Are you enjoying rhubarb season? When the robin nests in the cherry tree and thunderclouds tease us by gathering every afternoon, rhubarb is ready. I’m weeding among leaves of rhubarb the size of TV trays when a woman stops jogging by and asks, “What’s that plant?” “Rhubarb,” I tell her; our grandmothers called it “pie […]
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Sometimes, it’s possible to be too much in touch
As a general rule, it is not a good idea to smack a fellow river rafter with a paddle or to push him out of the boat in the middle of a rapid. Not only do such actions constitute a breach of wilderness etiquette, they can cause hard feelings that might result in unpleasantness later […]
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Commemorating the Vietnam War in northern New Mexico
This Memorial Day weekend, the population of northern New Mexico will swell by thousands of people. Many will come for more than the magnificent vistas of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and perfect weather. They visit because the area is home to the first-ever Vietnam Veterans Memorial, built back in 1971, when the war was […]
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Shooting at hikers is perfectly legal
My family and I almost became collateral damage at the end of a pleasant hike through Colorado’s Roosevelt National Forest. We were walking on a trail north of the small town of Lyons, when bullets suddenly peppered the trees behind our backs. My 8-year-old son, in tears, flattened himself into the dirt, and though my […]
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Killing cougars is the easy choice
The state of Oregon is back in the business of killing cougars. After a long and contentious public comment process, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission recently approved a management plan for the state’s top predator that would allow government-paid hunters to reduce cougar numbers back to 1993 levels. That could ultimately mean the killing […]
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A silent victim of illegal immigration is our public lands
Just three miles north of Arizona’s border with Mexico, the Coronado National Forest is littered with the leavings of people on the run: empty plastic water bottles, opened tuna fish cans, sweatshirts, jars of foot powder. Near a scattered pack of playing cards, some turquoise underwear lies in an undignified tangle. A pair of small […]
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Raising Bella in springtime
Spring can be a time of quirky deception in the Rocky Mountains. All manner of creatures are born into this seasonal maelstrom, where soothing sunshine one moment can give way almost instantaneously to a howling snow squall. I pity the frail calves and lambs born wet on the High Plains. They trudge dutifully behind their […]
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A real rain is what happens in New Mexico
It is a short flight from one extreme to another. My plane takes off in lush, green Portland, Ore., and lands two hours later in Albuquerque,N.M. As the plane comes over the Sandia mountains, another passenger, making a first trip to New Mexico, is startled to see a panorama of browns shining in the sunlight, […]
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Ego climbing at Delicate Arch
In mid-May, the print and electronic media in Salt Lake City, Utah, reported the first ascent of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. Delicate Arch is one of the most revered and recognized features in Utah, and if any natural feature deserves to be called an icon, it’s Delicate Arch. But on a recent Sunday […]
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Praise the Lord and pass the pancakes
Drive across the West along the Interstate and you’ll get the impression that sleeping, eating and filling up the gas tank are the activities we hold dear to our hearts. Of these three, however, the greatest seems to be eating. I’d stayed overnight at a motel no driver could see, much less imagine, just off […]
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Wamsutter: This Wyoming town never seems to die
Wamsutter, Wyo., population all of 261, is the poster child for Western boomtowns, though if you Google it, the computer asks, “Are you sure you don’t mean hamster?” Wamsutter used to be a rough-and-tumble railroad town, named in 1884 for an obscure Union Pacific bridge engineer. The promise of the railroad first brought surveyors, tunnelers, […]
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War protesters never die, they just keep on protesting
The third anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq was March 19, so I joined a small group of people who met in Riverside Park in Salida, Colo., to state our disagreement with the war. It was a cold and cloudy day, appropriate for the occasion. There were the usual homemade signs. I wore my Army […]
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Puppets on the range
A puppet show just finished a 20-year run in southwest New Mexico. I first attended in 1994, when a magazine sent me to the Gila National Forest to inspect damage grazing had done to habitat of Gila trout, our only endangered inland salmonid. Grazing allotments in the Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses had been leased […]
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Fishing ban will make us forget salmon
When the Bush administration announced plans to close ocean fishing ofchinook salmon along 700 miles of Southern Oregon and Northern Californiacoastline, many people in my hometown sneered their approval. With the exception of a brief, limited and most probably token fishing season last summer, Idaho’s upper Salmon River basin has been closed to salmon anglers […]
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Corn ethanol isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
This was supposed to be a cakewalk, a no-brainer, a slam-dunk. Ethanol from corn lessened our dependence on foreign oil, they told us. It helped our struggling Midwestern farmers. It was much better for the environment. Who could not support this? As it turns out, quite a few of us. Ethanol plants are sprouting like […]
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Wacky California is pragmatic leader of the West
The Interior West has long regarded California as a sort of rich eccentric uncle whose behavior is an embarrassment to the rest of the family. I have some firsthand knowledge of this attitude, because I am a fourth-generation Californian, who moved to rural western Colorado in 1992. The sidelong glances I received from a few […]
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Global warming can give you the chills
It was an odd juxtaposition: As news outlets were reporting last winter about astonishingly frigid conditions in Russia, where nearly 40 deaths had been linked to temperatures as low as 24 degrees below zero, they were also reporting an announcement by climate experts that 2005 was the hottest year worldwide in more than a century. […]
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The bottom-line truth: We are protecting our parks
Open your paper in the next few weeks, and you might see this headline: “Bush budget cuts end 911 coverage for Yosemite.” The story underneath says an official review of the National Park Service by a government agency found that budget cuts and staff vacancies at Yosemite National Park mean that visitors in life-threatening emergencies […]
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National Parks are truly under the gun
The words “heavy artillery” and “national park” aren’t usually uttered in the same sentence. Get used to it. National parks are under fire — both literally and metaphorically. First, let’s talk about the literal blasting. It’s proposed in one of America’s grand old parks, Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. The Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad […]
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We’re Tiger Woods, not Paris Hilton
“We decided not to be Invisible anymore,” read one headline when those floods of people turned out in cities around the country, from Washington, D.C., and Denver to Salt Lake City, Reno, Phoenix and Salem. For more than 60 years, Hispanic immigrants have been a deliberately created, out-of-sight-out-of-mind, disposable, low-wage work force. Hispanics work for […]