‘Stu for Silverton’ debuted this summer in Seattle.
Michelle Nijhuis
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor of HCN and the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Follow @nijhuism.
Posted inGoat
Plugging in
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family […]
Posted inGoat
The carbon (spin) cycle
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science. We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British […]
Posted inGoat
Mutualism on the Colorado River
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing. This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult […]
Posted inWotr
“Tiananmen Sid” shakes up a small town
A version of this essay originally appeared on the science blog, the Last Word on Nothing. My rural western Colorado town of Paonia, population 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the USA. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence from the federal government. We’re gossipy and private, inclusive […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
Imaginary journeys on a rowing machine
I don’t mind exercise. Really, I don’t. But I’ve always preferred to do it while accomplishing something else: going to work, talking to a friend, running an errand. At the very least, I like to huff and puff outdoors, away from the computer and incipient carpal-tunnel syndrome. Going to a gym? It’s always seemed a […]
Posted inGoat
Into the Big Empty
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing. I grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York State, and went to college in western Oregon — both beautiful places, beloved by many. But I never knew what it was to love a place until I spent a college summer in southern Utah, where I worked […]
Posted inGoat
Evolve or die
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. Updated 2-21-2012 to correct image of chipmunk. Several years ago, on a soggy but majestic mountain afternoon, I hiked into the Yosemite backcountry to meet UC-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology were retracing the steps of renowned naturalist Joseph Grinnell, […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2012: Can evolution help snowshoe hares adapt to climate change?
Can animals evolve quickly enough to survive global warming?
In recent years, Westerners have seen and heard a great deal about the effects of climate change on wildlife. Pikas are increasingly isolated on shrinking islands of mountaintop habitat in the Great Basin; mice, chipmunks and squirrels are retreating toward the ridgelines of Yosemite National Park; and numerous species, from butterflies and hummingbirds to an […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Animal migration occurs all around us and yet remains a mystery
Every spring and fall, I’m surprised by an odd sound above my house in Colorado. It’s somewhere between a creak and a hoot, an eerie, echoing call, like the one I imagine some dinosaurs used to make. It always takes me a minute to place it, but suddenly it’s unmistakable: It’s the sound of sandhill […]
Posted inGoat
Autopsy of an Aspen
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. In the rural Rocky Mountains where I live, we disagree about a lot of things — politics, religion, water, Tim Tebow — but we all agree on aspen. We love them, especially when they turn blaze-yellow in the fall, and we’d like them to stick around. So in […]
Posted inGoat
What would John McPhee do?
Cross posted from The Last Word on Nothing When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess? This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in Alaskan placer mining. And the […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Western scientists study the past to predict the future
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, far above the deserts of the Great Basin, stands the Methuselah Grove, a group of gnarly, thick-bellied bristlecone pines sculpted and polished by centuries of blowing snow. All of the trees are ancient, and one of them — the Forest Service won’t say which — is more […]
Posted inGoat
The middles of nowhere
Crossposted from the Last Word on Nothing As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) has a particular interest in the forgotten spaces of the […]
Posted inGoat
The crow knows your nose
Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. Crow diving at a masked researcher in Seattle. Photo by Keith Brust I have a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them. Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying […]
Posted inGoat
On the move in Yosemite
During one of my all-time favorite reporting trips, in the summer of 2005, I hiked through a chilly Yosemite rainstorm to meet up with University of California-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton — a veteran field biologist with more shipwreck stories than any one person should have — was retracing the century-old steps of Joseph Grinnell, […]
Posted inArticles
Defriending Joe Hill: Stegner’s lesson for the Oscars
Like most people who write about the West, I think about Wallace Stegner a lot. He’s like a brilliant, beloved, occasionally exasperating uncle. He said many things first and best, and, though he could get a bit stuffy at times, we youngsters have to admit that — even now, almost two decades after his death […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
The Latest
StoryA biologist finds what she believes to be wolf scat and tracks on a ranch in northwestern Colorado (HCN, 2/15/10) Followup Cristina Eisenberg, an Oregon State University doctoral student employed by the High Lonesome Ranch, collected 18 scat samples for DNA analysis. Now, the results are in: 11 samples were from coyotes, or had preliminary […]
Posted inGoat
Encounters with the Ex-Secretary
In two appearances at the Aspen Environment Forum this week, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and ex-Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt seemed to revel in the impolitic. Offshore drilling is an “unregulated frontier culture full of cowboy operators,” he said during a panel discussion with Shell VP Libby Cheney, Consortium for Ocean Leadership president Robert […]
Posted inGoat
Wile E. wins again
In February, I reported for High Country News on the possible evidence of wolves at the High Lonesome Ranch, an enormous ranch in northwestern Colorado owned by Texas attorney Paul Vahldiek, Jr. During visits over a seven-month period, biologist Cristina Eisenberg, an Oregon State University doctoral student employed by the ranch, had collected scat and seen […]