Public-land employees are easy targets for a violent, government-hating fringe.
Marshall Swearingen
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
Reports from the front lines
Excerpts from official accounts of threats against U.S. Forest Service and BLM employees.
Posted inOctober 13, 2014: Charles Bowden's Fury
Utilities experiment on the rural Northwest
Real-time response to demand could radically shift how the grid operates.
Posted inArticles
Watershed moment
The U.S. and Canada prepare to renegotiate the 50-year-old Columbia River Treaty.
Posted inNovember 11, 2013: Cosmic Prospecting
Cosmic Prospecting in Lead, South Dakota
What happens when an old mining town recruits a physics lab and pursues Big Science?
Posted inGoat
Check those attics: An archivist’s plea for your old newspapers
Halloween night in the windy railroad town of Livingston, Mont.: a Burlington Northern train, consisting of just three locomotives, hisses from the yard and begins the long, slow climb toward Bozeman. Nobody is onboard but a hobo. The engines crest the pass, pick up speed on the downgrade, hit 80 mph and jump the tracks. […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Alaska tribes attempt to block the controversial Pebble Mine
Some of the last surviving salmon-based cultures turn to EPA for protection.
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
Helium rising in the West
Near the middle of the Utah-Colorado line, a two-track winds into dry hills where rusty pipes poke from the sagebrush, marking cement-capped natural gas wells. Wildcatters drilled here in the 1920s, but abandoned the holes after striking mostly nitrogen and helium instead of hydrocarbons. Now, Denver-based oil and gas company Flatirons Resources wants to tap […]
Posted inGoat
Cow stomp: using cattle to reclaim mine land
In Coal Basin — a narrow drainage that meets the Crystal River at Redstone, Colo.– roads wind high into snow-capped peaks. In the early 1900s, and again starting in the 1950s, miners pried coal from these mountains, easing 100-ton loads down the switchbacks. Now the mineshafts are closed, but the tangle of roads, along with […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Wyoming digs its 10 billionth ton of coal
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wyoming digs its 10 billionth ton of coal.
Posted inGoat
Mining for dark matter in Lead, South Dakota
Updated 6/17/13 In the 1870s, gold fever struck South Dakota’s Black Hills. Mining camps like the infamous Deadwood sprung from the mud, supporting bustling trade in opium and liquor. The gold seams went deep, and hundreds of miners and their families settled into a stable and prosperous living in the nearby, larger town of Lead […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The Latest: Quagga mussels invade Lake Powell
BackstoryIn the 1980s, invasive quagga and zebra mussels hitchhiked on ocean vessels from Eastern Europe to northeast North America. There, the thumbnail-sized bivalves proliferated, clogging water intake pipes, crusting boats, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and causing billions of dollars in damage. Measures were taken to prevent their westward spread, but in 2007 quaggas arrived, eager […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
The West’s Big Data colonies
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The West’s Big Data colonies.
Posted inGoat
Weighing Pebble Mine
Each year, nearly half the world’s wild sockeye salmon congregate in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay, then make their way up rivers into a wild land tangled with smaller streams to spawn. There, at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak rivers, Pebble Partnership proposes to mine copper and gold. The Pebble Mine, if fully developed, […]
Posted inGoat
Wyoming’s pile of coal
This month, Wyoming coal companies will pull the 10 billionth ton of coal from the state’s ground, according to a recent estimate by the Wyoming State Geological Survey. If all that ancient metamorphosed swamp were put in a 100-foot high pile, it would stretch across a 12-by-12-mile square of prairie. WSGS based the 10-billion ton […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How technology detected a huge mine landslide before it happened
A 165-million-ton landslide rocked Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine on April 10, registering as a 2.4-magnitude earthquake in nearby Salt Lake City. The cascade of rock damaged giant trucks and digger machines, but not one of the 500 people who work the 2.75-mile-wide, 0.75-mile-deep pit was injured. That’s because Kennecott employees expected a slide […]
Posted inGoat
Big Data colonizes the West
For evidence that a new kind of information economy has come to the West, look not to San Francisco or Seattle, but south-central Wyoming. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, an Air Force town of 60,000 residents, Microsoft is building a massive, $158 million data center, a high-tech warehouse packed with computer servers that will store […]
Posted inGoat
Boundary water disputes
Imagine discovering that the clear, rushing water of the river in your remote neck-of-the-woods is contaminated with nitrates, sulfates, and selenium — a toxic heavy metal that causes deformities in fish. Then, to complicate things, imagine that the source of the pollution is upstream in another, neighboring country with its own leaders and environmental laws. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The Forest Service battles placer mining with an obscure law
On a clear day last October in northern Idaho, Forest Service geologist Clint Hughes panned for gold on the North Fork Clearwater River. The area attracted gold prospectors in the 1860s, but these days, the river, which flows through a wild stretch of country near the Montana border, is popular with campers and anglers. Hughes […]
Posted inGoat
High-tech canary in the copper mine
On the night of April 10, 165 million tons of rock — equivalent in volume to 735,000 school buses — ripped down the northeast face of Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon mine near Salt Lake City, damaging giant shoveling machines, haul trucks and other mining equipment. The cascade of earth swept away roads and left […]