Digging the L.A. River out of a bureaucratic morass
Blog Post
Posted inRange
Little grousing on the prairie
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I’m embarrassed to say that, in the decade I’ve lived on the Colorado Front Range, I’d never been to the Pawnee National Grasslands; that is, until last week. With mountains in my rear-view, I drove east from Fort Collins. Before long, I crossed the border into Weld County (called […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: The silence of desert greetings
“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 too! 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. […]
Posted inRange
How now, Browns Canyon
U.S. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, got two differing views about Browns Canyon when he met with constituents and hiked in the area during the congressional Easter recess. The meetings were in Chaffee County in central Colorado. The Arkansas River flows through Browns Canyon, which sits between Salida and Buena Vista. It may well […]
Posted inGoat
A towering problem
Imagine it’s a cool autumn evening and you are a small songbird winging southward after an exhausting breeding season in Canada. The hazards of the terrestrial world — hungry cats, window-skinned skyscrapers, careless drivers — have melted away. Up here, one thousand feet above the Earth, it’s smooth sailing. South America — and its feast of insects — awaits. In the 1950s, reports […]
Posted inGoat
Haste makes waste
Following a tip from HCN contributing editor, Craig Childs, I purged 500 words for this blog in 30 minutes, a stick-‘em-up way of pilfering my brain for production and creativity. I scored a good foundation, but since I’m still an apprentice, the rest was babble. The guiding rule for now is that haste makes waste. […]
Posted inRange
Lessons from the Old West: Don’t ban it, brand it
By P.J. Hill Last Saturday was roundup and branding day at my ranch in the Madison River Valley, about 20 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. Neighbors came to help and I put the P J (my registered brand) on the left side of my calves. As I carefully placed the irons on each calf (yes, […]
Posted inGoat
Could Arizona go blue?
To gauge how conservative Arizona is, look no further than the national headlines over the last few years: Its state legislature passed one of the most stringent immigration laws in the country, allowing police officers to check the immigration status of people who are dressed suspiciously, or otherwise strike an officer as likely to be paperless. […]
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Last in line
The outbreak started in February. Migratory waterfowl heading south along the West Coast found the wetlands of northern California’s Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge — a major stopover point on the Pacific Flyway — half dry. Nearly 2 million birds passed through the area as winter edged toward spring, many crowding into the remaining 15,000 […]
Posted inRange
Earth Day — Gone Fishin’
Earth Day was once again full of stark warnings about global doom and scolds over my level of recycling and my carbon footprint. So I went fishing. In particular, I took my 8-year-old to an old gravel pit that has been landscaped into a pond and stocked with rainbow trout straight from the hatchery. One […]
Posted inRange
Sagebrush rebellion rides again
I don’t relish this role, you know. If you happened to have read some of my other posts you may have noticed a certain pattern. Sure, there’s the occasional outlier column that addresses toilets, or aspen trees, or what have you, but on a pretty regular basis I’m the lady who sheepishly discusses all the […]
Posted inGoat
Friday new roundup: froze-to-death hot springs
Back in 2010, as an employee of the Forest Service, I watched fire line explosives obliterate a dead cow to the dust that flies eat. It’s not uncommon forestry work, though it is spectacular. And White River National Forest employees might get the same opportunity this spring near Aspen, Colo. A small herd of cows […]
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Downsized cleanup plan for Idaho Superfund site
The mines of Silver Valley, Idaho, east of Coeur d’Alene Lake were once the richest silver producers in the world. The valley’s flush days, however, are long gone. In 1981, thousands of miners lost their jobs when the sinking price of silver forced the mines to close (a few have since reopened). Two years later, […]
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Got the gold bug? Tour a mine.
All of us know at least one person who, as a hedge against imminent financial collapse, is stockpiling gold (not to mention Dinty Moore stew and guns). The idea is to have some kind of solid form of currency when the dollar and Euro go up in smoke, whether brought on by Obama, big banks […]
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Hunters ask for protection from enviros
This week, the U.S. House of Representatives plans to consider the “Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012,” a package of bills intended to benefit hunters and anglers. The bill seeks to open additional federal land for hunting, allows polar bear trophies to be imported from Canada, and removes the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate lead […]
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Predator aversion
The delisting quickly led to state-sponsored wolf hunts in Montana and Idaho that were supposedly aimed at responsibly reducing wolf populations to protect game species like elk. But for many wildlife conservation groups, the hunts have amounted to little more than the state-sponsored slaughter of a still-endangered species sacrificed for the sake of politics. Last […]
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Friday news roundup: Water’s the word in Western news
While the perennial news of the West remains it’s drying, it’s drying, it’s drying, this week brought us a welcome respite: thunder and rain storms. The air smelled fresh, the fields greened and the cars went another week without washing. Water related news also poured down through the intertubes too: read on. Salmon chroniclesAbout […]
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An unworthy opponent
For about a month, I’ve had my eye on the Arizona legislature’s uncanny will to pass fanatically conservative laws. This week seemed to reinforce that will, illustrated by these headlines: “Arizona bill would let mine firms shroud cases of pollution” and “Arizona okays secrecy for environmental reports.” While the headlines grab readers, they’re hyperbolic, and […]
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The unbearable lightness of winter
Maybe it’s because my meteorologist mom used to load our family into our old Dodge van to venture forth onto the flats east of Boulder, Colo., every time there was a severe nighttime thunderstorm to park beneath and ogle (a van, she and my dad reassured my brother and I, makes a pretty good Faraday […]
Posted inRange
Lighten up, take a load off
All this serious, recent talk (also see this) about Western water shortages and new pipelines gets me thinking again about a not-so-serious but related subject: poop. Granted, there are many very serious aspects of poop such as its disease-carrying properties. You may be aware that some of these benefits are old news to Joseph Jenkins, […]