I am on my way to Kootenai Creek, a neighbor and laughing friend who spends all day, all year, all everything, tumbling down the western side of the Bitterroot Mountains in southwestern Montana. This is the edge of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, over a million acres of forest that stretches between Montana and Idaho. Kootenai Creek […]
Writers on the Range
Posted inArticles
We need new words for the Bakken boom
I live in western North Dakota in an area filled with life, from feisty small towns to wildlife, prairies, a national park and the national grasslands. But all of this has been buried underneath one simple term: The Bakken. The Bakken is the geological term for a shale formation of the same name that extends […]
Posted inArticles
Yes, wildlife contraception works
When my 12-year-old son encounters any phenomenon that doesn’t yet fit into his worldview, he’ll sometimes ask, “Dad, is that a ‘thing,’” meaning, is it something worth caring about? This isn’t just my son’s problem, of course; at times we all face bewildering novelty. And if it’s a thing like a new technology that makes […]
Posted inArticles
Wilderness at 50: A place to be free, a place to hide
No Place To Hide is the name of a new book by Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter who worked with whistleblower Edward Snowden to break the story on National Security Agency spying. The book’s title is drawn from commentary by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who held hearings in the 1970s that uncovered widespread domestic […]
Posted inArticles
Considering historical correctness in New Mexico
Kit Carson’s name is everywhere on maps of the West. Nevada’s capital city is named after him, and in California, a Carson Pass crosses the Sierra Nevada. Colorado has Carson County, a town named Kit Carson and 14,000-foot Kit Carson Peak. But was the man himself really worth honoring? A few years before Carson died […]
Posted inWotr
Secrecy never went away at Rocky Flats
June 6, 1989: In a dramatic, unprecedented raid on a federal nuclear facility, more than 70 U.S. agents burst into the sprawling Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver seeking evidence of environmental crimes involving radioactive plutonium. Led by FBI special agent Jon Lipsky, the raid was kept secret from Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and […]
Posted inWotr
A day on the river that ended in a death
I keep thinking about Mary, a woman I never met. I Googled her name looking for her obituary, but I kept getting the same headlines of the articles I’ve already read too many times: “Woman dies in Pine Creek rafting accident.” “Texas woman drowns while rafting the Arkansas River.” When her obituary is posted, I’m […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t pick up the leaverite!
Ranger Maureen McLean relies on her overwhelmingly gregarious nature to help visitors enjoy wildflower season at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. And the wildflowers depend on that good nature to survive being enjoyed by the visitors. Ranger McLean heads the Meadow Rovers, a volunteer group that patrols the most crowded parts of the Paradise […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
How to publish a newspaper in the midst of wildfire
Rural weekly newspapers remain vital to their communities, and as a publisher-editor, it’s my job to keep readers informed about and connected around the things that are important to them. So how do you respond when nearly every means of doing that job is wiped out in one superheated burst of flame? In mid-July, what […]
Posted inWotr
Who are the true Idaho conservatives?
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has worked hard for six years to turn the state’s Highway 12 into a corridor for sending massive, 200-foot-long mega-loads of heavy equipment to Alberta, Canada, for tar sands extraction. But it’s not working out. First, state court verdicts in Idaho and Montana, plus botched operations by mega-loads haulers, held things […]
Posted inWotr
Nebraska loves its cattle a little too much
On the surface, it sounded like good news: In 2013, Nebraska supplanted Texas as the No. 1 cattle-feeding state in the country. The numbers were impressive: Nebraska had 2.46 million cattle on feed, surpassing the 2.44 million in Texas, the longtime king of cattle. They had folks in the governor’s mansion and at Farm Bureau […]
Posted inWotr
I moved from New Mexico to Missoula and can’t believe the water waste
I am fairly new to Montana, and I now walk the streets of Missoula with an uncanny feeling that I’m a messenger from the future. No, I’m not a nut job claiming to hail from Mars or another galaxy. But I do come from a place that has become a mutated version of itself in […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
A once nomadic firefighter decides to stay put
There’s a wildfire burning three miles from my house. Sparked by lightning, the column of smoke went nuclear yesterday, pushing flame through deadfall on the rugged shoulder of Chief Joseph Mountain in northwestern Oregon. This is a mountain we climb and ski and hike, the place where, with a glance, we can see the elevation […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The Tea Party loses one in Colorado
John Pennington lost his primary election bid for sheriff of Mesa County, here in western Colorado, last month. I don’t know why he lost to Steve King, a former Republican state legislator who then canceled his own campaign due to a scandal, leaving the general election race wide-open for several new candidates. But I do […]
Posted inWotr
Why I am a Tea Party member
Every once in a while, someone asks me why I helped start the Tea Party in Bozeman, Montana. To make the story short, I say something like this: It was spring 2009, and I’d become increasingly disenchanted with both political parties’ support of rampant government overspending; I worried about its impact on our nation and […]
Posted inWotr
The battle for women’s suffrage continues
In Montana, no woman has held federal office since 1916, when Montanans elected their first and only female Congressional representative.
Posted inWotr
Our reliance on drones to patrol the borders
When I think of Canada, I picture caribou herds, universal healthcare and the occasional hockey brawl. Officials at our Department of Homeland Security, however, seem to think the neighbors up North pose a serious security threat. After all, the department has spent the last five years quietly building a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — […]
Posted inJuly 21, 2014: On the Wild Edge
We’re prepared to buy back our own land
On June 9, 1855, the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla people agreed to a treaty that ceded 6.4 million acres of land to the United States, in what would become northeast Oregon and southwest Washington. In return for that lavish gift, 250,000 acres were reserved for the tribes, “all of which tract shall be set […]
Posted inWotr
How Amazon taught Grand Junction a valuable lesson
Small businesses and nonprofits have a lot in common: They operate on thin margins, develop strong local ties and support their communities’ economic and social wellbeing. But what happens to those strong bonds when an online retailing giant comes in with a deal that benefits one side and threatens the other? That was the question […]
Posted inWotr
Boise may be low profile, but we’re high-tech
Over the years, whenever I’ve tried to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of living in a small town rather than a metropolis, the small town has always looked like the better choice. It used to be that cultural amenities and cosmopolitanism gave big cities significant boosts in this either/or match-up, but developments in technology have changed […]