The Bonneville Salt Flats: Two Decades of Photography by Peter Vincent Peter Vincent with essays by Peter de Lory, Philip Linhares, Tom Fritz and others, 272 pages, hardcover: $85. Stance & Speed. 2013. “Salt fever”: That’s what drives thousands of people each year to gather with their hotrods, cars and motorcycles on the Utah-Nevada border, […]
Nevada
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
Reflecting on groundwater from the Owens Valley Watershed
Growing up in the high desert, I learned water doesn’t just fall from the sky.
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Timeline: The BLM vs. Cliven Bundy
A detailed history of the conflict, starting in 1953.
Posted inArticles
Public Record: Cliven Bundy
Court and federal documents chronicle a long history of grazing battles.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
International Car Forest of the Last Church
For a strange trip, check out Nevada’s otherworldly Stonehenge of wildly painted abandoned vehicles.
Posted inGoat
Rancher vs the BLM: A 20-year standoff ends with tense roundup
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Cliven Bundy says, ‘the BLM don’t exist.’
Posted inGoat
Four women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did. It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Go West, clean megawatts
Nevada stakes its renewable energy future on California.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Fallon, Nevada’s deadly legacy
In a small town once plagued by childhood cancer, some families still search for answers.
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
The Vegas Paradox
In Sin City, excess and efficiency walk hand-in-hand.
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
A bighorn sheep comes through the window, $500K left in airport change buckets, and more.
MONTANAMaybe blind belligerence is just “a guy thing,” or so Lori Silcher concluded after a male bighorn sheep crashed through windows of her rural home in Hamilton, Mont. “All of a sudden, we all felt the house shake and there was a resounding thud,” recalls her husband, Peter, who at first thought someone in his […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
In defense of bibliopedestrianism
A writer’s love of reading while walking in Nevada’s Great Basin desert.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The world of the speed artist
The FlamethrowersRachel Kushner400 pages, hardcover: $26.99.Scribner, 2013. Reno, the 22-year-old protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, makes her first appearance as she flies across Nevada on her way to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s. “The land was drained of color and specificity,” she observes. “The faster I went, the more connected […]
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
The Latest: A gold tax in the Silver State?
BackstoryNevada’s tax on mining was set in its 1864 Constitution at “a rate not to exceed 5 percent of the net proceeds,” and never fundamentally changed — even with recently skyrocketing gold prices in a state desperate for revenue. Advocates for a higher mining tax have for years been frustrated by legislators unwilling to go […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Parched lives in a parched land: A review of the Ordinary Truth
The Ordinary TruthJana Richman375 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2012. Traditionally, springs and wells are centers of life around which people gather and sometimes form communities. In Utah author Jana Richman’s second novel, The Ordinary Truth, metropolitan claims to desert waters unsettle a small town and pit one family’s members against each other. Shifting between […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Secret getaways of the National Landscape Conservation System
Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. Updated 4/9/13 The only map I have shows the way out of Las Vegas — always a good thing to know. It is crisp and folded-up on the passenger seat and it says to take the eastbound interstate, […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
BLM “ecosanctuaries” unlikely to provide relief for wild horses
On a crisp May morning, Madeleine Pickens, a 65-year-old businesswoman and the soon-to-be-ex-wife of billionaire financier T. Boone Pickens, steps out onto the weathered porch of her old Nevada ranch house wearing taut white riding pants, suede boots and movie-star glasses under glossy platinum hair. She points briskly, using a dachshund mix named Tommy that […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: Goodbye, listeners
Hi podcast listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Rants from the Hill podcast for the past 6 months. We recently decided to discontinue our podcasts due to staffing limitations at High Country News. But never fear, you can still read the Rants from the Hill online, at HCN.org, on the first Monday […]
Posted inWotr
Nevada, face down and flailing
Suddenly, this election season, state politicians in Nevada are refusing to sign the pledge – the one anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist has been foisting upon conservative candidates and lawmakers for years. It requires the faithful to swear that they will never, ever raise taxes. Many signers surely believe in it; others sign for fear of […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
As goes Nevada, so goes the nation?
Updated 10/30/12 Twenty-seven days before the general election, northern Nevada state Sen. Greg Brower pleaded a case before a roomful of ardent conservatives that sounded suspiciously moderate. “We can’t survive without any taxes and regulation,” the Washoe County Republican told a women’s club at the Nugget Hotel in Sparks. He acknowledged that he considers power-sharing […]