The Magazine

A four-year drought has humbled the Missouri River and plunged its 10 basin states into a sour quarrel with one another and the Army Corps of Engineers, the river’s federal boss.

The death of Denver’s Two Forks dam project has turned the state’s archetypal Western water establishment on its head.

The Pacific Northwest’s dawning power shortage is adding new impetus to build more hydroelectric dams in Idaho, while the state bills itself as ‘the whitewater capital of the world.’

In the absence of any comprehensive national strategy to handle predatory animals, the Agriculture Department’s Animal Damage Control branch has emerged as the one program to determine the fate of American predators. It does this primarily by killing them.

The Western Shoshone look homeward to Ruby Valley, Nevada.

The $590 million Animas-La Plata water project Congress reauthorized in 1988 continues to generate controversy in Colorado.

The question is whether the grizzly can take recovery on paper and turn it into recovery in the wild. The answer, it now appears, is not entirely up to the bear.

The Northwest rediscovers its ancient forests.

Economic changes and environmental concerns are beginning to force state game and fish departments to accept the more ambitious mission of preserving biological diversity.

A growing grassroots concern for the environment is driving the West’s 1990 elections. See state-by-state election coverage.

Rocky Mountain states bet on pipelines to get gas to the burgeoning California market.

The ski industry, once welcomed in the West, is turning into a pariah.

Is the rural West becoming a dumping ground for toxic waste and garbage?

Midvale, Wyo., farmers worry after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed last year that the tribes of the Wind River Reservation have rights to over 500,000 acre-feet of water.

The Navajos, like most reservation Indians, have historically been excluded from county politics by a mix of subtle and not-so-subtle barriers. But now they are creating a new political force.

While politicians, scientists and bureaucrats argue over reintroduction of the wolf to the western United States, the animals have moved south into Montana to occupy long-vacant habitat.

A corner of Nevada is the last stronghold of the Sagebrush Rebels — the group that sought to transfer public land into private hands in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In a Navajo community of 1,000 just west of the New Mexico state line, many families are trying to cope with the loss of loved ones and the sight of numerous others slowly dying from lung cancer.

The 1872 Mining Law continues to exert inordinate power over development of the West’s public lands.

The city’s boom could come to a screeching halt in as little as four years unless Las Vegas gets more water.