In Utah, scientists are exploring the site of a long-vanished inland sea called Lake Bonneville to understand the West’s past – and future – climate.
Wrestling with a destiny of dryness
When I was a teenager, I asked my father why we wasted our lives irrigating the desert. He wept because his only son didn’t get it. My father inherited his love of the desert from his father, who homesteaded in western Utah and once dug a two-mile ditch from a spring on Indian Mountain to…
Utah’s ancient Lake Bonneville holds clues to the West’s changing climate
A curious horizontal line runs across the range — a notch cut into the mountains like a railroad bed, visible from many miles away. It snakes around every gully and ridge, 600 feet above the playa where the Donners hauled their wagons. Floating Island Mountain, visible to the east above a perpetual mirage, also shows…
BLM experiments with camouflage to hide renewable power structures
On a late summer day, Bureau of Land Management visual resource specialist Sherry Roche lugged a 50-pound plywood panel from a white pickup onto the bare hillside of Hubbard Mesa near Rifle, Colo. Others lashed it to the ground with climbing rope, then stepped back to see if its specially engineered pattern of pixels faded…
Lawyer Laird Lucas on how and why he fights for the West
Laird Lucas, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Advocates for the West, entered an Idaho courtroom last spring to examine a witness. As he prepared to take over from a junior colleague, the judge adjourned for the day. “You mean I had to put on a suit for nothing?” Lucas griped. In his Boise…
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Wanted: a few good board members
Wanted: A few good board membersThe High Country News Board of Directors and several staff members met in late September in Reno, Nev. They approved a new budget and discussed everything from HCN’s editorial coverage and the new technologies shaping the media industry to the composition of the board itself; currently, it has 10 members…
Western scientists study the past to predict the future
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, far above the deserts of the Great Basin, stands the Methuselah Grove, a group of gnarly, thick-bellied bristlecone pines sculpted and polished by centuries of blowing snow. All of the trees are ancient, and one of them — the Forest Service won’t say which — is more…
Western voters love ballot initiatives — and sometimes make a mess
When Colorado voters go to the polls in November, they’ll consider Proposition 103, a ballot initiative that would raise taxes to help fund public education. It’s an attempt to fix some of the huge problems created by previous ballot measures that strangled education funding. It’s also a messy habit: For decades, Colorado voters have repeatedly…
Development near national parks impacts park ecology
Though many Western national parks are buffered by other public lands, housing development on their outskirts has been on the rise. Between the 1940s and 2000, the number of homes within 30 miles of national parks grew from 1.5 million to 6.6 million, according to a study which appeared in the Proceedings of the National…
Mapping the Hi-Line: A review of Honyocker Dreams
Honyocker Dreams: Montana MemoriesDavid Mogen227 pages, hardcover: $21.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Colorado writer David Mogen grew up along Montana’s Hi-Line, just below the Canadian border and east of the Rockies, as his father moved the family from one small town to the next. Honyocker Dreams begins with Mogen’s return to the Hi-Line many years…
To die fighting: a review of Jesse’s Ghost: A Novel
Jesse’s Ghost: A NovelFrank Bergon224 pages, hardcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. “The story of how I came to kill my best friend keeps pressing on my brain like a bad dream so I can feel it, but I can’t remember it whole.” So begins Jesse’s Ghost, the account of a man’s attempt to understand a murder he…
A press of pessimists
A very timely article (HCN, 10/17/11, “Obama jam”). The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study this week showing unrelenting negative coverage of President Obama by the press. Though the context is the political race, the data is culled from thousands of sources mostly dealing with the day-to-day business of the…
Why so defeatist?
“Getting weeds out of the national parks is an endless war that can never be won, but many Park Service employees are willing — and happy — warriors (HCN, 10/17/11, “Among the processes of place”).” This strikes me as rather biased. It is possible to remove invasive plants from many areas, or to keep them…
Clinging to wilderness, pristine or not
Yes, indigenous peoples in many regions, including Puget Sound, altered the landscape (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). Pristine? Maybe not, but that is no reason to reject conservation. The reason I cling to scraps of wilderness, however fictional that term may be, is that they are irreplaceable. I spend a considerable amount of…
It’s a perilous profession
Wildland settings make for terrible places to get injured (HCN, 10/17/11, “The golden hour”). Unfortunately, injuries often lead to death, as time becomes the killer. Nobody is to blame for this, and changing a pretty damn good system — that which is used by the U.S. Forest Service — will do no good, and could…
“Pristine” is in the eye of the beholder
Nice essay (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). I guess my only gripe with it is how “pristine wilderness” is defined. If pristine means that there has been no human influence, then there is no such thing, and hasn’t been for hundreds or thousands of years. But personally, I’ve always thought that pristine wilderness…
Unloved survivors
Rightfully enthralled with the Northwest’s magnificent cathedral-like old-growth forests, most people seem unaware of the existence of ancient species like the diminutive shrub Kalmiopsis leachiana (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). It inhabits an ancient hardscrabble wilderness home with other survivors of climate change, ice age and millennia. To me, the primordial genetic code…
A truly burning problem
There’s a danger in praising journalism simply because it agrees with one’s preconceived notions, but I’ll take that risk. Your fire coverage in the Oct. 17 issue was terrific (HCN, 10/17/11, “A burning problem”). It’s such an important story. The graphic of state-by-state comparisons was particularly useful. I’ve been so preoccupied with New Mexico, especially…