The Oglala Lakota may soon manage the first tribal national park, but transforming the bombed-out landscape won’t be easy. Also, the West debates gun control, cleaning up hardrock mine pollution isn’t easy, a letterpress newspaper alive in well in rural Colorado, restoring rivers, and more.
A map collection for time travelers
In 1952, rural Nebraskans encountered an extraordinary sight: an Army chaplain and his 11-year-old nephew zipping around the state in a silver Jaguar convertible. “People in Nebraska never saw such a thing as an open-topped sports car!” Robert Berlo, the nephew, told me last spring from his home in Livermore, Calif. Berlo didn’t inherit his…
In the Northwest, innovative projects use trees to cool streams
The wastewater treatment plant in Medford, Ore., removes organic solids, oils and other pollutants from sewer and storm runoff before dumping the water into the Rogue River. Even though the process cleans the water, it’s still polluted with heat. Warm waters hold less oxygen and can provide a dangerous advantage to invasive species. The state…
Will the Badlands become the first tribal national park?
Oglala Lakota leaders hope to transform their bombed-out Badlands and help lift the tribe out of poverty, but it won’t be easy.
In a rural Colorado valley, old-fashioned print news lives on
On any given Tuesday, if you venture past the creaky door and the piles of paper and boxes and photos, you’ll find Dean Coombs marinating in the smell of hot lead, dust and the slow decay of old newsprint, tending an ancient printing press that emanates a rhythmic whir-swoosh. Coombs, with an unkempt gray beard,…
How to clean up abandoned mines — without landing in court
Peter Butler’s late October tour of abandoned hardrock mines began high on Red Mountain Pass near Silverton, Colo., off a highway so narrow that, in places, its shoulder crumbles off cliffs. Butler, a water wonk with springy silver curls, is the co-coordinator of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a local watershed group, which has been…
Jonathan Thompson on gun control
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talks with Jonathan Thompson about his story “Which way will the West go on guns?”
Independent — or subsidized — journalism?
“An Industry Funded Education” in the Jan. 12, 2013, issue should have been called, “An Industry Funded Article.” We’re informed that the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University — bankrolled by a “self-proclaimed ‘environmentalist who hates the environmental movement’ ” — gets big funding from the extractive industry but faithfully maintains scientific objectivity. So…
Love wins
On the first day marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples in Washington state, Laurie and I headed to our rural county courthouse.
The buck stops everywhere
My response to Sarah Gilman’s opinion piece “If not here, where?” is: Nowhere. Although oil and gas exploration and recovery has advanced technologically, the basic concept of burning carbon for heat, light and more recently transportation is archaic. And now it’s evident that the resulting climate instability threatens the survival of human civilization. The series…
Tree tales
I read Brendon Bosworth’s article on Fallen Leaf Lake with great interest (“The forest at the bottom of the lake,” HCN, 12/24/12). With my dive partner, John Foster, a retired California state archaeologist, I sampled sunken trees from nearby Tahoe and Donner Lake, mainly in the 1980s. In South Lake Tahoe, 16 rooted snags in ancient underwater…
Water is (still) for fightin’: A review of Durango
DurangoGary Hart246 pages, softcover: $15.95.Fulcrum, 2012. Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s seventh novel, Durango, is timely, as many Westerners agonize over drought and the energy industry’s use and abuse of water. Hart’s novel, however, takes us to another front in the water wars, the decades-long dispute over damming southern Colorado’s Animas and La Plata rivers…
A lament for B.C.
Seldom have I read an article in HCN that brought a tear to my eye, but the Dec. 24 issue on the new British Columbia mines did just that (“The New Wild West“). Our family has vacationed in British Columbia and southeast Alaska many times over the past 50 years. It is perhaps the most…
Welcome, new interns!
Two new editorial interns just arrived at our Paonia, Colo., office for six months of intensive training in reporting, writing and (sometimes seemingly endless) rewriting. Sarah Jane Keller may be new to Paonia, but she’s no stranger to the territory. After growing up in rural Maryland, she made a leap to the West nine years…
Which way will the West go on guns?
Amid all the talk, legislative proposals and presidential decrees inspired by the recent shootings in Connecticut and Colorado, perhaps the most significant was the announcement in early January that former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was starting a gun-control lobbying organization. Americans for Responsible Solutions seeks to raise $20 million by the next election cycle…
A new normal for snow
Idaho hydrologist Phil Morrisey has been fielding some complaints lately. Although the Natural Resources Conservation Service — the federal agency he works for — reports normal snowpack, skiers say they’re schussing through thin powder. And they have a point, Morrissey says: The agency just started using a new standard for measuring average snowfall — and…
A review of An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps
An Atlas of Historic New Mexico Maps 1550-1941. Peter L. Eidenbach, 184 pages, hardcover: $45. University of New Mexico Press, 2012. In this colorful collection of maps, archaeologist and historian Peter L. Eidenbach presents the Land of Enchantment as seen by early conquerors, naturalists, surveyors, and railroaders. Geologically speaking, New Mexico has been mostly static…
Whose land is this?
On Memorial Day 2004, a friend and I drove into the South Unit of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, located within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on a former gunnery range. We stopped at the visitor center, a dilapidated trailer at one end of a crumbling parking lot, but it was closed. No matter, we…
A world of plague and hope: A review of The Bird Saviors
The Bird SaviorsWilliam J. Cobb320 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Unbridled Books, 2012. In William J. Cobb’s lyrical novel The Bird Saviors, a mysterious virus strikes the residents of Pueblo, Colo. Some blame wild birds for spreading the disease, which leaves victims incapacitated for weeks or eventually kills them. Employees of the Department of Nuisance Animal Control, including…
Boring?!
After reading “Outward (re)Bound” (HCN, 1/21/13), I couldn’t overcome a chilly feeling in response to a student’s description of his three-day solo trip in the Rocky Mountains as “so boring.” I was saddened by this student’s inability to find entertainment in one of the most spectacular mountain ranges in Colorado, and wondered if his response…