the context of the place, it was a very strange idea. We were sitting in a boat on dark green water deep in a red-walled canyon, a few hundred yards downstream from a 10 million-ton mirage. The mirage of smooth brilliant white looked curiously fragile in that otherwise raw landscape of red sandstone, green […]
Posted inJuly 22, 1996: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
Deciding what kind of river we want
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river It is too early to predict whether the river now will be run in peace and harmony. The Glen Canyon environmental impact statement recommends to the secretary of the Interior that an “Adaptive […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1986: An America that did not happen
An America that did not happen
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. To read the full text, click on the “View a PDF from the original” link below, or download a PDF of […]