The most recent illegal migrant I’ve met was named Marvín Leonel Contreras. I spotted the 22-year-old during an early morning hike in the Santa Cruz River valley below my home in Rio Rico, Ariz. He was limping up the center of the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. When he spotted me, he waved and smiled. He […]
Writers on the Range
Posted inWotr
A rational response to wildfires
As summer weather breaks in the West and ushers in a cool and moist fall, all of us are breathing a sigh of relief. At the same time we cannot avoid being haunted by the question of whether there is something we ought to be doing to reduce the wildfire threat. Any rational response to […]
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Run before dawn and other advice from a Native American elder
Born in 1896, Margaret King sits on her cot like a stained glass sculpture. If you parted the Bluebird Flour sack curtains from the window of her HUD house and held all 60 pounds of her up to the sun, purples, reds, blues, yellows and browns would stream through her parchment skin. Her ferocious eyes […]
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Some trees inspire true love
This is a love story about a small number of scientists and some pine trees in North America. I do not know if any hugging has taken place between the trees and the scientists, but tears of loss have been shed. Biologist Diana Tomback got to know the trees as a young graduate student, and […]
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Hell’s mountains are in the Northern Rockies
If Hell has mountains, they must look like the Northern Rockies. As my fire spotter and I fly an insignificantly small airplane over our territory in western Montana, we weave through brown tendrils of wind-shredded smoke that curl around granite peaks. Sudden explosions of dark ash rise into the air above stands of trees as […]
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Free Hetch Hetchy!
To the members of a nonprofit group called Restore Hetch Hetchy, one solution to overcrowding in Yosemite Valley in California seems obvious: Create a duplicate of that enormously popular attraction, complete with its own spectacular waterfalls and soaring granite cliffs. The proposal would not require a team of theme-park engineers to execute since a natural […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
From Washington, D.C., comes a new spoils system
Under the guise of flexibility, the Bush administration is quietly engineering a corporate takeover of government. President Bush has ordered all federal agencies to solicit bids from private corporations to replace 425,000 civil service jobs by the next election. That’s nearly one-quarter of the entire permanent federal workforce. The National Park Service has been one […]
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A letter to a rancher named George Bush
Dear Mr. President: We’re back in an energy boom in parts of the West, and this made me wonder how a rancher like yourself might feel if geologists discovered an enormous pocket of natural gas beneath your spread in Texas. What if the story got out, and the press corps suddenly appeared at your Western […]
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T-shirt etiquette confounds and confuses
“Just grab a shirt and let’s go,” my girlfriend said. But I hesitated. We were going whitewater rafting with her mother, and the top T-shirt in my drawer proclaimed its wearer an “Uneducated Idiot.” Somehow it didn’t seem a wise message. The moment has resonated with me, in part because I live near Yellowstone National […]
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Small farmers seek refuge in the city
Squeezed out of their traditional outlets by larger growers and global competition, Oregon’s small farmers are seeking refuge in the cities. They’re selling directly to customers at farmer’s markets–and, in the process, helping urbanites reconnect with the source of their food. “This is the farmer’s only hope, the only way we can make a living […]
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The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Route 666 is fading in the distance. That stepson of the Mother Road –Route 66 –is headed toward oblivion. That’s a shame, because for me, like plenty of pavement pilgrims who arrived in the West over the last half-century in RVs, SUVs or astride Harleys, the Devil’s Highway was the road into God’s Country. U.S. […]
Posted inWotr
From Washington, D.C., comes a new spoils system
Under the guise of flexibility, the Bush administration is quietly engineering a corporate takeover of government. President Bush has ordered all federal agencies to solicit bids from private corporations to replace 425,000 civil service jobs by the next election. That’s nearly one-quarter of the entire permanent federal workforce. The National Park Service has been one […]
Posted inWotr
The Bush administration is moving to mine our heritage
By any standard political measure, July was not the best of times for the protection of the last remaining wild places in this country. On July 16 came a ruling by a Wyoming court challenging the legality of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule — a policy to protect 58.5 million acres of untrammeled national forests […]
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The strange allure of tipsy trips in Montana
Drinking and driving in Montana has begun to be something of a cliché. Locals tell out-of-state newspapers that we measure distances in beers. A Los Angeles Times story a few months ago included a quote from Bill Muhs of Bozeman: “Bozeman to Billings is a six-pack drive…. Crossing the state would be a whole case.” […]
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One way to get rid of Lake Powell
What’s in a name? Controversy, as I learned about 25 years ago when I began editing a newspaper in Breckenridge, Colo. I called one local attraction what I’d always called it — “Dillon Reservoir.” The nearby Dillon Chamber of Commerce told me that it was scenic “Lake Dillon.” I argued that it was not a […]
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When does a deer become an elk? And other questions…
At what point did moose become marvels, bears become monsters and a 300-yard walk get to be strenuous? When did the human eye need a digital camera to properly experience the unimaginable proportions of the West? While working for the Park Service at Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah, and now for a concessionaire […]
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We keep dousing wildfires with money
Judged solely by headlines and political rhetoric, summer in the West has become a war zone of wildfire. The image is no longer of family picnics at the lake. The lake is busy filling giant buckets dangling from helicopters, which dump their taxpayer-funded loads onto fires that could not care less. One critic remarks that […]
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The EPA needs an urban pit bull
You walk past a wrecking yard and see on the other side of a high, chain link fence, not a pit bull with a mouth full of teeth but a goldfish in a tank. That”s the image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It”s a nomination […]
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Extinction — by the clock
It isn’t easy being a cheerleader for a bottom-feeder, but I’m feeling up for the task. Montana’s two varieties of sturgeon — a miraculous, prehistoric fish that feeds at the bottom of lakes and rivers –have recently been given an expiration date — an official prediction of when they will go extinct. A doomsday clock […]
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Searching for the true causes of the West’s fire problems
By now we’ve all heard — oh, how often have we heard –that a century of fire suppression has created a buildup of fuels that threatens an inferno across the forests of the West. Forest Service officials, once happy to pose for photos with Smokey Bear, now give grim news conferences to announce that natural […]