A few weeks ago, a Texas oilman cornered me at the Ouray Brewery. My friend and I were in Colorado’s “Little Switzerland” for a hike, a hot spring and a beer. When some attractive young women from Moab took the table next to ours, a camo-decked, rosy-faced older fellow who had been singing the “Green […]
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 inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
The bastard child of the range
About 10 years ago, reporter Dave Philipps found himself staring in awe at the thousands of captive mustangs corralled near Cañon City, Colo. He was there to write about wild horses rounded up from public rangelands by the Bureau of Land Management. Some were adopted out, he was told, but most would go into “retirement”: […]
Posted inGoat
Citizen oversight fizzles in Wyoming gas patch
The Pinedale Anticline gas field is a striking spot to visit. Even with the West-wide drilling slowdown caused by a recent bottoming out of natural gas prices, the place was hopping one hot evening last July as I explored its confusing web of roads during a reporting trip. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The fossil record: How my family found a home in the West
When I was a kid, I sometimes wished that my family went on normal vacations. Normal was what my elementary and middle-school classmates did over spring and summer break, flying to wave-kissed beaches or hitting flashy amusement parks. Not my family: My parents would load my two half-sisters, my brother and me into a big […]
Posted inGoat
Another win in the Wyoming Range
I’m not usually sold on catchy one-liners, but today, I have a favorite conservation slogan. Care to guess? I bet you won’t get it. Nope, it’s not “What Would Hayduke Do?” (Though I saw that one in Bluff, Utah, this weekend and had a chuckle.) And no, it’s not “Go Green: Eat People.” (Though that […]
Posted inGoat
You get what you pay for
At first glance, the LA Times’ most recent solar power expose looks like perfect fodder for the drumbeat argument from many GOP lawmakers to end federal subsidies for renewable energy projects. Big corporations building utility-scale solar in California, it points out, have been receiving huge direct and indirect payouts from the federal government, from loans […]
Posted inGoat
How do you tell an invasive species from a natural colonizer?
By now, you’ve probably heard of the 66-foot-long, 7-foot-tall, 188-ton “tsunami dock” that washed ashore near Newport, Ore., this summer – perhaps the most dramatic chunk of debris to reach the West Coast in the aftermath of last year’s tsunami in Japan. You’ve probably heard that state workers sliced it up like a giant block […]
Posted inGoat
Everything you thought you knew about camping is wrong
If you’re a chick with a backcountry bent, you’ve probably heard more than once that packing off into the woods while it’s your time of the month is akin to chumming the water while swimming near great whites. Only with hungry bears. (Or maybe shark bears.) Indeed, bears have such super noses that we’ve all […]
Posted inWotr
Mourning the world we’ve lost
“How do we grieve? How do we grieve for all that disappears into the maw of human appetite? How do we grieve for something as beautiful and terrifying as the polar bear?” The white-haired woman’s voice broke as she stood to ask her difficult question, the other audience members turning somber faces toward her — […]
Posted inGoat
From art as elegy to art as action
How do we grieve? How do we grieve for all that disappears into the insatiable maw of human appetite? How do we grieve for the eventual loss of something as beautiful and terrifying as the polar bear? The small, white-haired woman’s voice broke as she stood to ask her impossibly difficult question, the other audience […]
Posted inGoat
Omni-busted
Welcome back to my coverage of “race-to-the-bottom 2012,” wherein I gripe futilely about this year’s toxic politics (see past editions here and here), which appear to be completely allergic to anything that protects the environment or public health. Our story today begins in March of 2009, when Congress passed the landmark, years-in-the-making Omnibus Public Lands […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Helping hikers before they get hurt
“Search and rescue” conjures up adrenaline-pumping images: rescuers rappelling down cliffs, stretchers dangling from helicopters. But it rarely evokes rangers simply offering advice, e.g., “That 12-ounce water bottle may not get you through an 18-mile hike in 110-degree heat. But there’s another great trail. …” About 20 national parks however, have added such preventative search […]
Posted inGoat
Search and … inform
In this world of extreme sports, 100-mile ultramarathons and ever-decreasing record times, a 21-mile trail run probably doesn’t seem like all that big a deal anymore. And indeed, you’d never guess, reading about a recently-broken record, that there’s anything unusually taxing about what’s known in running and hiking circles as the “rim to rim,” where […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
What’s the best place for Big Solar?
In spring 2008, reporter Judith Lewis Mernit followed desert activists through Southern California’s Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. They were tracing a proposed route for the Green Path North, a power line that would carry geothermal electricity to Los Angeles to help wean it off of coal. It wasn’t the Mojave Desert’s best wildflower year, but […]
Posted inGoat
It’s the pits
If you’ve followed any government effort to rein in the impacts of a polluting industry over the last several years, especially in the run-up to this year’s Presidential election, then you’re probably familiar with the beaten-to-death description of all new regulations as “job killers.” (That’s right people! This isn’t about public health or protecting private […]
Posted inMay 14, 2012: The sediment dumps of L.A.
HCNers go to journalism conferences
High Country News‘ hometown of Paonia, Colo., has great food, great people, great access to mountains, rivers and deserts, and a great climate. What it doesn’t have, beyond our little office, is much in the way of opportunities for journalistic cross-pollination or training. So we were thrilled when HCN online editor Stephanie Paige Ogburn won […]
Posted inGoat
Frack fricasee
If you want evidence that it’s an election year, look no further than this press release from the Department of the Interior. It announces the department’s first-ever regulations (pdf) for certain federal lands covering several aspects of that ever controversial practice, hydraulic fracturing, wherein millions of gallons of water, plus measures of sand and chemicals, […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
Visitors, books and brand-new babies
The unseasonably warm weather we endured this March, which melted much of Colorado’s snowpack, had a bright side: It brought an early flood of visitors. Emily Guerin and Marie Sears stopped in after their backpacking holiday was thwarted by the weather. The college friends are bound for new challenges. Marie will enter medical school this […]
Posted inGoat
Last in line
The outbreak started in February. Migratory waterfowl heading south along the West Coast found the wetlands of northern California’s Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge — a major stopover point on the Pacific Flyway — half dry. Nearly 2 million birds passed through the area as winter edged toward spring, many crowding into the remaining 15,000 […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
When a boom is not a boon
Dark nights have long been a hallmark of the West’s vast rural High Plains. But a 2010 nighttime satellite photo from the National Geophysical Data Center reveals a striking change in the arid, once-empty sweep of western North Dakota — a smear of light that spreads far wider than any of the state’s cities. This […]