But will California’s platforms stay in the ocean once the oil runs out?
Fish
Posted inArticles
Watershed moment
The U.S. and Canada prepare to renegotiate the 50-year-old Columbia River Treaty.
Posted inSeptember 1, 2014: Lost in the Woods
The Latest: Ruptured tailings pond spills waste in Canada
Backstory In the remote northwestern corner of British Columbia, next to Alaska, plans for large mining and hydropower projects have sounded alarm bells on both sides of the border. Critics, mostly environmentalists and tribes, warned that Canada’s resource rush threatens rivers that support a vital wild salmon fishery in both countries, and that the race […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
Alaska’s Uncertain Food Future
Climate change in the Far North puts traditional food sources at risk.
Posted inGoat
Is Canada’s massive mine waste spill a sign of things to come?
From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a […]
Posted inGoat
Washington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t. Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many […]
Posted inArticles
What’s killing the Yukon’s salmon?
An ecological mystery in Alaska has scientists and fishermen baffled and alarmed.
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Salmon go down the tubes – literally
Washington biologists test pressurized tubes to transport salmon over dams.
Posted inGoat
Reasons for massive starfish dieoff still unknown
Here’s some shocking news: Since last fall, when I first wrote about Pacific sea stars falling victim to a mysterious disease, turning into goo and dying, the aptly-named “starfish wasting syndrome” has not – as scientists hoped – subsided on its own. It’s gotten much, much worse. How much worse, you ask? Well, from the […]
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
The Latest: After a long battle, agreement for the Klamath
BackstoryTo protect endangered fish during 2001’s drought, federal officials shut off irrigation water in Oregon and California’s Klamath Basin, costing agriculture millions. The next year, farmers got their water – along with a massive salmon die-off that infuriated Klamath tribes. Tribal members and farmers remained at odds until 2004, when federal rulings prompted dam-owner PacifiCorp […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Brine shrimp by the billions in the Great Salt Lake
Why is this shrimp fishery nearly conflict-free?
Posted inArticles
Will our ‘dam nation’ free its rivers?
A new film explores a growing movement to remove dams that have outlived their usefulness.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Genetic techniques turn up new species – and help conservation
The discovery of a small fish in Montana and Idaho may have big implications.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
A Japanese fly-fishing art comes to life
Centuries-old tenkara is becoming a hit on streams in the American West.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
49 trout streams of southern Colorado
49 Trout Streams of Southern Colorado Mark D. Williams and W. Chad McPhail, 120 pages, softcover:$27.95. University of New Mexico Press. 2013. For southern Colorado anglers in search of plentiful, hard-fighting trout, getting to gold-medal waters is the easy part: there’s the Gunnison, the Frying Pan, and the Animas, to name a few. But as […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
The great Flathead fish fiasco
State and tribes disagree over how to tackle an exotic species’ takeover of a Montana lake.
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Location matters in the war on lake trout
Lake trout aren’t just found in low-elevation lakes with large recreational fisheries, like Montana’s Flathead Lake. For more than two decades, they have thrived in the crystalline, icy waters of Yellowstone Lake, in the heart of Yellowstone National Park. Biologists believe someone introduced lake trout to Yellowstone Lake back in the 1980s. Since then, the […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
Hard lessons from the mighty salmon runs of Bristol Bay
The world’s longest ongoing salmon research reveals the astounding complexity of wild ecosystems.
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 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 […]