A float down the Lower San Juan teaches surprising lessons about dams, water and silt in the West.
Today’s garden plants can be tomorrow’s invasives
On a misty summer morning, ecologist Christy Brigham sinks down to the sand at Point Mugu State Park, part of the patchwork of federal, state and private lands in Los Angeles County’s Santa Monica Mountains. She watches a darkling beetle forage among rare dune plants — lacy, lavender sand verbenas and beach primroses, which resemble…
Rare-earth reality check
Not far from Devils Tower in the Black Hills of eastern Wyoming, work crews are preparing to drill dozens of new holes amid ponderosa pines and rolling meadows. But they’re not looking for gold. Instead, they hope to strike neodymium, europium and other exotic-sounding rare earth metals — a group of 15 elements, plus two…
The sign maker
When you arrive in town, anywhere in Stehekin, his signs are the first thing you see. On slabs of wood chainsaw-ripped and elegantly routed, in rustic block print or flowing cursive, Phil’s signs are never stenciled, never sloppy. They mark the post office, the school, the bakery. They mark trailheads and trail junctions. They are,…
Sedimentation is a building problem in the West’s reservoirs
Gary Esslinger, manager of Elephant Butte Irrigation District in southern New Mexico, spends as much time moving silt as he does water. Elephant Butte Reservoir, built in 1915, is fed by the naturally muddy Rio Grande, which drains 28,000 square miles of easily eroded desert in two states. Sediment has claimed 600,000 acre-feet of its…
Muddy Waters: Silt and the Slow Demise of Glen Canyon Dam
Updated 5/17/11 The Lower San Juan River courses through a rather forsaken landscape of clay hills and redrock plateaus in southeast Utah. At the end of a long, dusty road, there is a boat ramp at the water’s edge where, at any warm time of year, vans and roof-racked Subarus bake in the sun while…
Explorer’s notebook: Craig Childs on the Lower San Juan
Craig Childs reads from his journal and narrates his paddle down the Lower San Juan River, with photos and video he took on the trip. Additional photography courtesy of andrew davidoff, Alaskan Dude, and kla4067. Licensed under Creative Commons. Canyon treefrog recording copyright Jeff Rice and the Western Soundscape Archive.
Siltation expert: We need more dams
George Annandale has worked all over the world, studying, constructing and retrofitting dams and reservoirs to manage the sediment they accumulate. A native South African, Annandale, 59, is a water resources program leader for Golder and Associates, an international engineering and consulting firm. High Country News Executive Director Paul Larmer caught up with him in…
A deadly fastball in Denver: A review of The Ringer
The RingerJenny Shank 304 pages, hardcover: $28.The Permanent Press, 2011. The slaying of a Mexican-American immigrant triggers parallel experiences of personal anguish, family discord and cultural dissonance, seen alternately through the eyes of the dead man’s widow and the cop who shot him. “His thoughts were a confusing jumble of elation, dread, relief and fear,”…
As seas rise, cities retreat
Climate change is causing seas to rise — and threatening cities along the West Coast. At the current rate of greenhouse gas emission, scientists estimate that global temperatures will increase by an average of 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, melting polar ice sheets and upping sea levels by a meter. According…
Don’t plant a pest
Some of the worst invasive ornamental plants, where they’re found in California and their ecological damage rating Giant reed, ArundoFound in: Riparian areas; central west, great valley, northwest, Sierra Nevada, southwest, Sonoran and Mojave deserts.Ecological damage rating: High Fountain grassFound in: Coastal dunes and scrub, chaparral, grasslands; central west, great valley, southwest, Mojave and Sonoran…
Critter contraceptives
In the 1960s, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service researchers used hormone-laced bait to prevent New Mexico coyotes, the “little bad guys of the Western Plains,” from reproducing so effectively. It worked pretty well: Up to 80 percent of treated females didn’t get pregnant. But those females had to consume meds repeatedly throughout the breeding cycle,…
Welcome, Todd; goodbye, Ellen
HCN welcomes Todd Chamberlin, our new outreach director. Todd will be helping us increase our subscriber and donor base by organizing special fund-raising and marketing campaigns. Todd brings with him a wealth of business and marketing experience; for seven years, he was the director of eCommerce and Internet Development at National Geographic, where he developed…
Green ‘New Urbanist’ development rises in Albuquerque suburbs
One way to explain how a Manhattan-sized mesa may become the Southwest’s largest green development is to point to its past success as an apocalyptic wasteland. In 2008, a touch of twisted metal transformed part of Mesa del Sol, a 12,900-acre expanse south of Albuquerque, into a robot-ravaged Los Angeles for the movie Terminator Salvation.…
Scapegoating Sarah
Folks like to bash Sarah Palin because she is well-known and an easy target, but predator control was going on in Alaska way before Sarah became governor (HCN, 2/21/11). As the chairman of the Alaska Board of Game, I would like people to realize that predator control in Alaska is driven by state statutes that…
One thumb up, one thumb down
After seeing the cover of HCN in February — a fear-stricken cow moose and a defenseless calf surrounded by wolves — I was pleasantly surprised by Tracy Ross’ article (HCN, 2/21/11). It was a fair assessment of the politics behind the increasingly controversial and risky methods that Alaska is employing to rid the state of…
Cleverly clean
Kudos to Lake County, Ore., for its support and promotion of renewable energy (HCN, 3/21/11). They clearly have a joint vision, a marketing strategy, and are working together in a collaborative manner. Oregon has become a national leader in the field of clean energy and sustainability. Even with tight budgets, a myriad of agencies continue…
Air quality and equity
Lee van der Voo’s article on renewable energy development in Lakeview, Ore., was well-balanced and informative (HCN, 3/21/11). There is one energy-related issue in Lakeview that was not mentioned, however: air quality. As in most of the rural West, many folks in and around Lakeview use wood heat. But the area is prone to winter…
Consumers feel Big Beef’s squeeze, too
Thank you for covering the harm to Western ranchers from consolidation in the cattle industry (HCN, 3/21/11). It’s worth adding that this trend has terrible consequences for consumers as well. Since four corporations control 80 percent of the beef slaughtered in the U.S., in addition to paying ranchers poorly, those companies can charge consumers higher…
The power of the lowly dirt particle
Soon after I moved to western Colorado from the humid Midwest 20 years ago, I learned that a reservoir is not a lake. My family and I were eager to test our new canoe on the local reservoir, which I’d driven by a month earlier. Its dark waters beckoned to me, lapping against a thick…
Unheard stories, unseen lives: A review of Southern Paiute, A Portrait
Southern Paiute: A PortraitWilliam Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler208 pages, hardcover: $34.95.Utah State University Press, 2010. In all of Native America, few people have been less understood or more maligned than the Southern Paiute Indians and their desert cousins. Mark Twain denounced them as “inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California.” Except…