“I really like parts of it,” my editor wrote in response to a video I made about my travels to a few pieces of iconic Western land art, “and then other parts do feel a little too weird.” To the uninitiated this doesn’t sound so bad, but anyone familiar with editor-speak knows what it really […]
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Gas tracks
The shale gas boom is making a lot of executives rich, but the quiet players making the most impressive moves during this new American energy renaissance are the railroads. By now, we’ve read how cheap natural gas has supplanted some of coal’s share of the electricity market. Railroads ship coal, and thus analysts often say […]
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Pipeline plans
Moving water from one part of the West to another – it’s a time-honored tradition, a way to channel the bounty of rivers in less populated areas to drier regions with greater populations. We’ve reported on many of these projects, like the San Francisco Bay/Delta that supplies southern California, and the Central Arizona Project that’s […]
Posted inRange
Putting the West on a low-carb(on) diet
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House The day after the University of Colorado Law School’s annual summer conference — “A Low Carbon Energy Blueprint for the American West” — had ended, I was walking in downtown Fort Collins, when something above the foothills caught my eye. The dense white puff looked like a blooming […]
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Omni-busted
Welcome back to my coverage of “race-to-the-bottom 2012,” wherein I gripe futilely about this year’s toxic politics (see past editions here and here), which appear to be completely allergic to anything that protects the environment or public health. Our story today begins in March of 2009, when Congress passed the landmark, years-in-the-making Omnibus Public Lands […]
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It’s not the two-headed fish
I’m as guilty as the next headline writer. When High Country Newsran a story about selenium pollution in May, I went with the two-headed fish. After all, a headline promising a grotesque tale of a deformed fish was one of our few opportunities to even approach the clickability of adorable miniature pig videos and celebrity sideboob […]
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Enjoying the wilderness
Only five days left. Amidst the turmoil of final preparations – checking and re-checking gear, packing, food-shopping – I’m engaging in a little psychological battle with myself regarding the object of all this activity: a 19 day, 16 person, DIY rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. For those of us who […]
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Friday news roundup: more wildfires and lizards
Here’s the High Country NewsBurning Man story you all have been waiting for. Thousands of scantly clothed artists and gypsies voyage out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for a week to build a city, burn a hundred-foot, wooden man and vanish without a trace. BLM offices in Winnemucca, Nevada, which manage permits for […]
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Old and foul-mouthed
I’ve done a few stories on air pollution in the last year, and many a source has told me this: When it comes to pollution, all fossil fuel power plants are not created equal. It’s a principle enshrined in the Clean Air Act. Power plants that began generating electricity before 1978 are grandfathered into the […]
Posted inRange
Aging mining law handcuffs the American West
Two of my favorite western cities, Tucson, Ariz., and Boise, Idaho, share some common blessings and one common curse. The blessings include lovely mountain backdrops, vibrant universities and increasingly diverse economies. The shared curse: badly misguided mining claims upstream. I was a newspaper reporter in Boise for a short spell and when I return, I […]
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Burn baby burn
Nearly every Western ecosystem needs fire. Flames thin overly-dense trees, disperse nutrients and stimulate new growth. But decades of logging, grazing and fire suppression have left many forests, especially in the dry Southwest, prone to fierce, high-severity burns that do more harm than good. In their aftermath are scorched, blackened moonscapes with powdery ash sifting […]
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Temporal shift
But a recent study published in the current issue of the journal Ecology suggests that the Earth’s warming climate is jeopardizing the bird and lily’s temporal bond. According to the researchers, earlier snowmelt in the mountains (brought on by warming temperatures) has, in turn, led to a blooming shift in the lily, the first blossoms […]
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Firefighting pilots deserve better
Last Sunday, an aging P2V air tanker, T-11, flew low over the White Rock fire on the border of Utah and Nevada, dropped 2,000 gallons of retardant and crashed into the mountainside. Pilot Todd Tompkins, who loved fighting fires, died alongside his co-pilot, Ronnie Edwin Chambless. Iron County Sheriff’s detective Jody Edwards told the Missoulian […]
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Don’t be too self-righteous
Many years ago, in an interesting turn of events, I found myself in the same truck (mine) as a famous environmental writer. I can take no personal credit for her presence there; she was speaking that evening at a literary event sponsored by a local college. A good friend of mine was organizing the event […]
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Water to the people
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I hadn’t realized until I got an (en masse) email from Senator Mark Udall recently, that we’re celebrating water in Colorado this year. He and Sen. Michael Bennet introduced a resolution in May recognizing 2012 as the “Year of Water.” The declaration piggybacks on governor Hickenlooper’s “Colorado Water 2012” initiative which, […]
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Search and … inform
In this world of extreme sports, 100-mile ultramarathons and ever-decreasing record times, a 21-mile trail run probably doesn’t seem like all that big a deal anymore. And indeed, you’d never guess, reading about a recently-broken record, that there’s anything unusually taxing about what’s known in running and hiking circles as the “rim to rim,” where […]
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Farewell to a wise curmudgeon
On Sunday, the West lost a unique voice – journalist Ed Quillen, who for nearly three decades had written about the region’s communities and issues with a keen eye for irony and an appreciation for history. Ed died at his home in Salida, Colo. at the all-too-young age of 61. “Colorado has lost one of […]
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Capturing our way out of the carbon mess
Ah, geoengineering. That crazy idea to manipulate earth’s atmosphere to do the opposite of what our current manipulations are doing — cool the planet instead of warm it — has made its way back into the headlines recently, with pieces in the New Yorker and Scientific American. Geoengineering would be a desperate measure indeed, stemming […]
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Rants from the Hill: Sorry, Utah
“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 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. […]
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Friday news roundup: wildfires and water depletion
If only Billie Holiday were here to sing that solemn “Summertime” song. The living is easy compared to winter, but the environment for this week’s Roundup is harsh. Wildfire broke out across the West, especially in New Mexico, where the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire has burned 190,262 acres, and as of yesterday at 4:30 p.m., […]