In Kim Todd’s essay “Walking Woman,” she used the re-watering of the lower Owens River as a reason to visit Owens Valley and rhapsodize about Mary Austin (HCN, 5/24/10). In the re-watering, she finds a hopeful lesson that the truism of environmental victories being temporary and defeats being permanent may not always be true. Had […]
Communities
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Li-ber-tar-i-an, n
If Ray Ring (“Going to Extremes”, May 24) is going to write about politics, especially in the hard-to-label West, he needs to watch his flippant labeling. As an Arizonan and a Libertarian, I am very angered by folks who lump my freedom-loving and consistent positions with the often inconsistent stands of the Tea Party. Most […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Life in a doomed dome
Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All PossibilitiesRebecca Reider310 pages, hardcover, $39.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2009. The American West has long been home to grand engineering schemes, with planners and boosters eager to manipulate nature to suit their own purposes. Rebecca Reider’s new book, Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities, reveals one […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Ranger danger?
National parks seem like places of refuge, far removed from urban crime and violence. But for at least the last decade, law enforcement rangers in the National Park Service have been among the federal law enforcement officers most likely to be injured or killed by assault. In 2009, descriptions of violent incidents in national parks […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
So long, Paonia
Earlier this week, I drove through a stretch of barren landscape about 50 miles from our Paonia home, as I’ve done many times before. It’s an unremarkable part of western Colorado. The sparsely vegetated hills contain radioactive waste, an old bombing range, an experimental chicken farm and a lot of shot-up appliances. Soon, hundreds of […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Summertime slowdown
We publish 22 times per year, so we’ll be skipping the next issue. Here in western Colorado, we’ll be tending our gardens, celebrating the annual Cherry Days festival and the Fourth of July, and working on great stories for upcoming issues — not necessarily in that order. You’ll see the next edition of HCN in […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
The land less traveled
Your May 24 cover story “Accidental Wilderness” was for me a catalog of former or current projects I have worked on as an environmental consultant. The map on page 15 showing select Department of Defense and Energy Department sites around the West identified seven facilities where I have worked or visited as a consultant, chief […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
A wrinkle in space?
The back-page essay on May 24, “Walking Woman,” had a striking design, but it took some literary license with facts that are obvious to those of us who live in the eastern Sierra. The first sentence grates on grammatical nerves: The Sierra Nevada range is singular, not plural. The Sierras, plural, is correct if you […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Compassionate listening, fierce conversation
Voices of the American WestCorinne Platt and Meredith Ogilby; foreword by William Kittredge280 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Fulcrum Publishing, 2009. A chance conversation at a conference in 2004 launched photographer Meredith Ogilby and writer Corinne Platt on an ambitious journey. They resolved to photograph and speak with 49 “heavy lifters” from across the West, people of […]
Posted inWotr
Energy exporters: Stay out of the San Luis Valley
Before utility executives and solar-energy prospectors discovered the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, it was mostly known for its potatoes, Buddhist hermitages and scrappy water wars. Now our high-desert rift valley is home to a clash between two competing visions for Colorado’s renewable energy future. As utilities and their regulators argue over who is […]
Posted inWotr
Let’s not forget the hidden costs of uranium mining
Here in the West, uranium mining continues its wobbly resurgence. In recent years, it has sputtered through the peaks and valleys of pricing to once again climb in importance and output. The graph-line of this revival seems to correspond with the vicissitudes of our love-hate relationship with fossil fuels. In 2003, a time of cheap […]
Posted inWotr
“We’ve seen this movie before”
“The task is great. So is the need. And there is no time to lose,” said Exxon executives in their infamous “White Paper” of 1980. Those bombastic words came at the conclusion of Exxon’s plan to help solve the nation’s energy crisis of the 1970s. Long lines at the pump and oil embargoes had prompted […]
Posted inWotr
Fighting fire and memories
It’s been almost 16 years since a firestorm ignited on Storm King Mountain in western Colorado, killing 14 firefighters, including my friend, Roger Roth. A lot can happen in 16 years. I’ve married and divorced. I’ve moved three times. My knees have turned cranky, my hair gone grayer. Now I swing a pulaski beside men […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
New world, new canvas
Ex-priest reconstructs a working-class history from Basque arborglyphs
Posted inWotr
Springtime in the Rockies
The Mancos Valley reverberates with the gush of its namesake river in an annual rite of spring runoff. These waters are a perfect metaphor for starting a new life — allowing winter’s rigidity to melt and wash away. In this high mountain ranching valley of Colorado, the first water flows through irrigation spigots and onto […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Nature illiteracy
Pine grosbeak? How about just seeing a bird as a bird.
Posted inWotr
Boots on the trail ought to pay up
My first introduction to Colorado’s 14,421-foot Mount Massive was, quite literally, a pile of crap. Several piles, actually, just off the trailhead where I’d wandered to pee. Some were flagged with toilet paper; others disguised with a thin sprinkling of pine needles. I walked with care. It was a skill that I would have to […]
Posted inRange
Do you need to see a doctor? Queue up.
Part one in a two-part series “I need to see a doctor.” These six words have been written into our programming as modern humans. We wait in line at the clinic. We make an appointment. We know instinctively that this is the one person to see who can check out our health, fix us up […]
Posted inJune 7, 2010: One Tough Sucker
Did you get your cow?
Your article on wolf hunting in Montana was certainly written from a hunter’s perspective (given that the writer is a Field & Stream contributing editor), and I respected his take on the issue, complete with those hunter magazine close-ups of people “bagging” a wolf (HCN, 5/10/10). I did find the article wanting from two other […]