I am in school, watching a grown man cry. He works at a clinic in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border. He tells me and 22 other visiting college students what happened to local farmers one season, when the federal government shut off their irrigation water to protect endangered fish during a drought. He […]
Features
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Oil and gas companies pour money into research universities
Northwest Colorado’s Piceance Basin — 5 million acres framed by cliffs and hogbacked mountains — overlies roughly 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to supply the nation for 50 years. It’s also ideal mule deer habitat; state wildlife managers once called it “the deer factory.” But as drilling ramps up, deer numbers plummet. […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Oil boom spurs a rush on extractive education programs
Last May, Russell Carr crammed his possessions into his 4Runner and drove 30 hours to North Dakota, seeking a new start. The strapping 22-year-old had just earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Nevada, in his hometown, Reno, but the local firm he’d been courting offered a starting wage of only $17 […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A mining rush in Canada’s backcountry threatens Alaska salmon
Last summer, John Grace, one of the world’s elite kayakers, traveled more than 3,000 miles from his North Carolina home into the wild northwest corner of British Columbia, to explore the Iskut River. It’s the biggest tributary of the Stikine River, which flows all the way to the Alaska panhandle coast, and together they’re the […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
As it goes high-tech, wildlife biology loses its soul
In 1978, I was researching one of my first wildlife stories, working along the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwestern Montana, one of the wildest places in the Lower 48. A wolf was believed to be prowling into Montana from British Columbia –– an important discovery if true, because wolves had been absent […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
A Washington tribe and a timber company wrestle over a forest’s future
Updated 11/30/12 The Indian chief and the timber agent meet near the shores of Port Gamble Bay. The spring air is cool and breezy along this small and sheltered nook of northwest Washington’s Puget Sound. Inside the room where the two men sit side-by-side, the atmosphere is civil, yet tense, as they discuss their separate […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Is there a way through the West’s bitter wild horse wars?
On a sunny spring day, T.J. Holmes creeps up a dusty arroyo in southwestern Colorado. The 41-year-old former journalist and mountain-bike champ wears beat-up jeans, her blonde curls unfurling from a sun-bleached visor and a big gun slung over one shoulder. The chalky hills of Disappointment Valley look as if they deserve their name. This […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
How the Mormon GOP runs Utah with a collectivist touch
“Our object is to labor for the benefit of the whole …” –Brigham Young, 1873 A throng of cars floats down Interstate 15 on an end-of-summer morning, the rising sun wreathed in the orange gauze of distant wildfire smoke. In Lehi, a suburb sandwiched between Salt Lake City and Provo, a massive steel-and-glass shape juts […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The soul in Suite 100: A ghost story
I am from, as they say, an “old” New Mexico Anglo family. I did not grow up in New Mexico, but have always thought myself from there — tied to the place by blood and property and predilection, and by the way the smell of sagebrush and cast of light remind me that I am […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The fossil record: How my family found a home in the West
When I was a kid, I sometimes wished that my family went on normal vacations. Normal was what my elementary and middle-school classmates did over spring and summer break, flying to wave-kissed beaches or hitting flashy amusement parks. Not my family: My parents would load my two half-sisters, my brother and me into a big […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Vagabond writer Craig Childs on 20,000 years of wanderlust
Savoonga is the place to be on the Fourth of July. The village is a cluster of roofs on the north side of St. Lawrence Island, a treeless hump of capes and dormant volcanoes rising out of the Bering Sea, battered by Arctic weather. The Native Yup’iks here celebrate the holiday with more gusto than […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Can pallid sturgeon hang on in the overworked Missouri River?
Chrrrrp, chrrrp: Our headphones echo with the tinny peeps of a radio-tagged pallid sturgeon (Scaphyrincus albus). Dave Fuller, a Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries technician, maneuvers the jet boat up and down the Missouri River on a beautiful October day. The sapphire sky has yet to succumb to winter’s haze, and the […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Great Basin scientists unleash new weapons to fight invasive cheatgrass
This guy is lovely!” ecologist Beth Leger exclaims, falling to her knees. A tiny, energetic woman in her mid-30s, Leger hovers, bee-like, over a teensy grass with blue-green blades. It is, she tells me, a “cute” native called Poa secunda. It’s early May, and Leger, graduate student Owen Baughman and I are crouched on Peavine […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Who is Denny Rehberg, really?
The three candidates look too formal for Montana, dressed in suits and neckties for the first debate in the state’s most important race this election season. But the setting is classic Montana: A pine-paneled room in a lodge on the edge of the Big Sky ski resort, beside a trout-filled river surrounded by mid-June wildflowers. […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Troubled Taos, torn apart by a battle over historic Hispano land grants
Taos, New Mexico On a cloudless June day, Ernest Romero and I are parked on a ridge top in front of a home that gazes out over scenic northern New Mexico. The 2,200-square-foot adobe sits on three acres of piñon forest and is quintessentially Southwestern, with sand-colored walls complemented by sky-blue trim, wooden beams and […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
The Salt Pond Puzzle: Restoring South San Francisco Bay
FREMONT, CALIFORNIA We were on patrol. Caitlin Robinson-Nilsen, a young biologist in shades and a ponytail, steered the 4WD Explorer along a muddy levee in Fremont, Calif., and I rode shotgun, staying vigilant. She surveys snowy plovers –– adorable, six-inch, two-ounce, skittering shorebirds, with black collars and eye-patches –– as the waterbird program director for […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Can the outdoor gear industry wield its power for conservation?
For the people drifting in rafts and kayaks through the vast silence of Desolation Canyon, the circling plane must have been a puzzle. A King Air turbo prop, it flew low over the canyon rim, dipping its wings to make wide loops over the Tavaputs Plateau and the Green River. Below, boaters slid along the […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
The Quileute Reservation copes with tourists brought by “Twilight”
Five Quileute boys emerge from a phalanx of drummers. Barefoot and bare-chested, they wear black cloaks and wolf headdresses, and dance, crouch and crawl within the center of a large circle. On the outskirts, women and girls move rhythmically to a chant and steady drumbeat, several of them sporting red and black capes emblazoned with […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
The Atlas of the Industrial West
Ever wanted to tour a wind farm, a giant dam or an oil and gas field? This map will help. Click on the icon of the industrial site nearest you for a bit about the site and tours, if offered, along with a link to more information. Purple = oil & gas; Aqua = dams […]