The Magazine

Part 2 of The Reopening of the Western Frontier, a four-issue series exploring the West’s changing economic and cultural landscape.

Thanks to a mixture of geography, climate and natural resources, the rural West became the domain of a particular way of life that has lasted for 100 years. But today its economies are in retreat, and the Western frontier is reopening.

After nearly a century of neglect and vandalism, an area called Fourmile Ruin near Taylor, Ariz., is being excavated, not in a search for information about its original inhabitants but for its valuable pottery.

How do you explain what it is like to be able to walk five miles in any direction from town and find a rubble mound or masonry ruin?

A plan to invigorate the state’s economy by taking sewage ash from the Twin Cities backfires.

All is not well with the nation’s first planned nuclear-waste dump, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project.

Like lines drawn in the sand, the borders of America’s national parks have not prevented the crowding and shoving of neighboring public and private landowners.

A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court opens up an old account and allows the tribe to set its own coal tax rates.

Along Idaho’s Snake River, military war-games run up against the densest known concentration of nesting raptors in the world.

The proposed project has become a national issue, with environmental and citizens groups facing off against water planners.

An in-depth issue on The Nature Conservancy and Earth First!

Church Universal and Triumphant stirs controversy on the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park.

At issue in southern Arizona and elsewhere is a continuing debate over what to do about a form of recreation that is growing so rapidly that officials feel helpless.

The Clark Fork of the Columbia has been neglected and abused for decades, and is only now gaining the attention of people who are determined to bring it back to life.

Efforts to correct problems with oil and gas leasing on public lands have produced a confusing and often contradictory welter of legislation and court decisions that have left central issues unresolved.

Their hope for the future rests on the fact that the U.S. government took their land by imposing a fraudulent treaty on them in 1877 — the same year that Crazy Horse was killed by a bayonet-wielding soldier.

The state’s richest man, industrialist J.R. Simplot, announced in late December that he wants to build 100 coal-fired power plants along the Snake River over the next 50 years.

While there is hope that the grizzly is nearing recovery in the short term, most scientists remain worried about the long haul.

Congress considers a little-known bill — the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act — that would guard the thousands of caves underlying public lands from vandalism and other forms of destruction.

Dennis Washington’s Montana Rail Link takes over 900 miles of track from Burlington Northern, prompting picketing (and possibly sabotage) by workers.