There’s an industry that’s been contaminating rural water wells for years, but it hasn’t had to endure the same public vitriol that “frackers” have. Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report placing probable blame on dairies in the Lower Yakima Valley for spoiling drinking wells in the area with nitrates and antibiotics. Local […]
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Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Harvesting the Desert Shoe Tree
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Rants from the Hill is now a FREE podcast! Listen to an audio performance of this essay, here. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or through Feedburner for use in another podcast reader. On the […]
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The underwater gold rush
The right to dredge part of Idaho’s Salmon River for garnets and gold now belongs exclusively to one man. That was the decision of the Idaho Land Board last week when it granted Mike Conklin a mineral lease for a half-a-mile stretch of the river below Riggins, a small town near the western border of […]
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The sound of pollution
Artists like British “grime writer” Moose, who scrubs designs into filthy, smog-charred city surfaces (including the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco), have found novel ways to visualize air pollution for passersby. But now it’s also possible to experience air pollution with a different sense: hearing. Using mass spectrometry, which helps scientists pinpoint the exact compounds […]
Posted inRange
GOP risks much with its zeal to sell public estate
The Republican Party has formally embraced a policy to sell off America’s chunks of our public lands. That’s likely to prove as welcome as a hornet in a pair of swimming trunks. The GOP 2012 Party Platform espouses a purely market-driven exploitation of natural resources, as opposed to the traditional American system that embraces both […]
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You get what you pay for
At first glance, the LA Times’ most recent solar power expose looks like perfect fodder for the drumbeat argument from many GOP lawmakers to end federal subsidies for renewable energy projects. Big corporations building utility-scale solar in California, it points out, have been receiving huge direct and indirect payouts from the federal government, from loans […]
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Where’s the beef?
Ah, the future. It’s so fun to imagine. In 10 years, we could all be driving electric cars. We won’t download or search anymore; we’ll just tell our “wired” house what we want, and those things will appear on various devices, or on our doorsteps. And, if PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has his way, we […]
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Brigham Young the enlightened one
In 1847, a few years after the violent death, in Missouri, of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led the Mormons on an exodus across the desert into the promised land, a place we now know as Utah. Young, as President of the Church of Latter Day Saints, then led the colonization of Utah and parts of […]
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CU public lands conference turns up a few nuggets
Conferences are often the worst place for journalists to find great story ideas or spontaneous comments – just imagine panelists sitting on a distant stage droning on about abstract topics and you’ll find your eyelids involuntarily drooping. But as someone with a lifelong interest in public lands, the lineup at the Center for the American […]
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A horny problem
Running a rhinoceros horn smuggling operation is a lucrative affair. Take father-and-son team “Jimmy” and Felix Kha, from Garden Grove in California, for instance. The pair had to surrender $1 million in cash, $1 million worth of bling (gold ingots, precious stones, Rolex watches and other essential “playa” accessories) and two cars to the feds, […]
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Cheer up, Melon Queen
On a reporting trip over the weekend, I found myself riding in an old Ford pick-up draped with watermelon banners, wearing a sparkly top hat and holding a microphone out the window. As the truck crawled down Main Street in Green River, Utah, children scrambled like spiders to pick up thrown candy as retirees in […]
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Recreation.gov — nice try, needs work
Ever wanted to plan a vacation around a bunch of federally-managed recreation sites, but didn’t know where to turn? Yeah, me neither. I mean, sometimes I plan trips to visit particular national parks, but I don’t generally think of a vacation to, say, San Francisco, in terms of what federal facilities I can go see […]
Posted inRange
Jaguar versus the copper mine
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House There’s an extraordinary 70,000-square-mile region that encompasses part of southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and northwestern Mexico. This area, called the Sky Islands, is characterized by forested mountain ranges divided by desert or grassland valleys. Roughly 30 miles south of Tucson, smack in the middle of the Santa Rita Mountains portion […]
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An audience for old Indians
Roland McCook wouldn’t care if he died tomorrow. Last Thursday, he stood before an amphitheater of aging white folks outside the Paonia public library. I wanted to hear what he wanted to say because most of the country doesn’t listen to old people, especially old Indians. A woman asked McCook, who is a Northern Ute […]
Posted inRange
Enviros worry about Utah tar sands water pollution
By David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News The debate over whether oil sands mining should be allowed in Utah inched forward this week when an environmental group and the company that wants to open the mine both filed papers responding to a judge’s recent ruling on whether water resources will be adequately protected. Administrative Law Judge Sandra Allen ruled […]
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It’s a hardrock life
South of Ouray, Colorado, dozens of abandoned gold and silver mines litter the valley below Red Mountain’s pyrite-stained slopes. Tourists clog the pullouts of US 550, the highway running through the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains, to gawk at the weathered wooden head frame of the Yankee Girl mine and the eggshell tailing piles beneath it, […]
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Home rule
School kids in Colorado have to walk at least 1,000 feet from the playground to reach the nearest medical marijuana dispensary. But if they want to clamber around on the closest oil and gas well instead of trying to scrounge crumbs of THC-laced brownies spilled on the sidewalk, they have to stroll only about a […]
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Is Lake Powell really shrinking?
The West is heating and drying up so much that the whole place could burst into flames at any second. At least, that’s the way it seems, reading the news these days. Every day it’s another item about the catastrophic, unprecedented drought and the “new normal” of months of consecutive 90+ degree highs in places […]
Posted inRange
Antibacterial soaps in the backcountry
I try not to be one of those people who buy into every alarmist headline about how common products will poison me. Over the years, consumer safety scares have come and gone with predictable regularity. Eggs were forbidden cholesterol-bombs for a while. Caffeine was blamed for just about every possible malady, and then (at least partially) exonerated. And […]
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How do you tell an invasive species from a natural colonizer?
By now, you’ve probably heard of the 66-foot-long, 7-foot-tall, 188-ton “tsunami dock” that washed ashore near Newport, Ore., this summer – perhaps the most dramatic chunk of debris to reach the West Coast in the aftermath of last year’s tsunami in Japan. You’ve probably heard that state workers sliced it up like a giant block […]