This weekend, I sweated up to the top of Oh-Be-Joyful pass, a charmingly named ridge in Raggeds Wilderness near the town of Paonia, where I live. From there, my comrades and I could see mountains upon mountains — and way down below, the green slash of the valley where we live. Forty years ago, the […]
Wildlife
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Save a chimney, save a swift
Doesn’t look like it’s going to be a great night,” Larry Schwitters says, sitting in his car outside the Old Selleck Schoolhouse, about 40 miles southeast of Seattle. It’s nearly sunset, the sky is cloudless and warm. “It’s too nice for swifts,” he grouses. “If there were going to be a lot of them, they’d […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Smokey Bear: From cute to buff, and in between
The icon’s many images changed over the years alongside the Forest Service’s changing attitudes toward wildfire.
Posted inGoat
Beetle Evolution
The tamarisk leaf beetle is an unlikely citizen of Utah. And until recently it wasn’t found there. The tamarisk-munching bugs that now inhabit Utah, Colorado, and other parts of the West have their roots in Eurasia and hail from northwestern China and Kazakhstan. Scientists brought their ancestors to the U.S. in 2001 and set them […]
Posted inGoat
Got rabies: skunks are top carrier in Colorado
Skunks get a bad rap. Of course, not every animal douses targets with rancid juice from their anal glands from 10 feet away, so perhaps it is deserved. In Colorado the striped mammals have recently earned a new form of notoriety that adds to their stinky status: They’ve jumped into the lead as the main […]
Posted inGoat
Critical habitat under scrutiny
Endangered leatherback sea turtles can thank the Endangered Species Act for the government’s decision to add a chunk of ocean on the West Coast to their protected habitat earlier this year. In January, the feds expanded the graceful sea dweller’s critical habit to 41,914 salty square miles off California, Oregon and Washington. The leatherback is […]
Posted inArticles
On the prowl with Oregon’s pygmy owls
On his first Father’s Day as a parent, John Deshler is in Portland’s Forest Park. When I called several days ago, he was checking on a northern pygmy-owl nest site, carrying 5-month Henley with him. “My baby’s been good luck,” Deshler says. “I don’t bring her out here very often, but we did find a […]
Posted inWotr
A different voice on the phone
The television and photos he posts online show a wall of flames, smoke plumes billowing in the air like ominous storm clouds. It’s hot as hell outside, with record high heat, and the wind is blowing. And my young son is out there on a fire line somewhere, because much of the state of Colorado […]
Posted inWotr
Bison deserve a home on the range
You sleeping relick of the pastif I but had my wayI’d cloth(e) your framewith meat and hidean(d) wake you up to day. – C.M. Russell, 1908 Montana cowboy artist and favorite son Charles M. Russell penned those wistful words underneath a sketch he made of a sun-bleached buffalo skull poking through prairie grass. But that was 104 years […]
Posted inWotr
Safari Club and the NRA aim to gut wilderness
This April 17, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, which promised “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting.” Actually, this bill takes an ax to the 1964 Wilderness Act. Over 30 House Democrats voted in favor of H.R. 4089 because they did not want to be seen as “anti-hunting.” Now, our U. S. […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: more wildfires and lizards
Here’s the High Country NewsBurning Man story you all have been waiting for. Thousands of scantly clothed artists and gypsies voyage out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for a week to build a city, burn a hundred-foot, wooden man and vanish without a trace. BLM offices in Winnemucca, Nevada, which manage permits for […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Surveying the oft-snubbed (and very cool) spider with citizen scientists
It’s Saturday morning in early May at the Bluff Lake Nature Center, a modest suburban oasis in northeast Denver. An eager posse of spider hunters clusters around its intrepid leader, Paula Cushing, a petite woman with a dark braid, deep-set eyes and a fearless affection for eight-legged creatures. “Without spiders, we’d be up to our […]
Posted inWotr
Fire on the mountain
I have grown accustomed to stinging eyes, an itchy nose and a raw throat. Smoke is always heavy in the air, especially in the morning after cool nights have pushed it down to the deepest part of the Gila River Valley, where I live. Despite all this, I have to confess that I take some […]
Posted inGoat
Temporal shift
But a recent study published in the current issue of the journal Ecology suggests that the Earth’s warming climate is jeopardizing the bird and lily’s temporal bond. According to the researchers, earlier snowmelt in the mountains (brought on by warming temperatures) has, in turn, led to a blooming shift in the lily, the first blossoms […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
L.A.’s wild underbelly
By publishing such an indispensable, comprehensive account of an issue that has been all but forgotten by local news organizations, HCN has filled a critical role in keeping an accurate narrative of the sediment management issue in Los Angeles alive and well (HCN, 5/14/12, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”). As Emily Green so eloquently explained, […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Let gravity do its thing
This round of the sediment management plan won’t provide a sustainable solution to the problem (HCN, 5/14/12, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”). But now is a good time to make the case for long-term solutions. For that, we’re going to have to rethink the flood control system, or rather, remember it as a functioning riparian […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
On the hunt for abalone poachers in Northern California
Last spring, Don Powers steered his government-issue pickup down Highway 1, the thin ribbon of blacktop that hugs California’s North Coast. The sun shone bright, the scent of salt hung on the wind, and the world felt rapturous. In fact, a crackpot preacher Harold Camping had prophesied that the Rapture would actually take place then […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Three cheers for Emily Green
You have done us all a great service by publishing a very important story about the oak woodland and the sediment dump (HCN, 5/14/12, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”). I consider myself a member of the “environmental” community in Southern California, and I am an avid HCN reader. It is good to see a piece […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
Dancing with wolverines
When a wolverine splayed his huge clawed paw onto my shoulder, the tip of each powerful nail pressing firmly, I was filled with a reckless elation. But I remained still, because I recalled that wolverines have a special molar angled sharply inward that allows them to tear muscle and hide from carrion, pulverize bone. A […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: wildfires and water depletion
If only Billie Holiday were here to sing that solemn “Summertime” song. The living is easy compared to winter, but the environment for this week’s Roundup is harsh. Wildfire broke out across the West, especially in New Mexico, where the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire has burned 190,262 acres, and as of yesterday at 4:30 p.m., […]