Innholdsfortegnelse for October Vol. 55, No. 10 i High Country News

High Country News is an independent, reader-supported nonprofit 501(c)(3) media organization that covers the important issues and stories that define the Western U.S. Our mission is to inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the West’s diverse natural and human communities. High Country News (ISSN/0191/5657) publishes monthly, 12 issues per year, from 119 Grand Ave., Paonia, CO 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other post offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to High Country News, Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. All rights to publication of articles in this issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines. Subscriptions to HCN are $45 a year, $47 for institutions: 800-905-1155, hcn.org. For editorial comments or questions, write High Country News, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428 or editor@hcn.org, or call…

ON JULY 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish fish lined with vertical black stripes. He texted photos of his catch to colleagues, who confirmed his fears: The fish were smallmouth bass, voracious predators that have invaded waters around the West. Worse, they were juveniles. Smallmouth weren’t just living below the dam — they’d likely begun to breed. It was a grim discovery. Smallmouth bass, whose native range encompasses rivers and lakes in much of the Eastern United States and Great Lakes, have long plagued the Colorado River. State agencies and anglers probably began stocking them in the watershed in the mid-1900s, and they’ve since…

IN EARLY AUGUST, Singapore-based Maxeon Solar Technologies announced plans to build a $1 billion, 1,800-employee silicon solar cell and module factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company wasn’t enticed by the cheap labor or even the fine climate, but by the generous tax credits offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law almost exactly a year ago. The massive Albuquerque factory is just one of dozens of new clean energy projects that have sprouted nationwide, thanks in part to recent legislation. When, after months of wrangling, Congress finally passed the compromise law, it wasn’t generally seen as an inflation-reducing tool, despite its name. Rather, advocates hailed it as the first meaningful climate legislation to make it through a chronically dysfunctional Congress, even though it neither mandated emissions…

MY FATHER, a geologist, spent the summer helping to unearth a triceratops. He’s been volunteering on and off at an active excavation in central Wyoming ever since he retired from the oil and gas fields. My dad is a man of few words, even in our very active family group texts. But starting in July, a wave of messages started to roll in. Today I found a sacrum bone. In the mesaverde foundation. Found and excavated this rib bone from a Triceratops. Here’s part of the skull of a triceratops I found. Sometimes there was a photo. Most of them just looked like dirt with something sharp jutting out, or a shallow pit full of rocks. Occasionally I could make out a bone, its outline in stark relief to the…

Editor’s note: This piece discusses suicide and mental health problems among wildland fire dispatchers. LIGHTNING STRIKES in a dry forest and starts a wildfire. It’s a hot, windy day, and the embers quickly spread. Smoke rises, and it’s detected, sometimes by satellites, lookouts or people who call 911. Reports bombard an interagency dispatch center: There’s a new start, and it needs firefighting resources, fast. The wildland fire dispatchers who respond are a critical link in the fast-moving series of decisions needed to begin battling a blaze. When a fire sparks, they’re the ones responsible for figuring out who’s nearby to fight it, and sending resources where they need to be as quickly as possible. “A good dispatcher is makeor-break if you want to keep a small fire small,” said Rachel…

THE JOB WAS GUSTAVO’S IDEA, and the escape was his idea, too. “If he kills us, he kills us,” he told his kid brother, Iván, one night after work in October 2019. They had spent the day in the ranch’s corrals, selecting the best lambs for slaughter. Their boss, they said, carried a gun at all times. “How are we going to get out of this?” Iván remembered thinking. He tried to come up with someone who could help them, then dismissed the idea. He and Gustavo were on their own. Originally from Peru, the brothers had been recruited to work as sheepherders in the United States under a temporary work visa. For the past few years, they’d split their time between a ranch outside Cokeville, Wyoming — where they…

