The National Park Service is now designing a new plan for managing whitewater river trips through the Grand Canyon. But in pursuit of a no-compromise agenda, a small group of wilderness advocates would like the clean, quiet, low-powered and environmentally friendly motors used on these trips banned. They’d like most of the park, including 240 […]
Essays
Posted inMarch 17, 2003: Bracing against the tide
Fish farms challenge our commitment to the wild
If you’ve ever been to the Pike Street Market in Seattle, you’ve undoubtedly witnessed one of the pinnacles of fishmonger bravado. Order up a whole salmon at Pike Place Fish and employees snap into action, shouting like a platoon of marines. One hoists the fish you’ve chosen from an ice-heaped display table. Another dashes to […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2003: Bracing against the tide
Of Western myth and jackalopes
“Are there jackalope around here?” the dude from Chicago asked. “Well, up here there’s too much elevation. They’re down on the sagebrush flats.” from Jackalope by Hilda Volk On Jan. 6, 2003, the West lost one of its great mythmakers, 82-year-old Douglas Herrick, of Casper, Wyo. No, Herrick wasn’t a writer, an artist, or a […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2003: Bracing against the tide
Engagement in a time of terror
Who do we believe? How do we behave? These are questions I hold as we watch President Bush make his case for war. Our Department of Homeland Security recently placed us on “high alert/code orange,” advised us to buy duct tape and cover our windows with plastic, then in the same breath told us not […]
Posted inWotr
We need a shoe to drop on climate change
In 1999, Hurricane Mitch, which had lost most of its kick by the time it reached Honduras, still killed more than 10,000 people as a result of intense flooding, making it the biggest storm-related disaster in Central American history. A year later, 25,000 people died in Venezuelan rainstorms, the greatest such disaster in South America, […]
Posted inWotr
Everybody’s a greenie now
Suddenly, everybody’s green: developers, who believe a golf course pond is good for wildlife, ski resort managers, who want to use recycled water to make artificial snow, absentee owners, who want to cut everything in sight in the name of fire prevention, though they spend a weekend a year in their Southwest trophy homes. Or […]
Posted inWotr
The Bush administration is doing something right on fire policy
There isn’t much I can praise about the Bush administration’s approach to Western resource issues. But its instincts on firefighting policy are just about right. If it can fill in its knee-jerk act of cutting the budget with a sound, long-term policy, it could lead the West out of a quagmire that has been deepening […]
Posted inWotr
Wyoming lives uneasily with big game and big equipment
As meat lockers go, this corner of northwestern Wyoming is one of the prettiest on earth. Behind me, as I sit on this sage-covered bluff, is a great horseshoe of snow-dusted peaks: the Wind Rivers, the Gros Ventres, the Wyoming Range. Ahead lies the Upper Green River Valley: empty, vast and skeined with moving lines […]
Posted inWotr
Water principles of the West begin with blaming California
Like the rest of the West, Colorado suffers from a multi-year drought. Drought, in case you’re curious, is one of those technical terms for what happens when you have enough water for 1 million residents, but not enough for 4 million, let alone the 10 million that the developers would like to see. What might […]
Posted inWotr
Snowmobilers need to police their bad apples
A recent story in my local newspaper, headlined “Snowmobiler says riders endure hate” made me sit up straight. The article quoted Clark Collins of the Idaho-based BlueRibbon Coalition, who said that snowmobilers have become victims of a campaign “akin to any other hate campaign against ethnic or religious groups.” Mr. Collins’ comments interest me because […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Get off and walk – wilderness is for wildlife
Like many mountain bikers, I’m happiest when I’m charging up and down hills through the West’s spectacular public lands. I live in Durango, Colo., arguably the mountain bike capital of the world, and I ride every day. While I’ve spent most of my cycling years on roads, in the last five years I’ve been spending […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Let bikers in, and we’ll stand behind wilderness
I’m a mountain bicyclist. The pleasure of my life is pedaling through wild places, experiencing the views, the changing colors and textures of the plant life, the occasional animal sightings. On the trail, I’m renewed, and my commitment to public-land preservation is strengthened. I think that’s the way most mountain bikers feel, and historically, we’ve […]
Posted inWotr
A report from Nebraska, deep in drought
We’re dying out here. Thirsty grasses crunch underfoot, ground into sand that hasn’t gathered sufficient moisture to generate seed for new growth. Dried water holes wear wrinkled remnants of last summer’s mud, and powdery alkali sifts in our ever-present wind. Topsoil flies skyward from fields that never should have seen a plow. It’s a familiar […]
Posted inWotr
Lake Powell: Going, going, gone?
Who would have believed it? Water levels at Lake Powell have dropped to 50 percent for the first time since it filled in 1980. This draining is likely to continue to the point where the reservoir could vanish in the next three-to-four years. With snowpacks below 25 percent of normal, and continued warnings from the […]
Posted inWotr
For wet or for dry
I was pushed out of New York 30 years ago. I couldn’t take the city as it was, and I couldn’t change to meet New York on its terms. We moved to Colorado, where a mountain loomed in our backyard. There were challenges, of course. A tiny coal-mining town is alien to someone raised on […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson in engagement from Mary Page Stegner
Who do we believe? How do we behave? These are questions I hold as we watch President Bush make his case for war. Our Department of Homeland Security recently placed us on “high alert/code orange,” advised us to buy duct tape and cover our windows with plastic, then in the same breath told us not […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson in aridity from Wallace Stegner
The wisest man and best writer the West has produced was born this week 94 years ago. He died in 1993, but left us a massive inheritance, including Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Angle of Repose, Wolf Willow and From the Uneasy Chair. You can celebrate his Feb. 18 birthday by reading one of these books […]
Posted inWotr
Of Western myth and jackalopes
“Are there jackalope around here?” the dude from Chicago asked. “Well, up here there’s too much elevation. They’re down on the sagebrush flats.” from Jackalope by Hilda Volk On Jan. 6, 2003, the West lost one of its great mythmakers, 82-year-old Douglas Herrick, of Casper, Wyo. No, Herrick wasn’t a writer, an artist, or a […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
It’s time for a new law of the river
On New Year’s Eve, the normally placid pumping station of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California at Lake Havasu felt tense. Armed security guards on the scene since 9/11 seemed grim, and tourists seeking bird-watching information were turned away. It recalled those old black-and-white pictures from when Owens Valley farmers blew up the original […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
On the road with Cactus Ed
One day early in the 1970s, Ed Abbey and I were cruising along a southern Utah highway in a forest-green Chevy that had rolled off the assembly line some 20 years before. Ed had given a friend $100 for it in the spring and we were both pleased that it was still running now, early […]