Hydrologist David Evetts drove north from his office in Boise, Idaho, to the former prospecting town of Elk City on May 2. Fifty miles down a dead-end mountain road, he stopped at a gray metal box on a bridge over the South Fork Clearwater River. Reaching inside, he turned off the satellite feed that once […]
Sarah Jane Keller
Posted inGoat
Big Brother’s big data is coming to Utah
Last year, with a great deal of prescience, Wired magazine published James Bamford’s long form story describing Bluffdale, Utah where “Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors,” and where, off of Beef Hollow Road, construction was underway on a building five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. The building, which Bamford describes […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
The latest: Channel Island foxes rebound
BackstorySouthern California’s Channel Islands are home to cat-sized foxes (Urocyon littoralis) found nowhere else in the world. After DDT killed off the islands’ native bald eagles in the 1950s, golden eagles moved in, preying primarily on feral piglets but snatching up tiny foxes, too. Disease further shrunk fox populations. When the foxes were listed as […]
Posted inGoat
Dry news from the water mines
Mike Conway of the Arizona Geological Survey started getting phone calls from realtors several months ago. With the Phoenix-area real estate market heating back up, they needed to know if their clients are looking at land run through with cracks that might open up and damage their homes, or worse. In 2008, a fissure known […]
Posted inGoat
Tiny foxes rescued from extinction
The story of Channel Island foxes could have been one about extinction. Some time in the last decade we might have written about how several unique populations of four-pound, foot-tall carnivores ceased to exist in their only known home, southern California’s Channel Islands National Park. We’d wonder what went wrong, and how we allowed the […]
Posted inGoat
Eat more insects
When I was in middle school my Dad and I were catching grasshoppers for fishing bait, but we ended up in the kitchen frying them instead. Since it’s hard to go wrong deep-frying anything, they were kind of tasty, like popcorn. In a Calvin and Hobbes-inspired move, I decided to take some to school and […]
Posted inGoat
Save our gauges
In the spring of 2011, a big, fast-melting snowpack, along with ice-jammed rivers and persistent rain brought intense flooding to Montana. Miles City, in the southeastern part of the state, declared a flood disaster after part of its levee system eroded away, and the town’s stream gauge on the Yellowstone River measured the third highest […]
Posted inGoat
Grizzlies back from the brink?
Grizzly bears in the lower 48 were put on the endangered species list as threatened in 1975, a time when the survival of six bear populations in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington seemed tenuous. But thanks to decades of vigilance, the bears are doing much better, with about 1,400 to 1,700 in the lower 48, […]
Posted inGoat
(Still) getting the lead out
Lead is banned in paint, gasoline, dishes, and children’s toys, and now California is looking at removing the largest unregulated source of the neurotoxin by also banning lead ammunition. One motivation is to generally protect wildlife and human health, but some see it as a way to improve the prospects of California condors; lead poisoning […]
Posted inGoat
Living on borrowed water
Last June, poor runoff from an abysmal snowpack was turning Colorado’s Yampa River into a hot cesspool, pushing trout and mountain whitefish to the margins of survival. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the city of Steamboat asked anglers and flotillas of tubing tourists to stay away, to avoid stressing the Yampa’s overheating and oxygen-deprived fish. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The latest: A cautious cave re-opening
BackstorySince 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed nearly 6 million bats in the Eastern and Southern U.S. In 2010, when white-nose syndrome spread into Missouri, the Forest Service at first kept Western caves open, but asked spelunkers to disinfect their equipment. Then, that summer, the agency closed all caves and abandoned mines in its […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The latest: Mixed messages about nuclear power safety
BackstoryIn January 2012, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Orange County, Calif., started leaking radioactive water and was shut down. When Southern California Edison announced that the plant could be back online within six months, then-chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gregory Jaczko publicly chastised the company. Jaczko, who helped kill plans to store […]
Posted inGoat
In the ozone
In 2005, smog levels in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin surprised even the scientists who study one of smog’s primary components, ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is typically a summertime air pollution problem in traffic-ridden urban areas, like L.A., Salt Lake City and Denver. But in sparsely populated Sublette County, ozone that winter was […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
How the amount of fish you eat impacts water quality
Idaho plans to conduct a $300,000 study to learn how much fish its residents eat from state waters. The amount consumed helps determine regulatory limits for pollutant levels in rivers and lakes. Most Western states use the EPA’s default fish-consumption rate, a cracker-sized 17.5 grams per day, to set human health standards for dozens of […]
Posted inGoat
Return to the bat cave
Since 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed at least five and half million bats that would otherwise be eating insects, pollinating flowers and hanging out in caves. But as far as scientists know, the disease called white-nose syndrome, which grows on bat snouts and wings, hasn’t infected a single bat in the Western United […]
Posted inArticles
How fish consumption determines water quality
Jim Peters lives near Puget Sound in Washington, and during fishing season his kids eat smoked salmon like candy. Peters is a council member of the Squaxin Island Tribe of South Puget Sound. Fish permeate nearly every aspect of their culture; in the 1850s tribal members gave up most of their land to settlers in […]
Posted inGoat
Montana’s roadkill bill
I remember when a doe collided with my mom’s tank-like 1973 Chrysler Newport, an earwax gold car we eventually dubbed the “the deer slayer.” Mom trudged to a neighbor’s and called my dad, who came out to dispatch the unfortunate animal, and take it home to eat. It became a family joke to tease Dad […]
Posted inGoat
Uncertain science in CA’s Bay Delta
In 2009, a reporter for CBS’s 60 Minutes asked the then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a hard question about California’s water. The state had been battling over the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta for decades, and, with the Governator’s encouragement, work was progressing on the new Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The plan was supposed to […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Visitors to public lands seek different experiences than in the past
Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. People who visit Oregon’s state parks have a surprising desire to stay in yurts, even booking them months in advance. Eighteen state parks offer 96 “standard yurts” described by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department as “really cool” […]