ON A LATE SUMMER EVENING, I stood in the rain in the park near my house, waiting for the dog to pee and watching the waters uncharacteristically fill the riprap-laden ditch that runs through the center of the park. They pushed the leaves and trash downstream, flowing around shopping carts and discarded appliances and nudging discarded clothes and garbage bags toward the river. I saw a coyote, patchy with mange, run along the edge of the waterway. Maybe, I thought, the waters disturbed its usual haunts in the ditch and forced it on to the banks. Later that evening, my husband called to say the Santa Fe River was running. Although its dammed upstream reaches provide the city with water, the river here is elusive. Downtown, it takes the form…

MONTANA What’s a homeowner supposed to do when a grizzly bear takes a shine to their 6-foot-tall shed and starts using it as a combination scent post/back scratcher/claw-sharpening-and-nailpolishing device? Jamie Goguen realized she had a beary big problem indeed when a very large grizzly — estimated at between 700 and 800 pounds — began enthusiastically tearing up the generator shed on her property. Fortunately, the folks at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks know a thing or two about bruins, and they came up with a fur-raising solution to the problem, Field & Stream reported, teaming up with Goguen to install electric fencing that should discourage future visits and “prevent further conflicts with humans and structures.” We just hope the grizzly finds a decent replacement. You know how it is when…

HIGH WINDS TORE AT GOTHIC MOUNTAIN as the sleeping giant watched over the cabins nestled in Gothic, Colorado, a remote outpost accessible only by skis during the valley’s harsh alpine winters. The plumes of snow that lifted from the peak briefly appeared to form a cloud and then disappeared. To many, the snow that seemed to vanish into thin air would go unnoticed. But in a region where water availability has slowly begun to diminish, every snowflake counts. Each winter, an unknown percentage of the Rocky Mountain West’s snowpack disappears into the atmosphere, as was happening on Gothic Mountain, just outside the ski resort town of Crested Butte. In the East River watershed, located at the highest reaches of the Colorado River Basin, a group of researchers at Gothic’s Rocky…

IN FEBRUARY 2019, I visited the date gardens of the Coachella Valley and chewed the sweet flesh of dates found nowhere else in the world: Empress, Abada, Blonde Beauties, Brunette Beauties, Honey, McGill’s, Tarbazal and Triumph. I had always thought of American cuisine as ever-expanding. Then I realized there are hundreds of plants, animals and food traditions that are disappearing from my country’s food repertoire, including many rare California varieties. Dates are the edible fruit of a palm tree: wrinkled, generally brown and about 1.5 to 2 inches long. They belong to a category of fleshy fruits known as drupes, which have a single seed or pit. Drupes include coconuts, olives, black pepper, various nuts and stone fruits like peaches. Dates are very sweet, usually about 60%-70% sugars, including sucrose…

AFTER COLLEGE, I moved back to SOMA, the South of Market district in San Francisco, with no plans except to be home with my mom and Lolo Jesus, my grandfather, while my brother was away finishing college. Lolo’s health declined rapidly; my mom and I would head straight to the hospital after work to be with him. Then I’d spend late nights doing our family’s laundry across the street from our apartment at the Clean Wash Center. My weekly 11 p.m.-2 a.m. routine at the laundromat provided solace and contemplation. I formed friendships with the elderly Filipino attendants in ways I wished I could have done with my own reticent grandfather, especially after his passing. Creating the body of work that forms “A Hxstory of Renting” (AHOR) was my way…

(CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE, SILETZ} Drag clown, artist and writer Portland, Oregon 119 Grand Avenue PO Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 U.S. $5 | Canada $6 I usually get my photo taken when I’m in fresh makeup, but never after the show, when I look like garbage with a gleeful glow. This is when I feel the most alive — the most me. Whether it’s after my solo show, Looking for Tiger Lily, my drag horror series, Queer Horror, teaching drag and gender performance with youth, or reading from my memoir in progress, this is what it feels like to share my dreams, anxieties, imagination and laughter with a room full of people. I write and perform for that weird queer Native kid in a small town who longed…