If you’re familiar with the Klamath River Basin, which straddles the Oregon-California border, you’ve likely heard the story. Leafing back through the High Country News archives, we’ve certainly told it enough times. It goes something like this: It was, in a word, a meltdown. But the disaster also helped catalyze the “peace” that Jenkins wrote […]
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 inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Fall books for the sweetly socked-in
The changes seem to happen overnight: Even under the stifling lid of late-summer days, September’s dusk begins to come on cool, its mornings curling at the edges with damp chill like the pages of a book. Along the ditches and river, the cottonwood leaves are first to drop, scattering the ground with gold. Tea becomes […]
Posted inGoat
Economy vs. environment?
The state legislative universe is famously sluggish. Moves toward significant change tend to ooze at the pace of cold honey while lawmakers waste time bickering over bills that everyone knows won’t go anywhere. CEQA — which was inspired by the National Environmental Policy Act and itself inspired similar laws in other states — requires state […]
Posted inGoat
A bear of a season
The developed Yellowstone campground where John Wallace set up his tent last Wednesday probably made the national park seem relatively innocuous to the 59-year-old Michigan resident. It’s peak season, after all, and the place was likely humming with human activity, cars, chatter — those signs of weird, woodsy civilization peculiar to the West’s iconic natural […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Down and out in the West
With all this talk of a possible double-dip recession, it’s disheartening to note that Western unemployment rates are still sky-high from the last economic crisis. Nevada leads the country for the 14th straight month, due to its almost complete reliance on the still-pretty-dilapidated housing, gaming and tourism industries.“Construction was a larger share of our economy […]
Posted inGoat
Air quality and all that gas
If you’ve been following the recent media blitz surrounding fracking — where water, chemicals and sand are pumped at high pressure down a well to help release oil or natural gas — you might think that concerns over the process are all about groundwater pollution. After all, thanks to the “Halliburton loophole,” the process is […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Economies of vice
Paonia, Colo., High Country News‘ hometown, is not an easy place to find work. As is true in many rural areas, young folks who want to stick around have few opportunities. The options are even fewer for those who can’t or don’t want to work in local coal mines. Through the warmer months, many string […]
Posted inGoat
What’s for dinner?
Flying over Washington’s Puget Sound from SeaTac Airport, the view today is a wash of blues and whites. Low-hanging soupy, humid air vagues the sharp edges of an industrial waterfront. Blurred boatwake lines sketch the harbors and bays. The ocean looks smooth from here – unbroken and dull in the flat light save for a […]
Posted inJune 27, 2011: Hydrofracked?
The ‘Utah solution’ to immigration
Utah State Rep. Bill Wright is conservative to the bone. The Republican seems flabbergasted by the immigration debate that’s flared up since the passage of Arizona’s SB1070 last spring. Critics say the law — tied up in federal courts over its questionable constitutionality — legitimizes racial profiling in order to ferret out undocumented residents. But […]
Posted inGoat
The wacky world of immigration
I love the printed word, love having something informative and solid and paper at ready in my hands when I recline on my patio with a nice IPA. But as a magazine writer, I have to say: There are serious drawbacks to being constrained by a tight print schedule. Sometimes, right after your story goes […]
Posted inWotr
Ordinary wild
The cougar looks thin, his narrow belly dragging close to the ground as he slinks along. Paws as big as saucers on the oil-spotted concrete. Mouth agape in a terrified pant below wild, shifting eyes. Shifting at cars that whoosh by, shifting at men who flicker at the edge of his vision – some pursuing, […]
Posted inGoat
Ordinary wild
The cougar looks thin, his narrow belly dragging close to the ground as he slinks along. Paws as big as saucers on the oil-spotted concrete. Mouth agape in a terrified pant below wild, shifting eyes. Shifting at cars that whoosh by, shifting at men who flicker at the edge of his vision — they’re clearly […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
A Gem City Atlas: Novel maps of Laramie, Wyoming
What is Laramie? This winter, creative writing graduate students at the University of Wyoming teamed with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas author Rebecca Solnit and cartographers Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel to answer that question. The series of maps and essays that resulted provide a nuanced portrait of place — one that pairs missile […]
Posted inGoat
Mountain of … bluster
President Barack Obama’s decision to put the kibosh on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository has been a favorite punching bag for House Republicans in recent weeks, thanks in part to the debacle at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant stoking fears over the safety of nuclear waste stored at more than 100 temporary sites around […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Yellowstone bison get more room to roam
Updated 5/13/11 Two extra-wide, ankle-busting, road-blocking cattle-guards; 900 feet of jackleg fencing tied into rock outcroppings and other natural obstacles; a handful of heavy-duty gates: All to ensure that Yellowstone’s renowned wild bison can roam more freely than they have in years. Starting in full next winter, the animals will be permitted on 75,000 acres […]
Posted inGoat
Blocking solar power … with national monuments?
If you follow basic media coverage of debates over whether to protect various bits and chunks of public land from development, you’re probably painfully familiar with the following archetypal stances. We’ll call them Merle and Becky. Merle, a hardscrabble, hardworking local resident who may be involved in local government or small business and is eager […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
What’s in a name?
The West of yore must have been a miserable, filthy place, with lonesome settlers teetering precariously atop a stack of long odds. Or so you might conclude after surfing the U.S. Geological Survey’s database of place and landform names. The region certainly has a corner on Disappointments, with 46 of the nation’s 53 references falling […]
Posted inGoat
Sublime tourist trap or logistical nightmare?
Take a moment to consider the greats: The world’s largest ketchup bottle in Collinsville, Illinois. (Photo courtesy of Max Stahl) Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. (Photo courtesy of Ian, a.k.a. Sandstep).
Posted inGoat
Out like a lion, in like a wildfire
Back in December, when temperatures at HCN-HQ in Paonia plummeted regularly into face-shattering freezingness and the high country softened under pillows, featherbeds, jumpy-castles of snow, it was easy to imagine Colorado’s immediate future rife with moisture. Maybe even a mild spring on the high plains, piled with wildflowers and lushly green around the edges and […]
Posted inGoat
The incredible growing shrinking ski resort!
Do you remember those little packets of gel-cap pills? The ones that would, when submerged in water, swell to become little sponge dinosaurs? Only the little sponge dinosaurs were tiny and flat and lame and never came close to the awesomeness promised by the full-sized dinosaurs rampaging across the label? Seems that could be the […]