Deep in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument of southern Oregon lies my favorite wildflower meadow. This summer I need to step carefully, to avoid the lush clumps of Jacob’s Ladder blossoms and the delicate columbines, their blooms nodding in the breeze. I breathe in the scents of the wild: the spice of the conifers, the earthy […]
Writers on the Range
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Off the road again
Jack Kerouac wrote his entire novel “On the Road” in just three weeks. He used a continuous roll of teletype paper, as if pausing to put in a new sheet of paper would have caused a pile-up on his imagination’s highway. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said that Kerouac provided us with “a vision of America seen from […]
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A sucker punch to the stomach: When trees turn red
Colorado’s bark beetle epidemic is unlike anything in the state’s still-brief recorded history. Foresters say 95 percent of our lodgepole pines will be dead within just a few more years, with beetles likely to burrow next into the ponderosa pine along the urbanized Front Range corridor. To some people, this has been like a sucker […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
Mission critical
Can natural gas help save us from global warming?
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Too much bling
Last week, the teenagers among our dinner companions started talking about “bling.” An older man at the end of the table asked, “What is this bleen stuff?” “No,” the kids said, giggling. “You know, bling.” Well, no, he didn’t know. “Really?” Hilarious laughter; then definitions: “It’s like, shiny. Glittery. Sparkly. Jewelry. Like, fancy stuff. Rhinestones. […]
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You gotta dream big when you dream about oil shale
Things have quieted in the oil patch, and you don’t hear as many chants of “Drill, baby, drill” as we did last summer. Even so, there remains considerable interest in developing oil shale, as evidenced by a recent report from the Center of the American West in Boulder. America’s biggest deposits are roughly centered where […]
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I can’t wait to drink wastewater
I’m not really a water connoisseur. I can’t tell the difference between bottled “mountain spring” water and ordinary tap water, and all the various brands of bottled water taste alike to me. There is, however, one kind of water I’m just longing to sip. Unfortunately, it’s not yet on the market, but I’m hoping it […]
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Backcountry lessons from the Lost Forest of Oregon
The Scout we were driving across the treeless landscape was coated with dust so thick you couldn’t read the decal identifying us as scientists from a Forest Service Research Station. Had the decal been legible, an observer might have thought we were lost. We weren’t, but the forest that my work-partner, Doug, and I were […]
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Great Plains aura
Not long ago, I revisited the long-abandoned farm in south-central South Dakota where my grandparents farmed for over 30 years. Nothing could induce any of their children or grandchildren to copy their commitment to this lonely land, but it took a nasty cancer to get grandpa Lyle off the place. Standing at the farm’s highest […]
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Coming home to roost
Like a lot of other Westerners, I recently added chickens to my suburban back yard. I didn’t plan on raising fryers; I envisioned only fresh eggs, grasshopper control and free entertainment. What I hadn’t anticipated was how attached I’d become. I began with nine, 2-month-old chicks. Town ordinance allows only six hens, but I figured […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
What we got here is a failure to collaborate
Updated Aug. 24, 2009 On July 10, President Obama announced his nomination of Jonathan Jarvis as the next director of the National Park Service. Jarvis has worked for the agency for 30 years and directed its Pacific West region since 2002. Many of his colleagues contend that he not only has scientific training, but is […]
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In pothunter country, a small effort at healing
Two people are dead, and a lot of the living are furious. After an early-morning FBI raid last month in the Utah town of Blanding, which ended with 19 residents hauled in for trafficking in ancient artifacts, one of those indicted, a local doctor, sat in his Jeep and breathed in poisonous carbon monoxide. The […]
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One man’s salt must not burden another man’s water
The era of massive federal reclamation projects is long over, yet a changing climate will demand more work from less water. And so a new movement — watershed management — has quietly taken the place of building the big dams. Visit the tiny town of Mancos near Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado to […]
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Green gearheads? Rev it up!
This idea will probably strike some people as outrageous. But what the hey, progress rarely comes easily. The Wilderness Society, a behemoth in the environmental movement, has been running a help-wanted ad. It’s looking to hire a “Public Lands Recreation Policy Advisor.” Anyone taking that job, which is based in the group’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, […]
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Great Old Broads celebrate 20 years of hiking and advocacy
Where in Durango, in southern Colorado, can you spot a lavender size-40D bra hanging in an office window? Why, the national office of a group called the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, of course. It’s one sign that this organization, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, is not an ordinary organization. “We’re the junkyard […]
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Organic goes down a slippery road
Here’s the sad news: Even as the demand for organic food continues to explode, organic farmers in America are getting thrown under the very beet cart they helped build. The Chinese are taking over market share, especially of vegetables and agricultural commodities like soy, thanks to several American-based multinational food corporations that have hijacked the […]
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Nostalgia for the front lines
This spring on a warm May afternoon, an electric line went down a few miles east of where I live in Homer, Alaska. Sparks from the live wire ignited dry grasses, and the flames, fanned by wind, traveled quickly to a forest of beetle-killed trees. In two days, the Seventeen Mile Fire, named for its […]
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How a small town resembles Facebook
“I’m looking for a crib,” I said, and my friends reacted predictably. “I’m so out of touch!” lamented one, while another asked if I had an announcement to make, then raced over to my wife’s spot to ask if she was pregnant. The unusual aspect of this small-town rumor-mongering was its location. We weren’t in […]
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Birds can only fly so far
The sky is the color of a robin’s egg on the Barker Dam Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, 215 miles southwest of Las Vegas. I’m hiking a section of trail that winds its way through an immense Joshua tree forest when an American kestrel wings over like a fighter plane, chasing a raven. […]
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Riding the rails — upscale
“You been ridin’ the rails?” The man had an old green duffel bag slung over his shoulder. I could tell he’d checked us out as we stood on the lush lawn by the courthouse in Missoula, Mont. On my back I wore a faded red pack, and across my front I’d strapped my 6-month-old son. […]