A teacher friend of mine just shook the change out of his trousers to buy and then fully remodel a dump in Telluride, Colo. The house cost $1 million, and it was the cheapest thing going. I didn’t ask about the cost of the remodel. At the same time that my friend was assembling his […]
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The many problems of Richard Pombo
This must be the winter of Richard Pombo’s discontent, or it would be if they had winter in California. It isn’t just that his plan to privatize 15 national parks and other public lands went kerblooey, or that he found it prudent to give away embarrassing campaign contributions. It isn’t just that three Democrats are […]
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Yes, some hunters are gay
I saw Brokeback Mountain a short walk from my home in downtown Missoula, at the historic Wilma Theatre. Built in 1921 by producers of a Wild West show, it’s a place where Will Rogers once performed his cowboy satire. Between the old sound system and my bad ears (courtesy of the Marine Corps}, I had […]
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Christo in Colorado would be a very good thing
Art, it has been said, provokes a response by revealing the familiar in new light. By that definition, “Over the River,” the project on southern Colorado’s Arkansas River envisioned by artists Christo and Jeanne Claude, is already a success, even though it has yet to be approved and installation is almost four years away. “Over […]
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Oregon’s academic food fight in the cafeteria of ideas
It isn’t often an academic dean gets up in public and apologizes for participating in an effort to suppress the work of a graduate student. But that’s exactly what Oregon State University College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser recently did. “I profoundly regret the negative debate that recent events have generated,” he wrote in a […]
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Idaho seems set on killing wolves
Last week, I was thrilled to find four sets of wolf tracks carved in the snow in our back pasture. Two nights previously, wolves killed a neighbor’s black Lab within 200 yards of the owner’s house. I feel bad about that dog. We have Labrador retrievers, too. When I let them out in the morning, […]
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It’s true: Guns don’t kill people
When I was in sixth grade, my entire class was marched into the school gym for Hunter Safety class. There, for several class periods, the public school system helped us understand the difference between the deer we could shoot and the ones we shouldn’t, the ethics of “shooting your wife’s deer” (which always made me […]
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Hunters could free Yellowstone bison
You may have seen news photos of the massive, shaggy beasts that are a national totem, standing more or less complacently while hunters approach. Easy as one, two, three, the animals come crashing down. It’s an outrageous sight, but strangely acceptable — the first hunting of Yellowstone National Park bison in 15 years. The last […]
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Is Brokeback Mountain about the West? Sort of
The movie Brokeback Mountain moved slowly through film festivals, winning raves, then on to limited release, and now it’s up for a pile of Oscars and is making wannabe Westerners think twice about wearing that Stetson. In Salt Lake City, theater-owner Larry Miller ramped up the rhetoric by canceling a showing at one of his […]
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What price New Mexico’s sky?
When I moved back to New Mexico this summer, I did my best to contain my enthusiasm for a long-awaited homecoming. In short, I tried to avoid tangling memory with reality. New Mexico is often easier to love in the abstract. Despite its often idealized history — full of noble American Indians, a stern Georgia […]
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What peak oil means to every American
In 1970, oil production within the United States peaked — reached its maximum production rate — at not much more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. That means since 1970, oil production in this country has been declining, and we now import 58 percent of the oil we use. The sheer scale of […]
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Portland and Seattle steal all the rain
My wife was just climbing into bed, and I was already heavy with sleep after a coastal trip the other night, when something began tearing at the screen outside our small bedroom window. This something was eager to come inside. In the few seconds it took for us to yell and wave our arms madly […]
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A teacher looks back at racism
In 1961, when I came to Browning, Mont., to teach, I emerged from my little rental — all dressed up — to investigate the town. A path headed towards the main street across a weedy empty lot. A tall Indian in a wide-brimmed hat started towards me. Was I going to have to walk into […]
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For Sale: The West
It’s disconcerting to look at the ads in the local newspaper these days. I’m bound to recognize someone I know who has just cast in his or her lot with Re/Max, Coldwell Banker or another of the multitude of agencies now playing the West’s biggest gambling game: Real Estate Roulette. He or she will be […]
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Climate change is pulling the trigger
I once spent an entire summer catching frogs. Most people, I gather, do this in elementary school: I was in my early 20s, with a supposedly marketable college degree. I guess I should have done something a little, well, more mature. But I had an excuse. I’d been hired by the U.S. Geological Survey to […]
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The unbearable triteness of skiing
Q: Why did Utah choose the slogan “The Greatest Snow on Earth” when it so closely resembled the Ringling Brothers slogan “The Greatest Show on Earth?” A: Both businesses attract a lot of bozos. It’s okay to hate skiing and to own an automobile without a ski rack. You don’t need to have your computer […]
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The windy West gains influential support
The wind blows constantly across the Western plains, as anyone who’s driven north from Denver and across Wyoming can attest. You feel your car needs alignment until you see the tumbleweeds bustling towards Kansas City. That’s why America’s heartland has been called the Saudi Arabia of wind, and that’s why we should be looking closely […]
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Bison aren’t Buicks, and other dangerous beliefs
Don’t believe everything you hear about the West. While some Western myths are mere entertainment, others can kill you. Like thinking a 4-wheel drive provides traction on ice. Recently, some dangerously incorrect statements gained serious media attention during the first hunt in 15 years for bison leaving Yellowstone Park. Calling the hunt a slaughter, protesters […]
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Cruising down a river
There is something liberating about the wide open vistas of a great river, something that encourages a person to break through the normal restraints of civilized society and expand outward — sometimes in ambitious directions, but as often as not along eccentric lines in isolated regions. I witnessed this even before I got out on […]
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Death in the backcountry
News accounts about fatal avalanches — and we’ve had nine deaths in the West this winter — sometimes give the impression that the difference between life and death is one easy piece of technology: an avalanche beacon. If only the buried victim had been wearing a beacon, goes the story line, a life could have […]