Wotr

Spring is the cruelest month in the mountain West. Yes, I know that spring technically occupies three months as one-quarter of the four annual seasons. But here in northeastern Utah, it really only lasts a month. And it doesn’t even last a distinct month; what I’m saying is that you get about 31 days of […]

We won. The tiny town of Conway, Wash., will not have a cell tower looming over its one street.  Thanks to hours of work and thousands of dollars, we won. But it shouldn’t have been that hard. The 150-foot tower was to have been located behind the post office, where it would have dwarfed even […]

I was visiting Choteau, Mont., with my friend, Bill, when a cheery checkout clerk said, “I bet you’re here for the geese.” Our blank looks confirmed our out-of-towner status. “Snow geese,” she said. “They’re migrating north again now.” She told us how plump Arctic birds gather by the thousands in the wheat fields near her […]

Change comes hard to Western water policy. The Prior Appropriation Doctrine, interstate compacts, groundwater law, the “law of the river” — all of these seem set in stone in the minds of the region’s policymakers.  Of course, the West’s rivers aren’t bound by such a static existence.  Indeed, they are changing in fundamental ways, opening […]

These are challenging times in the newspaper industry, but from where I sit as editor and publisher of the tiny Silverton Standard & the Miner, high in the Colorado Rockies, things don’t seem all that bad. Well, at least not much worse than usual. This is the oldest newspaper in the western part of the […]

President Barack Obama may have won the national health-care battle, but Idaho Gov. Butch Otter is still loaded for bear. He’s proud he was the first governor to sign into law a measure that requires the state attorney general to sue the federal government if it tries to make Idahoans buy health insurance. Idaho has […]

The upcoming 40th anniversary of Earth Day is a testament to Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin who conceived of the celebration during a 1969 tour of the West. Earth Day turned out to be a brilliant idea, but Nelson went on to accomplish even more,  shaping environmental protections that many of us take […]

My daughter and I found the perfect sofa on the way to school today. It was just the size and color I was looking to add to the living room. Unfortunately, someone had dumped it upside down in the mud of my neighbor’s front yard. Apparently it took too much energy to have a garage […]

Tea Party activists across the country probably shuddered with horror when they read what Oregonians did at the polls recently. But for a majority of us who live in this state of rain, big trees and mighty rivers, voting for new taxes during an economic downturn was common sense. For the first time since 1930, […]

Chicken-picken’s no more, but skitching thrives

Do you believe in technology? I sure do. I came of age when electric typewriters were somewhat novel, a telephone call to a town only 10 miles away was long distance and a 30-volume set of World Britannica represented an exhaustive knowledge base. How quaint. But will technology enable us to stop polluting the atmosphere […]

This winter a small tragedy took place on a ridge above the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana near where I live.  I was nearly home when two neighbors out for a walk frantically flagged my truck down. They’d found a deer silently struggling, hanging upside down by one back leg, gripped in a loop of […]