Can the West’s uranium towns rise once more?
Wyoming
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
Energy workers, union members protest drilling
In Wyoming, the outcry against oil and gas drilling is getting louder — and now it’s coming from some unlikely quarters. Since 2005, the Bureau of Land Management has been auctioning off parcels in the Wyoming Range of the Bridger-Teton National Forest for oil and gas development. The most recent lease sale on June 6 […]
Posted inMay 1, 2006: Magic Valley Uprising
Stargazer aims his scopes at gas industry
Name Perry Walker Vocation Astronomer, engineer Age 61 Home Base 10-acre hilltop near Daniel, Wyoming Known for Keeping an eye on the air pollution caused by natural gas drillers He says “I can talk to these (natural gas) operators about their technology. I can understand just about anything they throw at me. And I find […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2005: The Final Energy Frontier
Tapping into energy’s fringe
As companies drill for ‘unconventional’ natural gas, environmental impacts mount
Posted inNovember 28, 2005: Gold from the Gas Fields
Gold from the Gas Fields
As energy companies reap billions from the region’s energy reserves, some Westerners question whether enough of the wealth is staying home
Posted inNovember 28, 2005: Gold from the Gas Fields
Energy companies plow some profits back into Western ground
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Gold from the Gas Fields.” As he sat in his Houston office on Nov. 10, Raymond Plank, the chairman of Apache Corporation, tracked news reports about the Washington, D.C., hearing, in which members of the U.S. Senate scolded five of his fellow oil-company executives. […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
The Latest Bounce
The Bureau of Land Management recently approved a mining company’s plans to explore for gold near South Pass, Wyo., a major historic point on the Emigrant Trail (HCN, 5/16/05: Gold mining proposed in historic South Pass area). Fremont Gold will dig 200 10-by-20-foot test pits about five miles from the pass. If the company finds […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Wounded
Wounded Percival Everett 256 pages, hardcover: $23 Graywolf Press, 2005. Set in the Red Desert of Wyoming, this novel is a modern-day Western with a twist. John Hunt, a black horse trainer, gets pulled into the dark currents of hate crimes when an Indian friend’s cows are killed by racists and a friend’s gay son […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
Horn hunters face hard times
For centuries, Asian men have consumed powdered antlers to try to boost their sexual performance, a tradition that’s helped fuel today’s demand for deer and elk antlers. Recently, though, the rising popularity of Viagra has “just about finished off” the Asian market, says Mike Aldrich, of Pinedale, Wyo., who buys and sells antlers. But more […]
Posted inJune 13, 2005: Owning a Piece of Paradise
Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park
Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park Peter Nabokov and Lawrence Loendorf, 400 pages, hardcover: $39.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. There’s plenty of talk about keeping bison and wolves in the nation’s flagship national park, but few people realize that American Indians were evicted from the area to make way for tourists, […]
Posted inJune 13, 2005: Owning a Piece of Paradise
I say: Good riddance to bad billboards
For four years in the 1980s, I lived in Vermont, and then left it for the West after tiring of the state’s 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. Since […]
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
Gold mining proposed in historic South Passarea
Four historic routes — the Oregon, California, Pony Express and Mormon Pioneer trails — converge southeast of the Wind River Range in Wyoming, at an area called South Pass. In the 1800s, large wagon trains crossed the Continental Divide here. Now preserved as the South Pass National Historic Landmark, the landscape still looks much as […]
Posted inMay 2, 2005: The Great Energy Divide
Heard around the West
WYOMING Cheyenne Frontier Days can get rowdy, but rowdy doesn’t begin to describe what rodeo contestant Neal Daniel did in a bar last July: He got into a fight he still can’t remember and stabbed a rival seven times. But after a judge recently ordered Daniel to pay the victim $32,000 in restitution, Daniel, a […]
Posted inWotr
Spring comes grudgingly to Wyoming’s high desert
Although I expect more heartless wind and freezing nights, I think winter’s tight grip has been loosened. Summer lies ahead.
Posted inMarch 21, 2005: An Empire Built on Sand
The life of an unsung Western water diplomat
Mark Twain once remarked that in the West, “whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.” But Delphus E. Carpenter, who spearheaded the 1922 Colorado River Compact among seven states, would have disagreed twice over. Carpenter not only abstained from spirits, but believed water problems could be resolved through diplomacy instead of fisticuffs. His life […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2005: An Empire Built on Sand
Gators, dirt and hot tubs in the Cowboy State
Readers will recognize the collection of colorful characters in Proulx’s latest installment of Wyoming fictions. The 11 stories in Bad Dirt feature trailer types, Eastern transplants, local roughnecks, and eccentric elders, living in a zero-sum economy of extractive plunder that would make native son Dick Cheney giddy with pride. In “Wamsutter Wolf,” mountain man wannabe […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2005: Anarchy in the Gas Fields
Wastewater goes unwatched
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Drilling Could Wake a Sleeping Giant.” On an average day in Wyoming, energy companies drill nine new wells to pull methane gas out of the state’s coal beds. In 1995, the state had 427 coalbed methane wells. Now, the total is more than 21,000, […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
A beautiful ode to a melting earth
Gretel Ehrlich’s latest book, The Future of Ice, is an intimate “ode and lament” on the effects of global warming. The conclusions are dire, of course: In the Arctic, as billions of gallons of fresh water pour into places like the Greenland Ice Sheet and where, in 2002, “at least 264,400 square miles of ice […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
An unfinished life in Wyoming
A new novel from Wyoming’s own Mark Spragg relies less on the distinctive landscape of the West and instead explores the more universal territory of a fractured family. Still, most of An Unfinished Life unfolds on a Wyoming ranch near fictional Ishawooa, “elevation 5,313, population 1,783.” Seventy-year-old Einar Gilkyson lives a lonely life on a […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Heard around the West
WYOMING Residents of a golf course community near Grand Teton National Park are distressed about a hunter killing a bull moose in their midst. The animal, which sported a huge set of antlers, had been a regular visitor to the Teton Pines neighborhood, wandering from one backyard to another. This time it was accompanied by […]