The sight was so unusual we stopped our meeting to stare: men in helmets and riot gear, carrying semi-automatic weapons, were surrounding a bank in Lander, Wyoming, on a Wednesday in late April. As we sipped our chai lattes from the coffee shop across the street, we watched as the armed men escorted a guy […]
Goat
Posted inGoat
Simon J. Ortiz poetry is a road map to Indian Country
About 20 years ago, my father gave me the book, Woven Stone, by Simon J. Ortiz. I was reading a lot of Native American literature at the time, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie. I was also reading a lot of poetry, from Richard Shelton to Rilke. Ortiz, a poet […]
Posted inGoat
The biggest wildlife crossing you’ve never heard of
Nestled in the Cascade Mountains of central Washington, winding along a 15-mile stretch of interstate is the largest wildlife connectivity project you’ve never heard of. Deer, elk, mountain goats, bobcats, black bears, foxes, mink, otters, cougars and wild turkeys roam the region’s old growth forests, mountain meadows, streams and glacier-covered peaks. But all too often, […]
Posted inGoat
Use well water in oil & gas territory? There’s a guide for that
As oil and gas development in Western states continues to increase, from Green River, Utah to North Dakota’s Bakken, so do public fears of water contamination from spills and hydraulic fracturing. Although fracking (pumping water and chemicals underground to release oil or gas trapped within rock) has been used for decades, there’s still no conclusive […]
Posted inGoat
A new era of clean air regulation is dawning
Court rulings are not typically repositories of poetic prose. But they occasionally contain beautiful little gems, like this quote from the King James Bible, embedded in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in a clean air case the Supreme Court ruled on this week: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound […]
Posted inGoat
What to expect when you’re expecting El Niño
The data are trickling in, and with each passing day it seems more certain: 2014 is going to be an El Niño year, and probably a big one. What does that mean for your Western state? First, a quick primer on the science behind The Niño. In normal years, prevailing winds in the Pacific Ocean […]
Posted inGoat
Google’s time machine will show changes in development and nature
I like to play the “used to be” game. While walking around my hometown with friends, I point to a storefront — one of the snazzier restaurants in town, say — and say, “That used to be this weird little store that carried everything from comic books to frogs in formaldehyde, all left over from […]
Posted inGoat
Joshua trees may be migrating north in response to climate change
Last spring, Joshua trees put on a magnificent show in the Mojave Desert. Nearly all at once nearly all of them bloomed, sprouting dense bouquets of waxy, creamy-green flowers from their Seussian tufts of spiky leaves. The bloom was so sweeping and abundant — and such a contrast to the typical pattern, where only a […]
Posted inGoat
Restore fish to Oregon’s Sandy River Basin: Just add trees
On the evening of January 16, 2011, a soaking-wet Sunday in northwest Oregon, the Sandy River, engorged by snowmelt and hurricane-level rainfall, leapt its banks. The river tore through neighborhoods on the slopes of Mount Hood, devoured cars and trucks, and left hundreds without power or phone service. Lolo Pass Road was transformed into the […]
Posted inGoat
In an era of light pollution, the darkest skies in the West
Here are some of the region’s best stargazing spots.
Posted inGoat
Wildlife and rodenticides: The new silent spring?
The Griffith Park mountain lion, discovered wandering the urban wilds above Los Angeles in the late winter of 2012, has been celebrated like none other of its kind. While mountain lions menace suburbs in Colorado and distress ranchers in Arizona, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California, the rare cougar is widely viewed as […]
Posted inGoat
Escalante oil spill raises questions about remote clean-ups
After four dusty days spent slithering through slot canyons and scrambling over boulders in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, this morning’s walk is notably refreshing. Steve Defa, a 59-year-old psychotherapist from Escalante, Utah, is leading me up a sandy wash shaded by big ponderosa pines and smaller pinyons. The air is fragrant with pine needles and […]
Posted inGoat
Has Durango sold its river, and its soul, to recreation?
Several months ago, an old friend and sometime source contacted me with a tip on a big local story going down here in Durango, with statewide and even national implications. I had been looking around the immediate region for something into which I could dig my investigative reporting teeth. This might be it. A week […]
Posted inGoat
After the standoff, what’s next for Bundy and BLM?
With armed militia on one side, armed federal agents on the other, and about 900 cows in the middle, the Bureau of Land Management last Saturday called off its roundup of rancher Cliven Bundy’s “trespass cattle,” releasing the 300 or so cows it had already collected back into the desert. BLM director Neil Kornze said […]
Posted inGoat
North Dakota, BLM look to curb natural gas flaring
Temperatures were in the single digits on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation in early February when Debbie Dogskin began to take off her clothes. In the throes of late stage hypothermia, people act irrationally as cold clouds their thinking. The 61-year old was found dead in a friend’s mobile home, an empty propane tank outside. […]
Posted inGoat
Against the grain: Proposed FDA rule has beer-makers foaming
In 2013, New Belgium Brewing, the Fort Collins, Colo.-based purveyor of libations like Fat Tire and Ranger, whipped up exactly 792,292 barrels of beer. Considering each barrel is capable of filling somewhere in the range of 60 six-packs, that production made for plenty of happy drinkers (including, on more than one occasion, yours truly). But […]
Posted inGoat
“Production vs consumption” in Moab
Moab, Utah seems to be coming full circle. Early prospectors discovered useful minerals – uranium, vanadium, potash and manganese – near the farming and ranching outpost, and in the 1950s, Moab became known as the “Uranium Capital of the World.” Thirty years later, the boom was over, the mines closed down, and homes stood empty. […]
Posted inGoat
Corporate giant Xanterra takes over operations at Glacier National Park
As winter fades to bright green spring in northwest Montana, three men are hitting the pavement in the towns of Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls, shaking hands at local businesses and visiting Rotary Clubs like politicians on the campaign trail. The comparison isn’t far off: the men are the new faces of Glacier National Park, […]
Posted inGoat
A pipeline built years ago may start to export Rocky Mountain gas to Asia
In the summer of 2010, construction began on the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate artery for carrying as much as 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Opal Hub in southwestern Wyoming to the Malin Hub in southern Oregon. The project crossed sensitive sagebrush plains and something like 1,000 creeks and […]
Posted inGoat
Rancher vs the BLM: A 20-year standoff ends with tense roundup
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Cliven Bundy says, ‘the BLM don’t exist.’