The people of Salmon, Idaho, may have reclaimed their namesake river this spring. It happened during Riverfest 2011, a fund-raising event created to help build a kayak park downtown, where the Salmon River splits into two channels. The event attracted a lot of the 20-something boater crowd of river guides and semi-obsessive kayakers, many of […]
Essays
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
The One-Eyed Squirrel of Ooh-Aah Point
It was a mid-July morning during my fifth summer on Grand Canyon National Park’s trail crew, and I arrived at the worksite on the South Kaibab Trail to find an old woman — memory casts her with doughy white skin and frumpy teal-colored clothes — perched on a rock on the side of the trail. […]
Posted inWotr
Local food, local loans
I just loaned $3,000 to a small business in my western Colorado town of Paonia, and I’m looking forward to getting the first installment on the 6 percent interest. I haven’t decided, though, if I want it in the form of a box of fresh-picked veggies or as a gourmet dinner. In six years, provided […]
Posted inWotr
Extreme Green
It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My “attack” on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major […]
Posted inWotr
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its a contrail
When we moved to the Colorado Plateau 20 years ago, I thought I’d be trading an ocean coast for a pristine Western sky. Instead, I was greeted by a nonstop parade of thundering jets roaring along one of the main air-transportation routes in the country, linking the East Coast to San Francisco. Congratulations, I told […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything […]
Posted inWotr
Anatomy of a disaster
The hydrologic havoc playing out in the Mississippi Delta is not a freak of nature. This slow-motion, manmade disaster is our inheritance from a previous generation of politicians, farmers and ranchers, who made bad decisions to correct short-term problems even as the best available science warned of long-term consequences. Like it or not, we will […]
Posted inWotr
It may be High Noon for tumbleweed
Conjure up the lonesome sound of a harmonica in a dusty Western town where gunmen with jingling spurs reach for their six-shooters at high noon. The scene would be incomplete without a few tumbleweeds rolling past. But here’s the truth: Tumbleweed doesn’t belong on the Western plains. An exotic also known as Russian thistle, it […]
Posted inWotr
We’re not all Right in Idaho
A March Gallup poll probably surprised no one when it determined that Idaho, Utah and Wyoming rank among the five most conservative states in America. The trio came in second, fourth and fifth, respectively, putting them in the archetypal company of Mississippi, which was first, and Alabama, third. Being a conservative in a blue state […]
Posted inWotr
Me and my SUV
I love my purple 4Runner. She’s a 1998 stick-shift with 177,000 miles on the odometer, and her name is Jesse. She’s been all over the West, camping on dirt roads and shuttling for river trips. Once, in the high desert of central Oregon, I hit a patch of ice going fast on a cold, bluebird […]
Posted inWotr
Big Sky country, bigger abuse
We seem to have a morbid fascination with news stories and photographs of dead, dying or distressed animals — something Montana has provided plenty of in the past two years. The number of animals involved has been staggering, the evidence of abuse extreme. The first news of abuse on a grand scale came last February, […]
Posted inWotr
Disaster traveling is my specialty
People who know me refuse to travel with me. I don’t understand this. I think I am the perfect travel companion — curious, unflappable, knowledgeable, cheerful, seasoned, undemanding, prepared. But friends claim that I don’t go on vacations; I go on disasters. People travel for a lot of reasons — to lounge around and do […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
A misguided investigation ends an era in Arizona
Calling the National Park Service case against Billy Malone “misguided” is a kindness. Others use words like “corrupt” or “fiasco” when speaking of the bungled federal investigation that cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars, ruined the reputation of one of the last old-time Indian traders and may have transformed an authentic Indian trading post into […]
Posted inWotr
Privatization threatens an Arizona national forest
Once upon a time, the Western public lands — places like our national forests and parks — were supported with American tax dollars. In return, we were welcome to use them. Undeveloped areas required no money to enter, and developed facilities were basic but affordable. Land managers were public servants whose mission was stewardship – […]
Posted inWotr
The West’s dams share a dirty secret
Soon after I moved to Colorado from the humid Midwest 20 years ago, I learned that a reservoir is not a lake. My family and I were eager to test our new canoe on the local reservoir, which I’d driven by a month earlier. Its dark waters lapped against a thick conifer forest. I couldn’t […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
The sign maker
When you arrive in town, anywhere in Stehekin, his signs are the first thing you see. On slabs of wood chainsaw-ripped and elegantly routed, in rustic block print or flowing cursive, Phil’s signs are never stenciled, never sloppy. They mark the post office, the school, the bakery. They mark trailheads and trail junctions. They are, […]
Posted inWotr
This Earth Day, it’s all about the air
As we prepare to mark the 41st annual celebration of Earth Day, we can thank Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and other Democrats for beating back the most recent attacks on the Clean Air Act. Perhaps America’s most successful environmental safeguard, this law has protected human health and the environment for four decades. Today, it’s emerging […]
Posted inWotr
Journeys we take at home
Every day, I hear the same thing from parents whose children have grown up. “Enjoy it while you can,” they tell me. “It goes so fast.” With a 3-year-old boy, Elias, who consistently wakes up in the middle of the night “needing sumfin” and a 6-year-old girl, Willa, who also wakes up frequently, saying “I […]
Posted inWotr
The wall along our southern border is a joke
In the minds of many Americans, the U.S. border with Mexico has become the heart of darkness, a place wracked with violence and beyond the reach of the law. Politicians play up these fears with legislation such as the bill introduced last month by California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, which would require hundreds of miles […]
Posted inWotr
Just call me a RAC star
I got a note from Ken Salazar the other day. I was glad to hear from him. It had been a while since we had visited. Well, OK … we’ve never visited. The secretary of Interior doesn’t know me from Adam’s cat. But still, it was nice to hear from him. I don’t get all […]