Conservative newcomers to Northern Idaho fight against the region’s Democrats, and themselves. Plus, the Southwest’s drought continues, midget faded rattlesnakes get a closer look from researchers, HCN follows a Montana wolf hunt, and more.
Sycamore Canyon: an essay
These rocks are warm to the touch under noonday sun. I strip my socks off sweaty feet and stand in unlaced boots in the shade of a juniper. Angie perches with her left foot wedged toe-first into a crevice above me, her right leg hanging free. She snaps a quickdraw onto a hanger bolted into…
BLM teams with researchers to protect midget faded rattlesnake
Summer snake hunting in western Colorado is a race against the sun. The reptiles emerge early from their dens to soak up dawn’s dull warmth. But once the hillsides hum with heat, they’ll split for the shadows. “We better get going,” says biologist Josh Parker of Georgia’s Clayton State University when I meet his small…
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but…
In the field with a Montana couple hunting wolves
We’re hunting wolves on an Arctic December morning in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Ryan Counts and Becky Frey lead me along a hillside above a shelf of open grass and sage known as Decker Flats. The local hunter gossip pinpointed a pack in this area the final day of elk hunting season,…
Of sense and salinity: A swim in the Great Salt Lake
Standing barefoot and swimsuited on a concrete boat ramp, I eyed the shimmering surface of the Great Salt Lake. On this June morning, clouds of brine flies roiled inches above the water: mouth level if you’re a swimmer. Worse, the brine shrimp had hatched, and their countless tiny bodies had turned the water — usually…
Put the public before profits
If California’s three largest utilities are owned by investors who expect a return (Sacrificial Land, HCN 4/15/13), then we need to devise a way to buy out or replace those investors with public-owned cooperatives. Putting solar panels on rooftops in our cities seems more practical than transporting electricity from remote areas via power lines. I…
Reflected glory
We are delighted to announce that Boston-based journalist Lisa Song (an HCN intern in 2010) has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, along with her InsideClimate News colleagues Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer. They received journalism’s premier award for “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.” “The story…
Sacrifice zones: A regrettable inevitability
I earn my living protecting undeveloped natural ecosystems and restoring degraded landscapes, and I visit Western deserts as frequently as I can. So I sympathize with the residents and stewards of the Mojave Desert confronted by the reality of industrial energy development profiled in Judith Lewis Mernit’s “Sacrificial Land” (HCN, 4/15/13). However, these people’s complaints,…
A hard right in Idaho
(This editor’s note accompanies an HCN magazine cover story on how right-wing emigrants took over North Idaho politics.) In my 18 years in the Northern Rockies, I’ve visited Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, several times and watched it change. The town — draped along the shore of huge Lake Coeur d’Alene — has been dramatically resort-ified, in…
The artist and his patron: A review of “The Inventor and the Tycoon”
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving PicturesEdward Ball447 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Doubleday, 2013. Leland Stanford appeared to have it all: As president of the Big Four Associates, who built the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, the tycoon became one of 19th century San Francisco’s most influential entrepreneurs,…
A tireless documenter of Native America: A review of “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher”
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward CurtisTimothy Egan412 pages, hardcover: $28.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who also won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Times, chronicles the life story of photographer Edward…
The Latest: Pumping Arizona’s rivers dry?
BackstoryLast July, Arizona’s state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year — despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West’s healthiest desert rivers. Environmentalists appealed the decision; so did the Bureau of Land…
Another water-short year in the Southwest is taking its toll
On April 14, a Sunday, the Colorado ski resort Vail Mountain celebrated closing day in the invariable way: Skiers and boarders sported neon onesies and mullet wigs. The less modest squeezed into denim short shorts to flaunt calves and quads sculpted over a winter on the slopes. Alcohol was overconsumed and confiscated in lift lines.…
The trouble with original claims
I am excited about the Río Grande del Norte National Monument. However, I work for one of the tribes in New Mexico, and given my familiarity with Native issues, I always find the position of the Hispanic community in New Mexico to be rather hypocritical. When they state that they have a claim to the…
Token protection?
It’s wonderful that people from many cultures in northern New Mexico recognized the economic benefits from heightened federal recognition of the Río Grande Gorge near Taos. National monuments are powerful economic drivers, and we welcome President Obama’s action. Yet the language of the Río Grande del Norte proclamation offers little additional environmental protection beyond status…
Book review: “Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art”
Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art. Edwin L. Wade and Allan Cooke, 248 pages, softcover: $40. El Otro Lado, 2012. In Canvas of Clay, the authors explore the evolution of Hopi pottery from the 14th century until recent times. Pairing full-page color prints with scholarly narrative, historical photographs with schematic drawings, the…
California cap and trade’s dirty secret
It is too bad that this otherwise insightful article overlooked a key flaw and dirty secret embodied in the California Air Resources Board’s cap-and-trade law (“A better cap-and-trade?” HCN, 4/15/13). As part of the carbon-trading scheme the ARB launched, the board adopted forest carbon protocols that allow timber companies in California and elsewhere to market…
How technology detected a huge mine landslide before it happened
A 165-million-ton landslide rocked Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine on April 10, registering as a 2.4-magnitude earthquake in nearby Salt Lake City. The cascade of rock damaged giant trucks and digger machines, but not one of the 500 people who work the 2.75-mile-wide, 0.75-mile-deep pit was injured. That’s because Kennecott employees expected a slide…
Other voices: the debate on wolf hunting from both sides
“Overall, they’re making it too easy to kill wolves. (It’s) persecution of wolves on a huge level. … I think we’re on the road to re-listing wolves in the Rocky Mountains.” — Marc Cooke, president of Wolves of the Rockies “The hunting has put such intense pressure on the packs, they’re dispersing, they’re disrupted; the…
Sierra Crane-Murdoch on Idaho’s political transformation
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talk with High Country News correspondent Sierra Crane-Murdoch about Idaho’s political transformation and the (mostly) California migrants behind it. Protest audio courtesy of noisecollector, from freesound.org