Have gray wolves found a home in Colorado?
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 inDecember 21, 2009: Wind Resistance
Life along the Colorado River
See a slideshow of Broussalian’s images of the Colorado River — and its people. The desert Southwest is unlikely to run out of water. But under the pressures of climate change and drought, population and politics, the Southwest is likely to run out of cheap water. The deal of the century will become last century’s […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35
A home of mysteries and restless souls
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
A tenderfoot in Taos
An exhausted mother. A lively baby. A compassionate drunkard.
Posted inGoat
When it blows, the snow goes
Last night, I flew home to Colorado to find that my car had changed color. During my weekend away, a wild dust-and-rain storm had rolled over Grand Junction, covering my car — and the rest of town, it seemed — with bright orange splotches of desert dirt. “Yep, half of Utah blew through here,” said […]
Posted inGoat
Lend me a hand
The effects of global warming on plants and animals are likely to be as varied as the species themselves. Some will adapt; some will even benefit. But what does the future hold for those too slow-moving, slow-growing, or otherwise unable to make the best of things? Conservation biologists have been talking, many nervously and some […]
Posted inGoat
Arizona hiker tracks climate change
Cool (so to speak) new study just published by researchers at the University of Arizona: Using records collected by an amateur naturalist and habitual hiker named Dave Bertelsen, scientists found that in the Santa Catalina Mountains on the edge of Tucson, the flowering ranges of 93 plant species moved uphill between 1994 to 2003. Average […]
Posted inGoat
Whither the weeds?
Climate change is likely to expand the reach of some of the West’s least favorite plants — for example, see “Bonfire of the Superweeds,” HCN’s story on invasive buffelgrass in the Sonoran Desert. But a new study in Global Change Biology paints a somewhat more hopeful picture: Scientists predict that some invasive species, such as […]
Posted inGoat
Carbon storage gets a tryout
Interesting story in the Tri-City Herald today about a test of underground storage of carbon dioxide in Washington state. (The article doesn’t say so, but this is the first North American test of CO2 storage in basalt.) Researchers are now drilling toward a rock layer about 3/4 mile below the surface, and, if the state […]
Posted inGoat
59,000 trees can’t be wrong
Westerners can see that there’s trouble in the woods — these days, it seems like there’s a beetle-killed lodgepole stand around every corner — but here’s some especially sobering evidence of forest die-offs, just published in the journal Science. A long-term study of almost 59,000 trees in plots throughout the region shows that tree deaths […]
Posted inGoat
The Big Melt continues
We know coal and other dirty fuels help heat up the planet, but it looks like they’re also messing with Western water supplies. Scientists at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (press release here) have found that when soot from power plants and diesel engines settles on mountain snow, the darker snow absorbs more heat […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
The Doc is in
Rural folks find common ground at the vet’s office
Posted inArticles
Slideshow: The unflappable Doc Vincent
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Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Only the scared survive
The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal WorldJoel Berger304 pages, hardcover: $29.University of Chicago Press, 2008. Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing PredatorsWilliam Stolzenburg288 pages, hardcover: $24.99.Bloomsbury, 2008. A world without fear sounds nice, doesn’t it? Liberated from our dread of nosy bosses, […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Under the asphalt a rumor thrives
This summer, with the crack of Indy’s bullwhip still echoing through theatres, it’s natural to indulge in a little romanticism about buried treasure. Even when — or especially when — said treasure lies below a worn-out asphalt parking lot in downtown Grand Junction, Colo., within easy reach of jackhammer and trackhoe. The booty in question […]
Posted inJune 23, 2008: Peace on the Klamath
Shifting sands in Navajoland
TEESTO, ARIZONA In the dry heart of the Navajo Reservation, at the end of a solitary, sand-choked dirt road, geologist Margaret Hiza Redsteer climbs out of her dark blue government Jeep, taps lightly on a door, and waits. And waits. When Mary Biggambler finally pokes her head around the door, it’s with a hearty […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
Remembering Rrrrrip City!
When I first picked up the anthology Red Hot and Rollin‘, I turned to my husband, a native Oregonian. “So, do you remember the Blazer championship of ’77?” I asked. “Remember it?!” he spluttered. “It was one of the pivotal events of my life!” My husband grew up in one of the 96 percent of […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Madame Merian and her passion for metamorphosis
In Chrysalis, Montana writer Kim Todd travels to Amsterdam and Surinam and brings back the story of a pioneering field scientist, one whose intellectual descendants still wander the modern West. Todd traces the 17th-century life of Maria Sibylla Merian, the daughter of a German printer, who defied convention to become one of the most diligent […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
The hidden history of a sneeze
In 1966, a severely asthmatic child named Gregg Mitman was one of an estimated 12.6 million allergy sufferers in the United States. Today, allergic asthma and hay fever affect more than 50 million Americans – roughly 20 percent of the population. In Breathing Space, Mitman, now a medical historian, traces the causes and effects of […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
Quest for darkness
“Your life can be changed by a firsthand connection with the night sky.”