When I realized a dozen years ago that my state’s license plates were issued chronologically, I felt stirrings of ambition. Here was a tiny yet visible status symbol, and all I had to do was wait. At that time my plate, after the county prefix, was 4786A, meaning that there were over 4,000 vehicles lined […]
Writers on the Range
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Nature-deficit disorder is ruining our kids
No matter how old I live to be, there will never be a place so full of mystery and adventure as a place of my childhood called The Woods. The stories that grew out of those trees still kindle powerful feelings, even after all these years. My friends and I knew the place was haunted. […]
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Just why did Gale Norton leave the interior department?
It seemed so sudden, the way Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned back in early March. It wasn’t like the other resignations from President George Bush’s cabinet. Everyone in town knew that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was an odd-man-out before Powell announced he would leave at the end of the first term. As to former […]
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How we lost our ranch to gas drilling
Our cattle, our dreams and our ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling. As one who has lived through the experience, I can say that […]
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Booming anger
I find myself waving vigorously at faces I recognize these days. I wave hard at people I know like we’re close friends who’ve found ourselves in a big, unfriendly crowd. I’m happy to see them, and often they wave back just as vigorously. I live five miles out of Pinedale, Wyo., this town booming with […]
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Watch out for hijackers in national parks
Yellowstone National Park, spring last year. Marypat and I have stopped for a picnic break on our annual April ride through the Yellowstone. We prop the bikes against a bridge railing, take our sandwiches and stroll to a grassy patch near a creek. It is quiet and tranquil in a way it never is during […]
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Lake Powell gets an A for boating and a D for water storage
It’s fun in the sun as usual at Lake Powell, as this summer follows another in a pattern of drought in the 21st century. But though the reservoir has plenty of water for boating, its primary purpose is to store water for the American Southwest. By that criterion, Lake Powell is a bust at 52 […]
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A resident responds to a plaintive question from Wolf Creek developer Red McCombs
“All my life, I have always wondered why there is antagonism toward developers,” said billionaire developer B.J. “Red” McCombs recently during a forum on his proposed resort atop remote Wolf Creek Pass, in southwestern Colorado. I can answer Mr. McCombs, but first, some history: At issue is a massive project on an inholding (private land […]
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Camping: We get grimy, look funky and love it
“What a hassle,” my husband complains as he wedges the camping table into the overloaded bed of our pickup truck. “You know, we’re going to spend less time in the mountains than we spent packing all this stuff. Why was it we wanted to go camping?” he asks half-seriously. That started me thinking. Why do […]
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Garage sales lead to déjà vu all over again
At a friend’s garage sale several years ago, I saw a copy of Ivan Doig’s book, This House of Sky. I bundled it with my other purchases, but when she went to ring it up, I said, “Jean, I’m not going to pay for this one.” “Why not?” she demanded. I opened the front cover […]
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Denial grips the Republican fringe
It’s a sad thing to see the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party skew its values to line up with those of the money-driven Wall Street wing when global warming is at issue. But it is even sadder to see even the non-religious side of the GOP adopting true-believer doublethink to sustain these monetized values. […]
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Stealth campaigns threaten our democracy
This election season in the West already looks as hot as a wildfire running on a dry wind. High-profile campaigns target congressional seats and governorships. But beware: The most important campaign runs in stealth mode. It’s the campaign by libertarians who want to cripple your state and local governments. They’re doing it with ballot initiatives, […]
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Debunking the myth of the sand-burrowing minnow
It’s a popular refrain here in central New Mexico come summer: The silvery minnow can hunker down, bury itself in a dry streambed and outlast drought. Whenever the river slows and its bed begins to dry, I’m inevitably informed that the Rio Grande has always dried, and the four-inch long minnow has always survived. This […]
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If only binoculars were cool
I’ve been a bird-watcher since I was a kid. Or to put it another way: Since I was a kid, I have not been cool. For the most part, that stopped bothering me a long time ago. Still, every now and then, I feel it. This happened recently when I got a close-up look at […]
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Our coyote war in the West reminds me of the war in Iraq
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” said psychologist Abraham Maslow. As a wildlife ecologist here in the American West, I can’t help but draw analogies between the Bush administration’s foreign policy in Iraq and one of its proposed wildlife policies in the American […]
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A lesson in survival
I thought about the woman’s bones for a long time — what position they might have been in when they were abandoned and covered up, what had happened to her heart and her lungs as they slowly deteriorated. The cavity of her ribs and her chest, the now-hollow cavity of her thigh bones, that narrow […]
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Rainbow Gathering lacks one color — green
When we tell folks that we have become the unwitting hosts for the Rainbow Family’s annual gathering, the first response is “the who?” As it turns out, some 20,000 Rainbows have gathered in Big Red Park, north of Steamboat Springs, Colo., in the Routt National Forest. Their Web site, welcomehome.org, styles them “the largest non-organization […]
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An Idaho forest burns almost naturally
Early in May, I watched one of my most cherished forests burn. The flames and smoke were great to see. Fire is often seen as death and destruction for a forest, but here was a forest living with fire as an ecological process. Exactly 10 years ago, this old-growth ponderosa pine forest of the Deadwood […]
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The good news about garbage
One summer day, in my favorite wild place, I found enlightenment through garbage. Other people’s garbage, I realized, is my destiny — and maybe my redemption. Spiritual enlightenment found in a wilderness is a cliche; few special moments occur anywhere else these days, and just once, can’t someone admit to finding rapture in a mall? […]
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Waypoints of the heart
As a kid I used to play treasure hunt, all by myself. I’d take a piece of notebook paper and draw an X for my starting point — the front stoop of my house — on a dead-end street. Then I’d make a series of marks, each one representing a step, guided more by a […]