It began as unseasonably warm weather – 80-degree temperatures edging into the last couple of weeks before western South Dakota ranchers were to round up their summer-fat cattle, bring some to market and move the rest to closer-to-home pastures with gullies and trees for shelter against the brutal winter months ahead. The cows perhaps didn’t […]
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Nitrogen pollution at critical levels in dozens of national parks
We’ve had national parks on the brain a lot lately as we slogged through 16 days of federal shutdown. It’s been an economic burden to gateway communities and a frustration to tourists. But a depressingly dysfunctional government isn’t the only thing plaguing our parks. A new study shows that airborne nitrogen pollution is fundamentally changing the […]
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The shutdown is over but its impacts linger
The shutdown is over. Federal employees are going back to work, with back pay. Journalists and data geeks can access information on census.gov and usgs.gov. Tourists are once again able to see national parks. And the National Zoo’s Panda Cam – praise be! – has returned to the air. Maybe we can just chalk all […]
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Oil spill, eagles and fracking: the news you missed during the shutdown
The staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was welcomed to work yesterday by a “coffee cake bite”-bearing Joe Biden, and a grinning administrator so thrilled to have her employees back on the job she jumped up and down as they entered the building. There wasn’t, I expect, a lot of jumping and grinning happening […]
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Pipelines aren’t the only way to ship oil – rail’s on the rise
What do melting sea ice, fiery train wrecks and the Bakken oil boom have in common? No, they’re not part of the latest Hollywood blockbuster – although if I came across a trailer showing George Clooney as a roughneck leaping from a flaming train onto an ice floe with an angry polar bear, you better […]
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Painkiller prescriptions skyrocket, endangering veterans
Ricky Green was 43 when he accidentally overdosed on pain medication for a lingering back injury from the first Gulf War. He died in his sleep in September 2011. Just a month earlier, he had asked his Veterans Affairs doctors to decrease the dose of three painkillers he was taking, but the physicians told him […]
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Don’t blame rangers for closed public lands
We’re now on Day 15 of the shutdown. The consequences of suspending so many of the government’s daily operations continue to ripple outward (a few of the odder side effects: new beers can’t be approved; Alaskan fishermen can’t catch crabs; furloughed federal workers are growing #shutdownbeards). The closures have, of course, affected access to the […]
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States pay to re-open national parks and fuel anti-feds fire
Last Thursday, the complaints of business owners and restaurant workers in national park gateway towns around the West hit home when my boyfriend’s parents, who were about to embark on the Southwestern leg of their once-in-a-lifetime cross-country road trip, realized the shutdown had foiled their entire itinerary for the region. Instead of snapping pictures from […]
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Does the Rim Fire leave room for compromise on salvage logging?
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., might have known that his proposal to salvage burned timber from Yosemite’s Rim Fire would not go over smoothly. Not only is he trying to auction off logging contracts in a national park while his own party’s antics have kept that park closed to citizens, he wants to sidestep the whole […]
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Disease hits Montana’s Missoula Valley deer – 400 dead in a month
As fall began to settle into Missoula, Mont., and hunters got ready for deer season, a sudden, bizarre rash of deer deaths left carcasses decaying in the area. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks began receiving calls in mid-September reporting the deaths, and in less than two weeks, they confirmed more than 100 cases. All the evidence […]
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Which Western politicians are to blame for the shutdown?
Hotels, raft guiding outfits and other tourism-dependent businesses in and around Western national parks have collectively lost millions of dollars each day that the government has been in partial shutdown. According to the Arizona Republic, the biggest hotel near Grand Canyon National Park had about half the occupancy it normally does this time of year, […]
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Montana’s largest utility diversifies its energy mix with hydropower
Montana’s largest utility company, NorthWestern Energy, is moving to diversify its energy mix – an increasing trend in the industry. Seeing the regulatory noose tightening on coal, and questioning the long-term promise of natural gas, the company recently announced plans to buy Montana’s 11 hydroelectric dams from their Pennsylvanian owners. By adding 630 megawatts of […]
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When a rare puma dies during a government shutdown, who do you call?
Dan Cooper didn’t know about the mountain lion until the local news media called on Monday afternoon to tell him. By that time, the animal had been dead for several hours; all anyone knew was that it had been struck by a car on the 101 freeway, which cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains on […]
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Rants from the Hill: Seashells on Desert Mountaintops
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. Our daughter Caroline is six years old, a fact that is less important to her than the much more exciting fact that she is about to turn seven. The other day Caroline and I […]
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A family’s mission to document the most isolated spot in each state
Let there be no mistake: Rebecca and Ryan Means don’t hate roads. “We enjoy driving around on them,” Ryan says. “But what we’re saying is we have plenty. Maybe as a country we should think about not laying any more down.” Rebecca, 40, and Ryan, 41, are conservation biologists from Florida, and they’re on a […]
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New Mexico’s Valles Caldera Preserve will soon welcome hikers
In northern New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains, hikers are finally getting access to some stunning lands that have long been off limits – the 89,000 acres of the Valles Caldera Preserve. Starting Dec. 6, 2013, much of the preserve’s forests, meadows and streams will be opened* to unrestricted cross-country hiking for a $10 daily fee. “The […]
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Trickle-down effect of the federal shutdown
Tuesday morning at the High Country News office began with a flurry of Twitter messages from federal agencies as they entered a social media blackout. Until some undetermined future, it will be radio silence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, EPA, NASA and the National Science Foundation. Websites will not be updated; apparently […]
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Government shutdown hits environmental enforcement
Question: How do the feds close a million square miles of public land in the event of a government shut down? Answer: They don’t. Not for lack of trying. Roads to popular areas like the Grand Canyon boat launch at Lee’s Ferry have been blocked, much to the chagrin of boaters, some of whom travel across […]
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The shutdown hits the West harder
Western states have a higher percentage of federal employees than the nation as a whole.
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Chronic wasting disease: forgotten, but not gone
As an environmental journalist, I know full well how difficult it can be to get people interested in a creeping problem. Climate change is a perfect example—its effects are hard to pin down and slow to develop. Wildfire, on the other hand, is dramatic, deadly and easily identifiable as a problem, especially if your house […]