High Country News January Vol. 55, No. 01

AS THE YEAR TURNS OVER, I’m drawn back to a memory from last spring. For several weeks in April and May, northern New Mexico smelled like smoke. The immense plume of the Hermits Peak Fire, filled with the ashes of the burned village of Mora, hung over the mountains, and refugees from the fire flooded into Santa Fe and other nearby communities. The fire, which started as a prescribed burn and grew to be the largest in state history, brought to the surface long-standing tensions over how to care for the region’s forests. For a century, local Spanish settler communities had resisted, at times violently, restrictions on wood harvesting and other practices. That historic resentment fed modern distrust and bitterness, and after the Hermits Peak Fire, some rejected the Forest…

High Country News is dedicated to independent journalism, informed debate and discourse in the public interest. We welcome letters through digital media and the post. Send us a letter, find us on social media, or email us at editor@hcn.org. SCIENCE RIGHT-ING Just wanted to share my appreciation for your exceptional science communications (“Pink alert for Western snowpack,” December 2022). I have spent 40 years working on glaciers in the Pacific Northwest and during that have time have had many reporters join us in the field from local papers. The ability to provide science details and tell the story of the field experience and the people in a seamless way is something you do exceptionally. It is difficult, I know, to focus on more than one aspect in a story. Speaking…

IN JULY, A THIN white envelope appeared in 150,000 Oregon mailboxes, with a short letter inside that sparked a statewide controversy. The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) was assigning wildfire risk levels to property, and residents in high or extreme risk areas and in the wildland-urban interface — where development and flammable vegetation collide — would likely become subject to new building codes and standards for creating defensible space. Mitigating fire risk is an urgent issue throughout the West, including Oregon, where wildfires burned a record breaking number of homes in 2020. Oregon’s new property assessment, part of broader wildfire legislation, marked an inflection point in its state level wildfire response; for the first time, the state designated wildfire risk with the intent of regulating statewide home-defense measures. Conversations about…

IT WAS SATURDAY, a hot one. In the remote mountains of Northern California, a group of mostly Indigenous women took a break from conducting prescribed burns. Some sat on mats in the early October shade, pounding woodwardia fern, splitting maidenhair ferns and weaving the stems into baskets, while others stood at a stump by the fire pit, using a wooden paddle to stir hot rocks into a big pot of acorn soup, steaming it from within. Salmon heads and fillets smoked on stakes around a fire pit. Children ran and shrieked until scolded by elders, who were listening to cultural presentations about prescribed fire and weaving. This was the midpoint of the two-week inaugural Karuk Women’s TREX, or prescribed fire training exchange — the first-ever such training tailored specifically for Indigenous…

Hotter days than ever curl the paintfrom the barn’s broadside, if not from the same loafing shedwhere our ladders and stepladders fold in on themselves, but even now, it’s endless,rolling distance, that familiar waveringwhere road crosses road—which way?—outof signal with no signto lean on, but the pastures, they do end. So, enough. Enough with this kingdomof pure loneliness wherein certain gracecertainly lies. Enough wielding fields of the seeming-particular—sandbergbluegrass, american sloughgrass, nutsedge, mullen,needleandthread—for no name can contour flatlands like these, locked in heat. See, a cloud is,by nature, deliberation. A decadelooking for you in the inkblots spreading a leopardfrog’s back is what I spent, then lo, loand behold, out of the blue arrives a text with plenty to glean on cruciform structuresin plant DNA, which nearedthe feeling, I guess, I guess…

THE HELICOPTER VAULTED over Music Pass and touched down in an alpine meadow, kicking up grit, October sun sparkling off its cockpit. Estevan Vigil swung out, hustled away from the rotors, and peeled off his flight suit. The chopper rose, a speck against the snow-dusted wall of southern Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, leaving me, Vigil and Vigil’s backpack, which contained about 700 Rio Grande cutthroat trout. “This is the best day of work I’ve had in a long time,” Vigil, an aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, called over the helicopter’s receding whump. “Coolest part of the job, hands down.” Vigil was here to empty his backpack’s piscine contents into Sand Creek, which wends 12 miles from the Sangres to the glittering quartz and volcanic folds of Great…