In 1985, in mid-career, I went back to college. I wanted to be a range conservationist. At the time, I thought I was the only student who wanted to study range management so I could later have an excuse to chase cows on government time. Silly me. Even at granola-crunching, holistically groovy Humboldt State in […]
Writers on the Range
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
High Country Snooze
HCS publisher heaves fowl Joey Winterbottom, an intern who arrived last week, successfully administered the Heimlich maneuver to HCS publisher Ed Motown during a brown-bag staff meeting yesterday. Motown had noticed the meeting had gone two minutes over the designated hour and was trying to sigh conclusively to indicate it was over – a technique […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
How I learned to love logging
For a long time I was a critic of the Thunderbolt timber sale on the Payette and Boise national forests in Idaho. Its real name was the “Thunderbolt Watershed Restoration Project” because its intent, the public was told, was to help salmon. But it seemed like a timber sale since it called for 3,300 acres […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Tactics first, ideas last
Back when I was a college sophomore, a disillusioned freshman wrote to the campus newspaper: “It seems to me that this college is all about what’s going to be on the test and whether the professor is a hard grader. Where are the ideas and the passion?” He didn’t get ideas, but he did get […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
True portentousness on a Wyoming highway
A few months back I was heading along U.S. 30 east of Kemmerer. It was one of those amazing Wyoming spring evenings, a panorama of sky, sage and sun which encompassed me totally, so totally that it took me a few moments to realize I had pulled off the highway and was standing in a […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Federal negligence turns ordinary Montanans hostile
NOXON, Mont. – Until last spring, few people had heard of Noxon, Mont., a sleepy town in the morning shadows of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness. That changed after the Oklahoma City bombing and the media frenzy around citizen militias, including the Militia of Montana (MOM) based in Noxon. Now, most folks who have heard of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
One man’s good move
My father is impeccably urban. Except for a stint at boarding school in New England and a few summer jobs in the country – he was fired from one for accidentally hoeing the heads off a half-mile-long row of cabbage – he remained in New York almost his entire life. His tastes, his habits of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Separating sense from nonsense in New Mexico’s forests
Environmentalists in northern New Mexico have a chance to show their better side. Having brought things to a halt in the recent, unnecessary crisis over firewood on Carson National Forest (HCN, 12/25/95), they might now show they can start things that need to get started. The crisis resulted from a lawsuit over the Mexican spotted […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
…and the words from the meaning on the Nevada range
“We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” – W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Times of Civil War “This is a war we’re in. We’re choosing up sides,” thundered Gene Gustin, chairman of the public lands advisory committee for Elko County, Nev. Shouts of approval rose from a crowd of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Don’t just stand there: Get arrested
Everybody’s doing it – the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, former Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, the Sierra Club’s Charlie Ogle – all going to jail for trees and to stop salvage sales. Getting handcuffed and treated roughly by gendarmes. Paying a new, for them, sort of dues. Since our travels around the West put us in […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hanford: Boomtown of the atomic frontier
At the beginning of World War II, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr told American scientists that “to get the fissionable materials necessary to make a bomb, you’re going to have to turn the whole country into a factory.” He exaggerated, of course. The factory took up counties, not countries. The Hanford Engineering Works in a […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hunting: Get used to it
Let me state right off and as unapologetically as possible that I am a member of the “hook-and-bullet” press – a field editor of the venerable Outdoor Life magazine, which along with its sister publication, Field & Stream, are America’s original conservation magazines. Both have been in business since before the turn of the century, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A few modest principles to help us manage Utah’s public lands
It wasn’t every day that I got to speak at a chamber of commerce meeting, so I tried to be careful. But I must have shown a bit too much green or too many urban mannerisms, and one member of the audience came rushing over almost before I’d stopped talking. In seconds we were going […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
For this hunter, there was only one elk
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. It was mid-afternoon and the bowhunter found himself working up a small knob covered with thick, second-growth lodgepole pine. The knob was part of the north slope of a larger mountain not far from the Continental […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
I like to hunt, but I don’t like to kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. I always edge away from the subject of hunting. I’ve hunted and shall hunt, but I don’t talk about it much – those late-night, throaty recitations of travels and kills make me nervous. It’s miserable standing […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Why a son won’t hunt with his father
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. “You always kill coyotes,” my father would tell me, with a seriousness that both frightened and fascinated me. “Always. They are bad animals. You shoot them whenever you get the chance.” The words rang through my […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
By the grace of old pines
Fish Creek murmurs to itself in a voice like rustling cottonwood leaves as it curves past Montana’s biggest ponderosa pine on its way to the Clark Fork River. Sunlight animates the tree’s trunk and ripples on the underside of its lowest branch, 30 feet overhead. Its bark is a smooth sheath of gold flakes with […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Local land-use plan sabotaged by state
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – At night the lights of Steamboat Springs rise up from the Yampa River Valley by the thousands, advancing east toward Mount Werner like a small army laying siege to the ski lifts. At the eastern edge of town they end abruptly, running up against the dark mass of Emerald Mountain. The […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Agency leaders need to come out swinging
With a muffled thump, a small bomb ripped through Forest Service offices in Carson City, Nev., in late March, damaging walls and computer equipment. The damages were not just physical; for the men and women whose daily routines were shattered, the detonation had understandable psychological ramifications. There were political reverberations, too: Some public-land managers who […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Jury tackles a question of ethics in Montana
BILLINGS, Mont. – The three-day trial here last month of a man accused of shooting an endangered wolf ran like a morality play about the new American West and small-town Montana culture. This is a place where men enjoy their guns, hunting, beer and trucks, but as the accused, Chad McKittrick, soon discovered, there are […]