Planners gird for more woes after major snows.
Colorado
Posted inGoat
Unlikely partnership seeks to end turf wars in western Colorado
The room was a brawl waiting to happen. Horseback riders sat next to mountain bikers. ATV, jeep and motorbike enthusiasts took their seats across from wilderness, hiking and “quiet trail” advocates. Even a survey of peoples’ heads revealed the potential tension: There were cowboy hats and shiny, banker-like pates; spiky mullets and hair flattened by […]
Posted inArticles
Will our ‘dam nation’ free its rivers?
A new film explores a growing movement to remove dams that have outlived their usefulness.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Voting down science education, world’s toughest boss, and bending over backwards for healthcare.
THE NATIONWhat if you went to your family doctor complaining about that nasty rundown blah sort of feeling and were advised to experience the joys of nature rather than those of pharmaceuticals? In a nutshell: Take two aspen and call me in the morning. Daphne Miller says it’s not a joke: Nature in general is […]
Posted inGoat
Has Durango sold its river, and its soul, to recreation?
Several months ago, an old friend and sometime source contacted me with a tip on a big local story going down here in Durango, with statewide and even national implications. I had been looking around the immediate region for something into which I could dig my investigative reporting teeth. This might be it. A week […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Adventure travel vs. conservation
A conversation with outdoor entrepreneur Bill Bryan.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
49 trout streams of southern Colorado
49 Trout Streams of Southern Colorado Mark D. Williams and W. Chad McPhail, 120 pages, softcover:$27.95. University of New Mexico Press. 2013. For southern Colorado anglers in search of plentiful, hard-fighting trout, getting to gold-medal waters is the easy part: there’s the Gunnison, the Frying Pan, and the Animas, to name a few. But as […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Houseboaters vs. river runners
Andrew Gulliford, a professor in Durango, Colo., spent five days last summer on a houseboat floating around Utah’s most famous party scene, Lake Powell – a reservoir on the Colorado River – and then another five running the Yampa and Green rivers on the Colorado-Utah border. Gulliford noticed sharp differences between the cultures of houseboating […]
Posted inGoat
Four women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did. It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Drought brings new dust storms to the geographic heart of the Dust Bowl
A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder;It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under;Blocked out the traffic an’ blocked out the sun,Straight for home all the people did run… That’s how folksinger Woody Guthrie described the walls of airborne earth that rolled across the Texas Panhandle during the drought-ravaged 1930s. But he […]
Posted inArticles
Bison roundup at Rocky Mountain Arsenal refuge
At least 20 animals were removed from the herd to let habitat recover.
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The Latest: Southern Colorado protected from proposed Army base expansion
BackstoryWhen Fort Carson proposed expanding its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in 2003, nearby ranchers worried. The 235,000-acre training ground, in southeastern Colorado, was slated to grow to more than 650,000 acres, and though the U.S. Army promised to work with “willing sellers,” locals feared land seizure through eminent domain, as happened in the 1980s when […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
A bighorn sheep comes through the window, $500K left in airport change buckets, and more.
MONTANAMaybe blind belligerence is just “a guy thing,” or so Lori Silcher concluded after a male bighorn sheep crashed through windows of her rural home in Hamilton, Mont. “All of a sudden, we all felt the house shake and there was a resounding thud,” recalls her husband, Peter, who at first thought someone in his […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
A Colorado carpenter takes a chance on hemp
Can an agrarian insurrection revitalize this High Plains town?
Posted inGoat
Discovery: Good ol’ tallgrass was formed by good ol’ bacteria
It’s always tempting to reflect on how wonderful the West used to be. You know what I mean: Conservationists and Natives lament that the first invasions by white settlers wrecked everything, and ranchers and loggers long for a return to the era before 750-page environmental-impact statements. Who among us hasn’t conjured up wistful images of […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Dispatch from Twiggley Island: an essay
Neighbors band together to survive after the Colorado floods.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
KDNK Radio and Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock on Front Range floods
September’s massive flood devastated the front range town of Lyons, and recovery efforts there and in other affected communities are ongoing – even as a partial government shutdown threatened to pull National Guard members from essential work repairing roads and bridges. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s Eric Skalac talks […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason’s four-year road trip
Bringing poetry to an entire state, one county at a time.
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
BLM teams with researchers to protect midget faded rattlesnake
Summer snake hunting in western Colorado is a race against the sun. The reptiles emerge early from their dens to soak up dawn’s dull warmth. But once the hillsides hum with heat, they’ll split for the shadows. “We better get going,” says biologist Josh Parker of Georgia’s Clayton State University when I meet his small […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Economy, distrust complicate allocation of tribal settlement money
When the Obama administration announced in April that it would pay 41 tribes some $1 billion to settle a lawsuit over federal mismanagement of trust funds, many saw it as a sort of stimulus package for Indian Country — a chance to invest in long-term development and infrastructure, such as schools, clinics and roads. “The […]