January glowed brightly around us as we hiked the ridgeline of Carbonate, the mountain flanking the Big Wood River on the edge of Hailey, Idaho. It’s a popular hiking spot, generally in late spring and fall. The entire trail is open to the sky, and switchbacks quickly unfurl views of the Smoky Mountains, Camas Prairie […]
Jenny Emery Davidson
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Blurring the landscape
In southern Idaho’s irrigated landscape, the boundaries between what’s natural and what’s not appear to be definitive: Canals and huge water sprayers on central pivots draw stark lines between fields of green produce and sagebrush desert. But historian Mark Fiege says in Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, that […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Mormons on the land
-We cannot return to Eden. We know too much and we care too little about the complexities of our collective past. But perhaps we can find our way toward a new genesis, a wiser relationship toward Creation that is founded on the sacred principles of love and respect and empathy.” * Terry Tempest Williams, New […]