The happy cow on the label of Horizon organic milk is like a stop sign for consumers: Your quest for healthy milk ends here. The back of the carton assures us that Horizon milk is from certified organic farms, where clean-living cows “make milk the natural way, with access to plenty of fresh air, clean […]
Writers on the Range
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What it was like in prison in Riverton, Wyoming
My parents have been spending time in the slammer. They are both approaching 80, are upstanding citizens, but in any given month, they might average two weekends in the joint. A while back, I decided to join them. That particular weekend they were at the Honor Farm in Riverton, Wyo. They specialize in Wyoming institutions […]
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Water pounds through our towns and our dreams
The water in the mountains has decided that enough is enough: It’s time to come down. And down it has come, in a swell of white, tumbling magnificence the likes of which I haven’t seen around here in my 28 years in the West. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of flood that is washing through our […]
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Stars in our eyes
Recently, at mid-afternoon on a rainy day, I looked up at the cloud-burdened sky and missed the stars, truly missed them. I felt the kind of wistful pangs that you might when you remember a long-gone but beloved grandparent, or a teenage sweetheart who misunderstood you long ago. I knew they were up there — […]
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Can billionaire philanthropy save the earth?
A few days ago, I was commiserating with a friend about the sad state of environmental affairs. We were talking about the infamous “death of environmentalism” paper and its call for the environmental movement to connect more to issues involving social justice. My opinion, I told my friend, is that it’s not environmentalism that’s dead. […]
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Energy Bill rewards the fattest cats
As you may have noticed, gasoline costs more than of yore. Some basic economics: Gasoline is a manufactured good. Its price depends in part on the price of its basic commodity, in this case crude oil. It costs more than of yore, as does natural gas. More basic economics: The price of crude oil and […]
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On the basketball court, a confusion and profusion of races
Steve Nash was chosen as this year’s most valuable player in the National Basketball Association, and other than that he grew up in British Columbia and now plays for the Phoenix Suns, you might ask what this has to do with the West. A fair question, and one I will get to. Nash is a […]
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Opposing Wal-Mart doesn’t make you a Nazi
I’m a radical, yes. An environmentalist, yes. A small-is-better zealot, yes. A feminist, a fierce supporter of independent bookstores, a rabble rouser. I’ve been called a Chicken Little who shrieks, “The sky is falling!” I admit to all those labels. What I am not, and this is the second time in a decade I’ve been […]
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In our rush to protect America, we secretly put Americans at risk
Growing up in Richland, Wash., in the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the Department of Energy produced plutonium for bombs, Trisha Pritikin never imagined that the milk she drank or the air she breathed was poisonous. Her father, a safety engineer at the plant, was supremely patriotic, and the entire family felt proud […]
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Love the gas, not the drill
I have a confession to make: I like natural gas. Every morning at five minutes before 6:00, I wake up to the gentle whumph of the gas stove kicking on in the family room. I then get out of bed, tap on my son’s door and call, “Time to get up,” and plant myself in […]
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I say good riddance to bad billboards
For four years in the 1980s, I lived in Vermont, and then left for the West after tiring of its busybody politics. But I certainly admired one aspect of life in the bucolic yet politically correct Green Mountain State: No billboards. Back in 1968, the Vermont Legislature passed a law banning billboards, and since then […]
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The brief but wonderful return of Cathedral in the Desert
It looked almost exactly like Phil Hyde’s photograph taken in 1964, a year after Glen Canyon Dam began backing up the Colorado River — a seven-year event. Hyde’s photo revealed a stunning waterfall in a giant amphitheater with a narrow, almost slot opening at top, perfectly named “Cathedral in the Desert.” Eventually it disappeared, drowned […]
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My kind of river flows fast and gritty brown
My kind of river, the White. Near twilight, we camp at the put-in, a two-track rut into a brush-ringed clearing on the outskirts of Rangely, Colo. No ramp, no parking, no fire grates, no tables, no signs — a wide spot on the river bank just out of town, where we lean our canoes against […]
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Trees can be just another sacred cow
Only God can make a tree, but anyone can ruin a prairie. Consider the celebrated 19th century journalist Julius Sterling Morton. On moving to Nebraska from Michigan in 1854, he found he didn’t like the way nature had designed the Great Plains. Accordingly, he summoned forth “a great army of husbandmen… to battle against the […]
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Ego gates get my goat — and that’s just the beginning
So, my neighbor finally got a ranchette. Whether it’s five acres or 40, the next step is apparently the perfect entrance gate. Rancheteers have made these huge gates the latest symbol of affluence in the West. They boast uprights bigger than my house, flanked by imported decorative boulders. The crossbar seems sometimes to be a […]
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Why should the Arctic Refuge matter to the ski industry?
Why would the 19 million acres of wilderness that make up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the potential oil beneath it, plus its resident herd of caribou, matter at all to the ski industry? Sure, the refuge in Alaska is wild and beautiful, it’s pristine, it’s a crown jewel of wilderness. We in the ski […]
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The devil made us do it
A recent proposal to change the name of Devils Tower National Monument has fallen through, but even if it had succeeded, Old Nick would have kept a prominent place in the landscape of the West. In Wyoming, monument supervisor Lisa Eckert had suggested adding the name “Bear Lodge” to the site. That came at the […]
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Grazing buyouts help land and ranchers
It’s springtime in the Rockies, which means roiling rivers, blooming fruit orchards and lots of baby bovines in the valley-bottom pastures. A month ago, the calves were small, dark lumps deposited on dun-colored fields; today, they are energetic youngsters, chasing each other across green grass in free-for-all games of tag. In a matter of weeks, […]
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Home on a very small range
In the years that I zealously rode a horse as a teen, the pasture below our house was a pen for my plump little buckskin mare. Conveniently flat, it doubled as an arena, hard-packed and strewn with makeshift jumps. Other than being a nuisance and forcing me to feed hay more often, the thistle and […]
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Hullabaloo in the hook-and-bullet press
As a hunter, fisher and full-time outdoor writer, it pains me to admit that most hunting-and-fishing magazines are right down there with supermarket tabloids. You can tell the really important articles by the number of exclamation points after the title, as in: “Sportsmen’s group in all-out battle for shooting and hunting rights!!!” Fact-checking departments are […]