It sounds like a paradox, but a congressional designation of wilderness can actually harm what is wild. I believe that will come true if Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson’s bill, the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act, becomes law. Whether we like it or not, once that law is passed, the law of unintended […]
Writers on the Range
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How I turned into a time-share sucker
My family and I just got back from Sedona, Ariz., land of pinon-juniper forest, redrock spires and vortexes said to be spiritual. The only vortex we found, though, was the one our credit card number went into. We headed down to the self-proclaimed “New Age” capital of the West, thanks to a friend who gave […]
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The day they close the pass
Old-timers still remember when winters in mountain towns meant something more than just catering to hordes of skiers. Sure, those winters were tough; the days were short and cold, and drifting snow restricted outdoor activities and even closed some businesses and high mountain roads. But mountain winters had a positive side, too, for they were […]
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Why I Cherish the Road to Nowhere
When I was a kid, I hated roads that went to nowhere. Lonely and, to a first-grader’s eyes, completely featureless, the high desert of my childhood had plenty of them. Roads to nowhere meant frustratingly long rides in a station wagon without air-conditioning, whizzing along flat open spaces with tumbleweeds blowing across the highway, the […]
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Is how we’re living gross?
I lapse into smugness when someone visits me early in the summer. The mountains around Bozeman, Mont., are dazzling white, the fields emerald, the rivers boisterous, the air clear. I first came here in the spring. I remember how staggering it was. It happened again recently. A friend who had never visited passed through and […]
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The House takes an ax to the Endangered Species Act
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, the states can serve as “laboratories of democracy” by testing new approaches to see if they might work for the nation as a whole. The idea is that if a new approach falls flat, the rest of the country can learn from the mistake without going […]
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Nature works better with us
You’ve seen the ads: Some eco-celebrity urges you to make a donation to save one of the earth’s last special places. Your generous gift will help protect this place so it remains healthy and pristine forever. Few of us bother to think that this pitch contains a huge assumption — that protecting a piece of […]
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Sacred cows in the public’s paradise
With four hours of freeways and winding mountain roads between me and San Francisco, I was finally hiking slow and easy up the first part of Disaster Creek Trail in California’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness. I’d been waiting all summer for spring to arrive in the Sierra High Country, in a place called Paradise Valley. I’m a […]
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Fear and adrenaline can cause a ranger to kill
When Chief Ranger Jerry Epperson hired me to be a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park in Utah so many years ago, I wasn’t sure what my duties were supposed to be. So it seemed like a good idea to ask. Epperson smiled wryly and said, “A ranger should range.” So while all of us […]
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Wildfire can make you run for your life
As we stood on a hillside in Idaho’s Boulder-White Cloud mountains watching a fire bear down on us, I told my friend Dave that this was the closest I’d been to a wildfire without getting paid for it. We’d just finished speed-hiking down from a high lake basin, after the Forest Service told us to […]
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The end of something really big
As soon as we read about the dead whale, it was clear we were about to take a field trip. “Let’s go,” said my friend Nathan, peering at a newspaper photo of a giant beached vertebrae. He’s a sculptor, so he has an artist’s appreciation for bones. Besides, his mother had recently cracked one of […]
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Lions and cheetahs and elephants, yippee
In a recentNature magazine article, scientists suggest that threatened African wildlife can be saved by moving the animals to the American Great Plains. What a great way to restore our faith in cowboys! Many have forgotten that cowboys with broken bones regularly compete in bronc and bull riding, and all have survived lousy prices and […]
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One man’s grisly encounter with a grizzly
It’s easy to come away from the new Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man, persuaded that its subject was a delusional crackpot who deserved his fate: to be killed and eaten by a bear. That certainly is the popular impression of Timothy Treadwell, who died in Alaska nearly two years ago at the claws and fangs […]
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Lessons from the mountains to the stormy seas
Ten months ago, I was in the Indian Himalayas, cut off from the media connections most Americans take for granted. On Christmas Day, a young neighbor from the village, who taught math and spoke limited English, stopped by to ask if I’d heard the news: A huge wave had slammed many parts of Southeast Asia, […]
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Illegal immigration tarnishes America
As a Canyon County commissioner in rural Idaho, I live every day with the consequences of our hypocritical immigration policy. Federal officials say it is our policy to block illegal immigration, but our southern border is so open that millions of people manage to come through, overcoming the desert’s hazards of killing heat and rapacious […]
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Don’t be fooled: Our southern border is as porous as ever
Not long ago, my morning walk in Arizona’s Santa Cruz River Valley was rudely interrupted. I’d been walking my dogs in the usually silent valley. Suddenly, I heard the drone of an airplane. Irritated, I looked up to see a Border Patrol airplane drop down to circle just south of Palo Parado Road. Since my […]
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Fear in the fields
Farmworker Olivia Tamayo’s fingers are crooked from over 30 years of picking and weeding vegetables in California’s hot sun. Sitting in her home in this cramped farming town of Huron, she talks in low tones about the reality of farmwork for many female migrants. In 1975, Tamayo arrived in California’s Central Valley from Mexico, newly […]
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The Endangered Species Act is a roaring success
The Endangered Species Act — which is being reviewed by Congress this week — is a soaring success. Just look up. Look skyward for a while and you might spy an American bald eagle. Hundreds of them live in my home state of Montana. Across the United States, the bald eagle is a living, flying […]
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RVs R Us
Living in a western Colorado mountain town that panders to tourists, vacationers and white-knuckled early retirees driving Greyhound buses converted to homes nicer than I live in, I, too, have suffered. I have been damned, dammed behind these tin-can condos as they’ve labored up passes like mastodons running a marathon. I’ve watched with a perverse […]
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Alien grasses are finding new homes in Arizona
By the end of June, some 20 wildfires had reduced large patches of Arizona’s desert scrublands to ash. The blazes eventually burned over 200,000 acres and killed many huge and venerable saguaros, along with smaller cacti, trees and shrubs. “Invasive” grasses carried these fires, those species from somewhere else that are increasingly blamed for environmental […]