The Magazine

A special issue on Colorado, with articles on the oil shale boom on Battlement Mesa, dueling small-town newspapers, Colorado politics, and Denver’s waster policy.

Bureau of Land Management head Bob Burford scares conservationists and tips the scales of management toward greater development of BLM land.

A special issue on Montana, with articles on the Rocky Mountain Front, the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, cattle and coal, and Anaconda’s bars.

One thousand miles upriver from Mexico’s farmers, in Colorado’s Grand Valley, the federal effort to control salinity is floundering.

Excerpts from Edward Abbey’s introduction to a new edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, plus articles on industrial revenue bonds, James Watt and more.

Since the completion of the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan in 1980, a team of biologists has been working to re-establish breeding populations of wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Favoring bigger trains, Burlington Northern will discontinue rail service to small agricultural communities like Rapelje, Montana.

HCN editor Dan Whipple follows a cattle drive in Utah’s Uinta Mountains.

The focus of Colorado River controversy is a federal plan to meet increased electrical power needs by expanding generation at Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream of Grand Canyon National Park.

When the Anaconda Copper Co. closed its Anaconda, Mont., smelter in October, the community appealed to the state for help in keeping the town alive. But the state’s response has been disappointing.

A natural gas boom around Evanston, Wyoming, has brought a rise in violent crime, traffic and disintegration of rural culture, but funds set aside to mitigate the impacts haven’t been properly applied.

A proposal to retrofit a high-mountain dam near Aspen, Colorado is one of dozens of potential hydropower projects in the Rocky Mountain Region.

The U.S. Department of Energy makes so many secret shipments of nuclear weapons components each year that there are a likely a dozen or more convoys on the road on some days.

A farm near Boulder, Colorado illustrates the challenges of passing family farms on to future generations, and of the hurdles to young farmers in general.

Sabotage of an oil and gas exploration rig outside Jackson, Wyoming, raises questions that divide the environmental community.

Inheritance taxes negate the rise in farmland value and consume some farms that would otherwise pass on to the farmers’ heirs, prompting efforts to reform tax laws.

In part one of a two-part series, a geologist from Colorado examines the future of oil shale in the Rocky Mountain region, exploring the properties of the oil-rich rock and the jockeying of energy companies for a piece of the action.

Recent reports of grizzly bears in Colorado may end the blanket denial of the grizzly’s presence there by state and federal officials.

The Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources, based in Bozeman, Montana, advocates for applying free market economic approaches to managing natural resources, including those on public lands.

The Colorado Department of Health has warned residents of Irondale, Colo., that their wells are contaminated with DBCP, a pesticide known to cause male sterility and possibly cancer.