As recently as this summer, it looked like Crested Butte Mountain Resort — a ski area in western Colorado renowned for its extreme terrain — might finally expand onto the forested slopes of uncharismatically-dubbed Snodgrass Mountain (Gusundheit!). The company has been pushing the expansion for decades, and a strong local opposition movement has been active […]
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Veteran namesakes
It’s Veteran’s Day. A military post, Fort Hood in Texas, has been much in the news of late on account of a tragic mass murder. And I’m a history buff. These threads all came together when I found out that Fort Hood was named for an army veteran — Gen. John Bell Hood. […]
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An impossible Shangri-la
In August of last year, we wrote about the Jenson brothers’ grand plans to turn a tiny, defunct ski hill in southwest Utah into a posh, exclusive mega-resort (see our story “An unlikely Shangri-la“). In building the Mt. Holly Club, the Jensons hoped to emulate the Yellowstone Club, the ultra-ritzy Montana ski and golf community. […]
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The case of the missing binders
Central Washington’s Kittitas County, hungry for economic uplift since the fall of the timber industry, has been in the limelight a lot lately for scuffles over development. The proliferation of subdivisions there has met sharp criticism from certain corners (see Cally Carswell’s recent article “Death by a thousand wells” on the area’s over-reliance on exempt […]
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Bluegrass in red rock country
This past weekend, the HCN interns took a road trip out to nearby Moab, Utah, to experience some of the West’s most dramatic landscapes and hear some good ol’ tunes at the yearly folk festival. The sunset faded as we left Colorado, cruising through darkness on I-70 to the Cisco exit. On Utah State Route […]
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“A deeply troubled idea from the start”
In 2000, when the federal government shelled out $101 million to buy what’s now the Valles Caldera National Preserve, it made one thing clear: The government wouldn’t be the preserve’s cash cow forever. But nine years later, the preserve isn’t close to weaning itself off federal funding, according to a recent report by the Government […]
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Commitment issues
Today, for the first time in 15 years, leaders from the United States’ 564 federally recognized Indian tribes met with political leaders in DC to discuss the problems that blight their communities: lack of adequate health care, lack of adequate employment, lack of, well, a lot of things. The day-long summit began with opening remarks […]
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Coming soon to MTV: The Oilfield Blowouts
Don’t ask me how I found this. Okay, go ahead and ask: I was actually hard at work researching a story and, during one of those long, winding, fruitless trips down Google lane, I stumbled upon this. It was at roughneckcity.com, which is such a cool site that I’m hesitant to share it with all […]
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Mules aren’t burros
Lately I’ve encountered two novels which annoyed me because they treated burro and mule as synonyms, which they are not. The most recent was Abandon, by Blake Crouch; the title of the other one does not leap to mind. Mules and burros are related, but they’re not the same animals. Start with the […]
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Indian Eco-battles
Today the Arizona Republic wraps up an excellent three-part series on coal, water and green jobs conflicts on Indian lands in northern Arizona. Sunday’s story focuses on the Navajo Generating Station near Page, responsible for pollution haze over the Grand Canyon and ranked as the nation’s third-largest emitter of nitrogen oxides by the EPA, who […]
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Wanna hunt here? Just sign this petition
Landowners unhappy with government regulations are protesting this fall — by locking out hunters. Fred Hirschy, a Montana rancher, says he’s been losing cattle to wolves and is fed up with the lack of response from Montana’s wildlife department, reports The Montana Standard. For years Hirschy had allowed moose and deer hunters onto his land […]
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Poisoned plains
When Kaput-D enters a rodent’s bloodstream, it causes the animal to bleed through several orifices. In a matter of weeks, the rodent might bleed through its skin, becoming weaker and more susceptible to predators. Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted official comments to the Environmental Protection Agency against the pending approval of the […]
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Eco-pawprints
Has it come to this already? Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living is the name of a new book written by two Victoria University professors, Brenda and Robert Vale. The couple — both architects who specialize in sustainable living — have computed the carbon emissions created by pets, taking into […]
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Cold War clean-up
Stimulus funds are now being used to tackle one of the West’s biggest nuclear messes: The 65-year old atomic dump in Los Alamos, N.M. is finally getting some much-needed attention. On Thursday the New York Times reported that a team of workers using $212 million in federal stimulus money will clean up the site on […]
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Well hell, continued
Watch what you drink in the Yakima Valley. Groundwater contaminated with nitrates and bacteria, which is pumped by private well owners for drinking, is turning the lower valley into “the toilet bowl” of Washington, as one resident puts it. Dirty drinking water is a “widespread and long-standing” problem in the valley, according to the Yakima […]
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Recession blessings
Christina Davidson, a correspondent for The Atlantic, has been touring the country on a “Recession Road Trip.” One recent stop was in Lolo, Mont., where local rancher Tom Maclay has been trying to build a major ski resort called Bitterroot on Lolo Peak. Some ski runs have already been cut. Now it […]
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More on that big sucking sound from Vegas
If you’ve enjoyed HCN’s coverage of Las Vegas’ groundwater machinations, you should tune in to this interview. From KUNC, Community Radio for Northern Colorado: In the latest in our occasional series of conversations with the writers at High Country News, Editor Jonathan Thompson tells KUNC’s Kirk Siegler that (massive water pipeline) projects are back under […]
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Utah climate clash
When University of Utah professor Jim Steenburgh and a team of climatologists issued a scientific report on climate change in 2007 to then-Governor Jon Huntsman, they emphasized their “very high confidence” that humans were mostly responsible for recent warming patterns. But many Utah lawmakers didn’t take their word for it. And while the state’s new […]
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Resilience, not sustainability
The annual Headwaters Conference at Western State College in Gunnison often presents some concepts worth chewing on, and this year’s gathering (held Oct. 16-18) was no exception. Headwaters, as I’ve come to understand it after 20 years of attending, is something of an idea fair for little mountain towns. For some time I’ve […]
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Clean(er) coal?
In Alaska and Wyoming, two energy companies just announced plans to burn coal underground to create natural gas, then use the waste carbon dioxide to enhance oilfield production. The process, called “underground coal gasification”, has never been done in the U.S., but is used in Australia and other countries. The Anchorage Daily News reports: As […]