An author returns West, looking for unexpected intersections.
Neil LaRubbio
Posted inArticles
The importance of Black Lives Matter in a white rural West
A Westerner reflects on racial injustice close to home.
Posted inOctober 12, 2015: The Rise of Lisa Murkowski
How to survive the bust
As oil prices plummet, a drill rig worker traces the effects among his brethren.
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
In the field with a Montana couple hunting wolves
We’re hunting wolves on an Arctic December morning in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Ryan Counts and Becky Frey lead me along a hillside above a shelf of open grass and sage known as Decker Flats. The local hunter gossip pinpointed a pack in this area the final day of elk hunting season, […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Technology eases access to ancient ruins, for better or worse
My archaeological quest began in an SUV near Blanding Elementary School, where screaming children played kickball with a potato-shaped P.E. teacher. Winsten Dan, my cattle dog, slept on the backseat as I thumbed my smartphone; I had downloaded an app that saves PDFs from Web pages so they’re accessible outside cell reception. I used it […]
Posted inGoat
Predator control ain’t easy
I recently returned from a wolf hunt. The trip was part of my research for an upcoming story on how wolves, once endangered, are now being managed in the Rocky Mountains. Our experience of managing predators in the West goes far beyond wolves, however. There’s plenty circulating in the news on this topic right now; […]
Posted inGoat
Gone hunting wolves
By the time you read this blog, I will be on my second day of hunting gray wolves in Montana. An old friend of mine in Livingston introduced me to some ranchers in Paradise Valley to write a story of their hunt. We will be trudging through a wilderness of snow on horseback, hoping to […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
What scientists are learning from wildfire in New Mexico
New Mexico’s Gila National Forest is an ideal place to study wildfire scars. Ponderosa pines on the western cliffs have blackened bark at their bases. On the eastern range, frequent burns keep the grass treeless and nutrient-enriched, so that it stretches for miles like a thick green hide. From a small plane in July, I […]
Posted inGoat
A Western obstructionist gets obstructed
Updated 9:49 a.m., 11/12/12 James Inhofe, a 77-year-old senator from Oklahoma, a grown man with no history of mental illness, claims to have uncovered divine logic that refutes the science of global warming. He has sanguinely decoded the rubric among verses in the first book of the world’s most famous text — the Bible. Here […]
Posted inGoat
Flight for life
Something about helicopter pilots chasing bank robbers, busting spies and saving castaways impressed six-year-old Doug Sheffer. The Whirlybirds television episodes, over 50 years ago, were heroic and exciting and everything he seemed born to do. While his father tried to waylay those childish ambitions, it wasn’t too many decades before Sheffer had owned his own […]
Posted inGoat
TransCanada expects your stall tactic
The environmentalist style of warfare is to stall the enemy into submission. Climb up in a tree, stand in front of feller bunchers, block traffic, throw stink bombs on whaling ships, etc. It’s worked, and it hasn’t. Last January, environmentalists claimed a victory when the State Department denied construction of the Keystone XL pipeline pending […]
Posted inGoat
Yes Virginia, there is poop in your well
There’s an industry that’s been contaminating rural water wells for years, but it hasn’t had to endure the same public vitriol that “frackers” have. Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report placing probable blame on dairies in the Lower Yakima Valley for spoiling drinking wells in the area with nitrates and antibiotics. Local […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Fire & Brimstone
In this edition of West of 100, we’ve got a couple of stories about wildfire. First, the backstory to Emily Guerin’s piece, “Fire scientists fight over what Western forests should look like.” We’ll talk with Emily about why the debate over a new study arguing that severe fire may be more normal than we thought […]
Posted inGoat
An audience for old Indians
Roland McCook wouldn’t care if he died tomorrow. Last Thursday, he stood before an amphitheater of aging white folks outside the Paonia public library. I wanted to hear what he wanted to say because most of the country doesn’t listen to old people, especially old Indians. A woman asked McCook, who is a Northern Ute […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Watching land swaps in Idaho and the West
For Western Pacific Timber and its then-President and CEO Tim Blixseth, the spring of 2006 promised big business. The company had recently purchased 39,371 acres in the Clearwater National Forest in the Upper Lochsa, on the Idaho-Montana border. The Lewis and Clark trail winds through here, and the rivers and woods are home to threatened […]
Posted inGoat
That sweet autumn air
As darkness comes earlier to western Colorado, summer’s stillness gives way to a restless fall. The skunks start chemical wars, mountain lions assassinate kids (of the caprine variety) and bears burglarize fruit trees in our own backyards. These are signs of a changing season, one where my colleagues are all victims or gleeful voyeurs of […]
Posted inGoat
El regreso de la tortuga grande
Updated 8/19/12 The bolson tortoise was extinct. Or at least it was supposed to be. Then, in 1959, wildlife biologists stumbled upon an area in northern Mexico where the locals were watering chickens from the empty shells of “tortuga grande,” or the bolson tortoise. The small, resident population was enough to seed a revival of […]
Posted inGoat
Talking mean with Hugh B. McKeen
While on assignment for a story on wildfire in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, I called up Catron County commissioner Hugh B. McKeen to see if he’d meet up and discuss the recent 297,000-acre Whitewater Baldy Fire that burned through the wilderness and forestland nearby. I had heard a bit about Catron County’s anti-government charm, […]