Innholdsfortegnelse for November Vol. 56, No. 11 i High Country News

The mother-daughter duo fighting fossil fuels in Colorado How Madhvi and Lalitha Chittoor teamed up against a proposed oil and gas development. By Raksha Vasudevan Audio: What do we really learn from trail cams? Documenting wildlife can bring us back to nature. By Ruxandra Guidi Scan to read these stories and all our web-exclusive content. Follow us @highcountrynews hcn.org/56-11 ON THE COVER Prairie smoke, Geum triflorum, grows in a prairie remnant in a cemetery near Pullman, Washington. Rajah Bose / HCN…

WHEN 19TH-CENTURY miners first scouted eastern Arizona, they found that the region’s alpine streams contained more golden wealth than merely ore. The White Mountains are home to the Apache trout, one of only two native salmonids within Arizona’s borders. They’re lovely fish, endowed with mustard flanks, pink and purple undertones, and constellations of black spots. Miners called them “yellow trout” or “yellowbellies.” Colonization wasn’t kind to the Apache trout. The newcomers caught and ate them by the bushel, and logging, overgrazing and mining degraded their mountain creeks. Worst of all were the legions of non-native trout — brook, brown and rainbow — that the state later stockedin the White Mountains to entertain anglers. The introduced fish swiftly overwhelmed the native trout. When the first iteration of the Endangered Species Act…

ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR American households could not afford to pay its energy bills at least once over the past year. Some families cut back on groceries or medicine to make ends meet, while others kept their homes at uncomfortable, even unsafe temperatures to save money. Across the West, electricity rates rose an average of 17% between 2018 and 2023, amid record-breaking wildfires, storms and extreme heat. While the rate hike can be attributed in part to inflation and the cost of maintaining aging infrastructure, experts also cite climate-related costs. Utilities are now investing billions of dollars to harden their infrastructure to reduce the risk of igniting wildfires. Meanwhile, increasingly extreme temperatures are forcing ratepayers to turn up their heat in winter and their AC in summer. Hurricanes and…

OLD ROPE SWINGS HANG from even older cottonwoods along the Middle Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The riverside forest, known as the bosque, has long been a shady oasis in the arid valley. “It’s where everyone would go,” said Shelby Bazan, who describes herself as a “born and raised Burqueña,” or native of Albuquerque. Her father grew up along the river in the ’70s, and both her parents remember summers when the river was alive with water and people. Myron Armijo, the governor of Santa Ana Pueblo, shares those memories. “The Rio Grande was our playground,” he said. “Once we got our chores done, then we would get out there and play, a lot of the time pretty much all day long.” Now, water diversions, development and climate change…

A FEW MILES OUTSIDE Pullman, Washington, a remnant of the Palouse Prairie lies on a small hill, surrounded by undulating wheat fields and studded with cracked and weathered headstones from the late 1800s. More than 100 plant species bloom here at Whelan Cemetery, including pink prairie smoke, purple lupine and yellow arrowleaf balsamroot. Two centuries ago, before settlers came to the Palouse, these plants were part of what Melodi Wynne, a citizen of the Spokane Tribe, describes as a “million-acre grocery store.” The fertile, well-drained soils of the Palouse, which stretches from the forests of northern Idaho south to the Snake River, were carpeted with grasses and wildflowers, many with roots that have long been used for food and medicine by the Nez Perce, Palouse, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane and other Indigenous…

An Inuit woman explores living in direct relationship with the land, water and plant and animal relatives of Alaska. RIGHT SMACK in the middle of our Unalakleet harvesting season, my family and I moved away. We left for Anchorage — Alaska’s largest city — in mid-July. While my brother, his wife and my dad and his wife were getting nets ready for seining, cutting and drying humpies on the Unalakleet River, my family and I were unpacking totes, not sleeping very well on air mattresses, and purchasing things like a new broom, plunger and dish soap for our new-to-us house. For the first time in my life, I owned a house with a concrete sidewalk and a mailbox outside my door. With a yard I’d eventually have to landscape. And though…

