Journeying from redrock desert to an icy wasteland: an essay.
Sarah Gilman
Sarah Gilman is an independent writer, illustrator and editor based in Washington state. Her work covers the environment, natural history, science and place. She served as a staff and contributing editor at High Country News for 11 years.
Posted inGoat
Can the oil and gas industry fix its public image in Colorado?
Last week, I drove over the mountains from High Country News HQ in Paonia, Colo., to Denver to attend the Rocky Mountain Energy Summit, an annual confab for the oil and gas industry – complete with a balloon drop wherein suited attendees throw elbows as they jockey for prizes — hosted by its powerful state […]
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Can feeding bears in the backcountry reduce bear-human conflict?
It’s been a hairy summer in New Mexico. In late June, a black bear attracted by birdfeeders tore into a tent at a campsite near Raton. The two women inside managed to escape and scare the bear off with their car alarm. Earlier that month, north of Cimarron, a 400-lb bear clawed its way into […]
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American roadtrip with a twist: two women travel the nation to see climate adaptation in action
There are all sorts of reasons to hit the highway this time of year. You might be trying to escape recent extremes of desert heat, bound for cooler high country and the freezing plunge of alpine lakes, or bone-chilling swells along the Pacific Coast. Or perhaps you’re the sort whose perfect lark includes the world’s […]
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EPA drops study linking fracking to Pavillion pollution
To environmentalists, it must have looked, at last, like progress. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was finally getting serious about the potential risks posed by hydraulic fracturing — wherein pressurized water, chemicals and sand are fired into rock formations to release natural gas or oil. Residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, had been complaining for years that […]
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The blue window
“Buy this book and read it on the plane (!)” This was David’s advice to me for our upcoming expedition to Alaska’s Harding Icefield, sent with a link to Glacier Mountaineering: An Illustrated Guide to Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue. I am no stranger to mountains, having grown up in Colorado and spent several seasons […]
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BLM fracking rules just got more industry-friendly
When I first wrote about the Bureau of Land Management’s draft of its new fracking regulations in May 2012, I chalked the Obama administration’s pro-industry, jobs-jobs-jobs spin on the proposal up to election-year politicking. After all, beneath the Orwellian PR and despite not going as far as environmentalists had hoped, many parts of it seemed […]
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Colorado likely to adopt tough new rural renewable energy requirements
Updated 5/16/13 This is “a direct assault on rural Colorado,” Rep. Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, fumed at Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers last week. From the strength of his rhetoric, you might think wealthy Front Range cities had proposed phasing out production agriculture or even banning all guns. In reality, though, DelGrosso was piling scorn on a policy […]
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Could California lead the West on regulating fracking?
Until relatively recently, California didn’t often come up in discussions about booming oil and gas development. Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado have been much more at the forefront of the media fray, joined by New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Dakota in the last decade. But ever since a pair of unsuccessful gold prospectors first […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
On losing nothing
Sir John Franklin would not recognize today’s Arctic. When the British explorer set out through the vast archipelago at the edge of North America in 1845, he had reason to believe he could find the Northwest Passage — a valuable shipping route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. Much of the continent’s northern coast had been […]
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Much ado about mud
Until recently, the phrase “flash flood” conjured in my mind a racing blue wall of water, or a canyon running red as blood with sediment – a deadly natural force that smells simply and cleanly of earth and rain. But a trip with friends down the San Juan River in southeastern Utah set me straight […]
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‘We are the decider.’
Several years ago, two off-road enthusiasts threw their backs into building and improving a trail through Utah’s Recapture Canyon near Blanding. They used picks and shovels, added culverts and retaining walls. They likely had the support of many local off-roaders, eager for new places to four-wheel. What they did not have was permission to build […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Philip Anschutz’s outsized reach in the West
For the first time since 1981, Montana’s Glacier National Park is seeking bids to operate its lodges, restaurants and shops, set amid the dramatic Northern Rockies. Among those reportedly considering the opportunity is Xanterra Parks & Resorts, the nation’s largest national park concessionaire, which belongs to Philip Anschutz’s Anschutz Corporation. Meanwhile, the same billionaire’s Anschutz […]
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Signs of a strong environmental agenda?
Greens weren’t exactly thrilled with Obama’s environmental performance in his first term, especially with regard to climate change. One of the brightest spots in his administration was Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson. Under her watch, the EPA moved toward regulating greenhouse gases, developed key emissions rules for power plants, made a valiant attempt at […]
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‘It helps to be irritating’
Colorado’s North Fork Valley – where High Country News makes its home– recently received news that had many residents cheering and hugging on Paonia’s three-block main drag and at the local brewery. On Feb. 6, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would defer the sale of more than 20,000 acres of controversial oil and […]
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Wyoming windsock you in the face!
There is no shortage of Wyoming wind jokes. Google Wyoming wind, and you’ll likely stumble across an image of a “Wyoming windsock”: a length of iron chain on a post, with a sign explaining that, if said chain is cocked at a 75 degree angle, you ought to “beware of low-flying trains.” This is perhaps […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
A field program teaches undergrads to think differently about public lands
I am in school, watching a grown man cry. He works at a clinic in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border. He tells me and 22 other visiting college students what happened to local farmers one season, when the federal government shut off their irrigation water to protect endangered fish during a drought. He […]
Posted inWotr
If we don’t get our energy here, where will we get it?
A few weeks ago, a Texas oilman cornered me at a brewery in the high-mountain town of Ouray, in western Colorado. Some young women from Moab had just taken the table next to my friend and myself, when the fellow wandered over to buy us a round. Eventually, he revealed that he worked for ConocoPhillips. […]
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Monumental opposition to a monumental proposal?
Obama’s second term has not yet begun and already folks are heaping on environmental demands – things that may have been politically untenable for the centrist president to do in the long run-up to a tough election where the economy and energy policy hogged the spotlight. Last month, the Outdoor Industries Association – a trade […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Tilting the balance of power
Ten years ago, I gathered with 22 other undergraduates on the shady side of a prefab building, sheltered from the glare of a Death Valley autumn day. We were there to talk with activists from the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, who had recently won a 7,750-acre reservation, only a small fraction of it in the national […]