“You want to go where? There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even Wyomingites forsake for mountains and […]
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West’s forests will never be the same
Last year’s Indian summer fires in Montana were so intense, so awesome in their fury, that they even spooked veteran firefighters. Pilots dumping retardant on the Jungle Fire southeast of Livingston, Mont., reported flames jumping 500 feet above the tree line. For comparison, imagine a wall of flames leaping over the Washington monument. Hotshots, those […]
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When it comes to subsidies, coal wins
My local Montana newspaper ran a letter not long ago complaining about the cost of wind power. The only thing that lets wind power compete with good old coal-fired electricity, the writer said, was the 1.9 cent per kilowatt-hour subsidy that a wind producer gets for the first 10 years of production. If only it […]
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Mules and hikers keep duking it out in the Grand Canyon
“Hold real still,” drawled the lead wrangler, his mule plodding past a hiker trying to flatten herself to a rock wall on the Grand Canyon’s narrow South Kaibab Trail. He didn’t have to repeat himself. The woman, wearing sneakers, seemed scared to death. This meeting of animals and hikers from all over the world has […]
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The inevitable fires next time
Welcome to the West’s new world of fire. With six out of the last eight years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, it is a world where every year is what we call a “bad” fire season. Or maybe it’s the “indefinitely bad” season, as Tom Boatner, the BLM’s chief of fire operations […]
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When smoke gets in your life
On the way to Gardiner, Mont., the sunrise was a surreal red. All day, smoke squatted in town. Walking around on the eve of my writing class, seeing people through the haze, felt vaguely apocalyptic; what I imagined nuclear fallout might be like, or Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Ash landed on parked cars […]
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Just put an asterisk on the whole region
I wrote this column in 2 minutes and 17 seconds. I typed more than 300 words per minute, including the time spent getting the ideas out of thin air and editing myself, running the spell-check, and the ultimate writer’s reward, patting myself on the back. It’s a new world record for column writing. How can […]
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What the Crandall Canyon mine disaster tells us
In March, I testified before a House subcommittee on energy and mineral resources about the impact of climate change on public lands. There were seven witnesses, and one was Robert Murray, founder of Murray Energy and owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. This, as everyone knows, is the mine that recently collapsed, burying […]
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It’s time to break the silence on the Iraq War
Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” King’s opposition to the war in Asia was immediately denounced as “demagogic slander” by Time magazine. But others also spoke out. George W. Ball, undersecretary of State, told […]
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Peak bagging and how to avoid it
“I could not rest until the topmost stone was beneath my feet,” said John Muir. That’s right, nature-loving boys and girls: John Muir was a peak bagger. Long celebrated for his founding of the modern environmental movement and his exuberant love for the small wonders of nature — “not a sparrow falls to the ground […]
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Why bad people do good things for our public lands
There I was out on the high prairie that angles up to the mountains of the Front Range of Colorado, digging out Mediterranean sage with a tool of torture called the pick-mattock. I couldn’t have been paid to do this. Not only was I there, but over 100 other people were there, too. The weather […]
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Tomorrow’s ghost towns are sprouting today
It’s hard to believe that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., not far from present-day Dillon, was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings, and open only as […]
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A happy 63rd birthday to Smokey Bear
It’s time we give an overdue nod of gratitude to that venerable bruin of fire prevention: Smokey Bear, who just turned 63 this August. At a time when bears are being tranquilized and relocated all over the West for Dumpster-diving and campsite pantry raids, Smokey remains the only honorable bear role model. You won’t find […]
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Hot time in the city
Summer features its best impression of Hades as we enter August. You feel like you’re awakening from a bad, slow-moving dream, one in which the cat has settled on your face, and you can’t wake up enough to move it, but neither can you breathe. That’s the way midsummer makes me feel. Denver’s weather is […]
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Wind power will blow your mind
Wind power has all the ingredients of a good brain-buster. The energy that windmills produce helps to preserve the environment, but the giant wind generators themselves have to be added to the environment. Wind power is making us redefine what we consider pollution. Windmills may not billow black smoke that require scrubbing or leak hazardous […]
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A Wyoming forest yearns to burn
Gorgeous red sunsets and haze in the air scare the heck out of people in my part of Wyoming. We live next to the Shoshone National Forest. It is a jewel, and so remarkable that it was the first national forest created by Congress. The mountains in this 2.4 million-acre reserve in west-central Wyoming are […]
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Living precariously with wolves and cattle
Through the end of June last year, we got along fine with the wolves. I was working on a ranch in Montana’s Madison Valley, where the wolves ran elk to exhaustion in the high country while yearling cattle fattened on the lower pastures of the ranch. Peaceful coexistence with predators seemed within our grasp, and […]
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They don’t have to shoot horses
The idea that you can keep a blind horse safely, that it can be pastured, ridden, that it can lead a happy, even productive life, flies in the face of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking, however, is not Alayne Marker’s strong point. She and her husband, Steve Smith, operate Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Montana, […]
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The caveguy within holds us back
I’ve been puzzled by people I know to be intelligent who nonetheless find it inconceivable that the earth’s climate could be affected by human activity. Then I saw one of those “cavedude” commercials on television, and a glimmer of insight began to flicker. In the commercial, a Neandertal in modern dress is talking to a […]
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Asthma and allergies take root in the new West
‘Mom, would you really have shipped me off to Denver?’ I asked my mother recently. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘But imagine,’ I said, ‘what it would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution, surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?’ ‘You were very, very sick,’ she explained.’Nothing helped.’ She told how […]