A baker’s dozen of us from central Colorado boarded the Amtrak Southwest Chief May 10. We were celebrating National Train Day, so called because back in 1869, a Golden Spike was pounded into a railroad tie, finally linking East and West Coasts by railroad. Lots of Americans still like to link up by train; on […]
Writers on the Range
Posted inWotr
Outdoor recreation binds us in the West
Travelling through the Beehive State recently, I was struck by two completely different stories emerging from Utah. On one weekend, San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman led a group of angry protesters — many of them armed — on an illegal ATV ride through Recapture Canyon, the site of 1,000-year-old Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that some […]
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The Colorado River’s reunion with its usually bone-dry Delta
They kissed. Like two long-lost lovers who had been cruelly kept apart for 20 years, the Colorado River and the Sea of Cortez finally embraced. The historic reunion occurred this May as the United States and Mexico worked together to restore the Colorado River Delta. The “pulse flow” of water raced down from Lake Mead, […]
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A coffee entrepreneur’s unlikely success story
This is not a eulogy, just a slice of life, or in the case of Randy Wirth, 67, a fine cup of coffee with a good man. I can’t claim to have been a longtime friend, but I was a longtime acquaintance. We were both members of The Old-Guys-in-Speedos-Eeewww Club. We were fast and still […]
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What the president can do right now for conservation
When a racist rancher in Nevada and his armed supporters can command headlines by claiming to own and control publicly owned lands, perhaps it’s time to remind Westerners about the history of the nation’s public-land heritage. Recall that it is we, the American people, who own the public lands that make up so much of […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
This is our land – until it’s privatized
It’s 6 a.m. on April 8 as I head out for a hike on Mount Lemmon, in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest. Today, the temperature in Tucson will break 90 degrees, so I’m looking forward to the cooler, higher elevations. Passing Rose Canyon, I notice that the campground is still closed. Making a quick decision, I […]
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When a rattler comes to call
I first noticed the Panamint rattlesnake when her head moved just beneath my feet. I hadn’t stood on her, not yet; I stood on the edge of our concrete doorstep with my bare toes drooping west, pointing to the Sierra Nevada mountains, six inches above the glacial alluvium around our home. The snake — whom […]
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How to cook a rattlesnake – if you have to
A neighbor in New Mexico once told me that it’s bad luck — not to mention bad form — to kill a rattlesnake. Unfortunately, he told me this after I’d already killed one. It was sleeping in the garden, beneath a tomato plant, when my wife noticed it. There’s something about a snake in the […]
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One battle for civil rights continues
Sometime next year, a federal judge will decide whether Native Americans are still being shut out of political power in Utah’s San Juan County, where more than 52 percent of the people are members of the Navajo or Ute Mountain Ute tribes. The trial will be presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby, […]
Posted inWotr
This land is our land – until it’s privatized
It’s 6 a.m. on April 8 as I head out for a hike on Mount Lemmon, in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest. Today, the temperature in Tucson will break 90 degrees, so I’m looking forward to the cooler, higher elevations. Passing Rose Canyon, I notice that the campground is still closed. Making a quick decision, I […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Hot Mess and other fears for the future
I live in an idyllic little Western town, rich in natural beauty and culture. I have a great family, no pressing health or financial worries – in short, it’s a utopian life. And yet … somehow I can’t leave it at that. I can’t tune out the news, can’t ignore economic and political injustices, and […]
Posted inWotr
A Montana university can’t resist a great big gift
Perhaps nothing warms a university president’s heart like successful alumni throwing millions of dollars at their alma mater. Recently, Montana State University’s President Waded Cruzado announced a $50 million donation – a university record — from Norm Asbjornson, owner of AAON, a Tulsa, Oklahoma based heating and cooling equipment manufacturer. Asbjornson is a 1960 MSU […]
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Neighbors who visit my backyard in the dead of night
Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of snickering outside my bedroom window. I lay still, ransacking my brain for ideas on who might be out there, playing a trick on me, though by this point I had a fairly good idea of the culprits. I reached for […]
Posted inWotr
Cliven Bundy needs to pay his grazing bills
Whatever you’ve read or seen on television, a new “Sagebrush Rebellion” of public-land ranchers against the federal government has not erupted in rural Nevada. What’s happened there can best be described as the last act of a long-running dispute between a delusional rancher and a hapless federal agency, the Bureau of Land Management. Unfortunately, the […]
Posted inWotr
My chickens lay their own Easter eggs
My first baby chicks arrived 10 years ago, just after midnight on Easter Sunday. The post office, of course, was closed, but I got the call to come get them, as happens when live animals are shipped. I’ve been rocking a flock ever since. Those who raise backyard chickens will inevitably go through an obsessive […]
Posted inWotr
The lessons of Ludlow, 100 years later
If April 20 is an informal holiday for celebrants of cannabis, members of labor unions observe the day more somberly. That’s especially true this year. One hundred years ago, striking coal miners and their families were killed in what’s now remembered as the Ludlow Massacre. It was the landmark catastrophe in the broader, nearly year-long […]
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Former Interior secretary blasts gas industry pressure
Former Interior Department Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the University of Colorado recently to talk about oil and gas drilling on federal public lands. Not surprisingly, he didn’t pull any punches. Babbitt criticized the agency he oversaw during the Clinton years, the Bureau of Land Management, for its handling of drilling on 250 million acres of […]
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In the West, it’s all about beer
After sampling 50 different beers and spending a number of hours searching for garages converted to breweries, I was content. A friend and I had planned this getaway for weeks, and the night in Bend, Ore., was as central to the trip as was Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. In fact, the visit […]
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Save sagebrush, and good things happen
High in the Desatoya Mountains east of Fallon, Nev., and just east of Route 50 — famously dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America” by Life Magazine in 1986 — a curious congregation gathers in the predawn light. It is a congregation made up of two parts: one, of sage grouse, preparing to strut their stuff […]
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The next energy boom to hit southeast Utah is “unconventional oil”
The Uinta Basin in northeast Utah is changing fast. Its lower reaches are already pockmarked with some 8,000 oil and gas wells, but so far, the top of the high southern rim — the area known as the Book Cliffs — has avoided much of the industrialization found to the north. But that could change, […]