“You want to go where? There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even Wyomingites forsake for mountains and […]
Essays
Posted inOctober 15, 2007: Cat Fight on the Border
RV Nation
We started the list on Interstate 80, somewhere east of Lovelock but most definitely before the blue-dome skies and dun hills around Dunphy. We passed them, one by one. Dutch Star. The Manor. Wanderer Wagon. The Contessa. The drivers looked down at us while their tailpipes coughed black. Southwind. Four Winds. Trade Winds. Sea Breeze. […]
Posted inWotr
It’s never too late to go back to school
I just got home from my second job, but there’s no time to kick back. I only have enough time to grab a bite to eat and kiss my wife and son goodbye. Though I’m almost 30, I’m in high school again and can’t be late for class. I dropped out of high school midway […]
Posted inWotr
There’s a power in pedaling a country road
Biking year-round in Dillon, Mont., means experiencing the extremes of August’s suffocating heat and smoky forest fires, to January’s sub-zero frozen nostrils and fingers too numb to grip. But the scenery and sparse traffic makes me appreciate bicycling and living in southwest Montana, even when the view is what I see from a mud-encrusted mountain […]
Posted inWotr
The BLM plays with fire in Oregon
Everyone here in Oregon loves our forests. These lands — most in public ownership — are the cornerstone for both the economic and ecological health of the state, and are central to our identity. Indeed, more and more of us are making our homes in the woods every year, in the so-called “wildlands-urban interface.” And […]
Posted inWotr
Hard lessons from Colorado’s concentration camp
On the southeastern plains of Colorado, on 560 acres of stunted elms, yuccas and broken concrete, you can find the remains of Colorado’s only concentration camp. Here, from 1942-1945, over 14,000 men, women and children were held against their will, patrolled by military police and surrounded by barbed wire and eight guard towers. Their crime? […]
Posted inWotr
Nothing out there can be a very good thing
“You want to go where? There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even Wyomingites forsake for mountains and […]
Posted inWotr
Nobody likes regulation, but look where we’re moving
Most dry summer months, somewhere in the country, a wildfire fills the sky with flames and forbidding columns of smoke. During the rest of the year, state and local governments would do well to keep that specter in mind when they determine where many American communities will be growing. In too many places, people have […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2007: Sheep v. Sheep
What’s it like to live in the West?
Here and there when I am traveling people ask What’s it like to live in the West? And they always ask it with that capital W on West, you can really and truly hear it, And this just happened in Illinois, in the seething earthy redolent middle of nowhere, A young man asked it, and […]
Posted inWotr
West’s forests will never be the same
Last year’s Indian summer fires in Montana were so intense, so awesome in their fury, that they even spooked veteran firefighters. Pilots dumping retardant on the Jungle Fire southeast of Livingston, Mont., reported flames jumping 500 feet above the tree line. For comparison, imagine a wall of flames leaping over the Washington monument. Hotshots, those […]
Posted inWotr
When it comes to subsidies, coal wins
My local Montana newspaper ran a letter not long ago complaining about the cost of wind power. The only thing that lets wind power compete with good old coal-fired electricity, the writer said, was the 1.9 cent per kilowatt-hour subsidy that a wind producer gets for the first 10 years of production. If only it […]
Posted inWotr
Mules and hikers keep duking it out in the Grand Canyon
“Hold real still,” drawled the lead wrangler, his mule plodding past a hiker trying to flatten herself to a rock wall on the Grand Canyon’s narrow South Kaibab Trail. He didn’t have to repeat himself. The woman, wearing sneakers, seemed scared to death. This meeting of animals and hikers from all over the world has […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2007: Facing the yuck factor
Ashes
We’re winding our way up the Poudre Canyon in my old four-wheel drive – a strange group, to be sure. There’s me at the wheel, hoping this morning will go right. There’s my 14-year-old son, silent in the backseat, watching the canyon flash by. There’s dark-eyed Eva. And there’s the dead woman, Mary. Mary wanted […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
The good and bad of peak-bagging
“Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is … a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Are tomorrow’s ghost towns sprouting today?
IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings and open only as a quiet tourist attraction. It […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
Gunning with the in-laws
Jim Aldrich, my father-in-law, grins a lot. But today, as we stand on his deck in the desert of Southern California, his smile is especially pronounced, cutting deep creases into his stubbled cheeks. It’s not the blue sky brushed with contrails that makes him happy. It’s the gun. He just popped six rounds from a […]
Posted inWotr
The inevitable fires next time
Welcome to the West’s new world of fire. With six out of the last eight years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, it is a world where every year is what we call a “bad” fire season. Or maybe it’s the “indefinitely bad” season, as Tom Boatner, the BLM’s chief of fire operations […]
Posted inWotr
When smoke gets in your life
On the way to Gardiner, Mont., the sunrise was a surreal red. All day, smoke squatted in town. Walking around on the eve of my writing class, seeing people through the haze, felt vaguely apocalyptic; what I imagined nuclear fallout might be like, or Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Ash landed on parked cars […]
Posted inWotr
Just put an asterisk on the whole region
I wrote this column in 2 minutes and 17 seconds. I typed more than 300 words per minute, including the time spent getting the ideas out of thin air and editing myself, running the spell-check, and the ultimate writer’s reward, patting myself on the back. It’s a new world record for column writing. How can […]
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What the Crandall Canyon mine disaster tells us
In March, I testified before a House subcommittee on energy and mineral resources about the impact of climate change on public lands. There were seven witnesses, and one was Robert Murray, founder of Murray Energy and owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. This, as everyone knows, is the mine that recently collapsed, burying […]