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK Do you ever feel stuck in a rut and can’t get back in the groove? You’re not alone. Apparently, dude-bro elks go through something similar every autumn — go into a very deep rut, in fact — when they’re in the throes of mating season. Tourists flock to Yellowstone National Park between September to mid-October to watch — and listen to — the lovesick bugling of Cervus elaphus. According to yellow-stonepark.com, it’s an auditory spectacle that is beyond thrilling: “The bugle starts low and throaty, rising to a high whistle, then dropping to a grunt or a series of grunts. It’s a sound that is difficult for the human alphabet to imitate, a guttural bellow, a shrill pitch, and a hollow grunting.” But before you say, “I’ll…

THE RESIDENTS OF WESTERN Washington’s Skagit County, which stretches from the Cascade Mountains to Puget Sound, are proud of their county’s agricultural heritage. Throughout the region’s idyllic patchwork of fields and country roads, crop identification signs tell visitors exactly what’s being grown, while family farmstands offer fresh produce. The amount of farmland, however, has declined over the past century. Now, only 7% of Skagit County is agricultural. And as crop prices fluctuate, costs rise and extreme weather becomes more common, some farmers are turning to more elaborate forms of “agritourism” to make ends meet, opening event venues and expanding their roadside offerings. To some residents, the new buildings and parking lots mean traffic jams, tipsy guests and other disruptions to traditional farms. Others see special events and nontraditional agritourism as the…

CHICO, CALIFORNIA, resident Jessie Raeder dug her fingers into the dirt. Before she arrived, she’d been in a “state of clenching,” she said, but this forest therapy walk in the Butte Creek Ecological Reserve left her feeling calmer. The sessions were intended to support locals like Raeder, who live in areas that have burned in wildfires. The guide invited her and the other participants to feel nearby textures — perhaps the roughness of bark, wet grass, or the smoothness of a rock. Raeder held dirt in her hands and noted its earthy aroma. “For me, it was definitely a familiar and welcome smell of childhood,” she said. “These sessions were very soothing and grounding and left me feeling refreshed and enlivened.” Tracing back to the 1980s, doctors in Japan began…

Retired California TV reporter Celeste Durant remembers Bob Jones as the tireless researcher who sat nearby in the LA Times newsroom in the early 1970s, and became a lifelong friend. “This was at the height of (Publisher) Otis Chandler wanting to make the LA Times a world-class newspaper,” Durant said. “He was hiring really talented people and giving them free rein to write in-depth stories.” Jones was one of those talented people. He was particularly proud of a story he helped break in 1985 about Mormon rare-document hunter Mark Hofmann, perhaps best known for unearthing the “Salamander Letter,” which raised questions about the church’s official version of its history. In 1987, when Hoffman admitted to forging the letter and setting off three bombs in an attempt to cover up that…

WHEN VISITORS enter the quinceañera exhibit at the Yakima Valley Museum, the first thing they see is a pair of seafoamgreen Converse high-tops with flashy, graffiti-style lettering on the side that reads “mis quince” — “my 15th” in English. “This is Yakima right here,” said Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, a professor at Heritage University in Toppenish, Washington, who worked on the exhibit. During a traditional quinceañera, the cumplimentada, or birthday girl, exchanges her everyday shoes for high heels, signaling her transition to womanhood. Nalya Marquez, Navarrete Hunter’s niece, used the high-tops as her “everyday shoes” at her quinceañera in 2017. Navarrete Hunter grew up in the Yakima Valley, an agricultural area in central Washington where Latinos have worked, lived and settled since the 1930s. The region’s Latino population is still growing,…

MICHAEL ZIMMERLE (HE/HIM) Weekly Back Porch Blues Jam founder, builder, wandwright, musician Paonia, Colorado ​I am relentless when it comes to getting people up on stage. Music completely bypasses intellectual thought. Watch someone sing, and watch their expectations drop away, and suddenly the power of that music becomes a force of nature. It doesn’t matter whether it’s technically correct or not; I’ve heard some off-key stuff that touched me in ways that are almost indescribable. When you get somebody up on stage who is trying something for the very first time, and you get an entire group of people exploding in applause for them — even if for no other reason than that they got up on stage and gave it a shot — that is, to me, one of…