Innholdsfortegnelse for January Vol. 58, No. 1 i High Country News

Winter is settling over the rolling hills of North Idaho, where I live. Snow ices the limbs of the bare aspens outside my window, while perfect flakes fall from the flat gray sky. This weather is my reality today, but it is also ephemeral; the blanket of snow will probably melt in a week or two. Three days ago, we were still awaiting the season’s first snowfall. In fact, everything in my view is ephemeral. The largest aspen? Probably 15 years old. The window I’m looking through? Installed about 35 years ago. And beneath the snow, the hill my house sits on is made of loess, silt blown in to the Palouse region from elsewhere periodically over the last 2 million years. That’s the blink of an eye in geologic…

After 40 years of service and 80 years on Earth, Andy Wiessner — wilderness warrior, land wheeler-dealer and longtime friend to High Country News — is stepping off our board of directors. Andy attended a one-room schoolhouse in Stowe, Vermont, and his mother, Muriel, let him and his sister run free in the North Country woods. Andy’s father, Fritz, was a pioneering rock climber. Andy recalls being “dragged up all kinds of horrible peaks in the Alps” as a teenager, including Switzerland’s Schreckhorn, whose name literally means the “horn of terror.” He learned to love mountaineering, but says he never took to technical rock climbing. With an undergrad degree from Dartmouth and a JD from Boston University, Andy went to Washington, D.C., in 1974 to work as a congressional staffer.…

I was very much attached to the idea that my history is a blip — that my personal history, how I perceive it, was just a blip, seen against the history of the universe. A lot of astronomers sort of wrestle with what, exactly, that means. The work we do to philosophize and make an abstract version of the universe is so small compared to the ground realities of what our communities need. Our idea of deep time has actually shrunk in size compared to what you would have thought was potentially possible, because we know what deep time is, what the idea of billions of years of change looks like. And to us, it feels like our blip is all we have. For me, I think of a deeper…

GRAZING GOBBLES UP PUBLIC LANDS So let me get this straight: My public lands and tax dollars are being wasted to support 50,000 outdated ranchers and a few billionaires so they can continue to destroy what little biodiversity we have left in the West (“Free Range,” December 2025)? Livestock and people literally outnumber mammals on this planet, and we’ve killed more than 50% of our wildlife. Cattle play big in this destruction, and in the West we’re down to less than 10% of public lands that are truly wild. All this for 2% of our beef? Why not leave the ranching to those who actually own the land they run cattle on, and let the wildlife have the public land? And then, when wild populations recover, hunt them sustainably? The…

RECENTLY, WHILE READING a draft of a story by another writer for this magazine, I tripped over a familiar phrase: time immemorial. If you read (or write) Indigenous affairs journalism, it comes up a lot. As in Indigenous cultures have been here since time immemorial — I’ve seen it so often it disappears into the wallpaper, an invisible cliché. But this time, I realized I had questions. Why do Indigenous affairs writers — myself included — rely on this phrase so much? Natives have been told our whole lives — in classrooms, through academic research and in popular myth — that humans first migrated into North America around 12,000 years ago. Native histories consistently disagree, however, asserting that humans were here much earlier than that. Using the phrase time immemorial…

THE SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY IN LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA, was in chaos when 24-year-old Tanya Atwater arrived to pursue her graduate studies. It was January 1967, and a buzz of frenetic energy filled the air. Long rolls of paper printed with squiggles of magnetic data spooled down the hallways, retrieved from odd corners where they had lain covered in dust. A few weeks earlier, a Cambridge geophysicist named Fred Vine had visited Scripps to explain a theory so new it didn’t yet have a name. Some called it the Vine-Matthews Hypothesis; others referred to it as seafloor spreading. It was a critical advancement on the old, long-discredited notion of continental drift. The new theory would come to be known as plate tectonics. Atwater stood out among the other scientists. For…

If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution, please scan the QR code to the right, visit hcn.org/give2hcn, call 800-905-1155 or mail a check to: P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. Anonymous (37) In honor of Nick Bowlin In honor of Scott Harris In honor of George Washington Hayduke In memory of Barbara “Bee” Jensen In memory of James Richards Baerwiesel Fund David Hall Gordon Jackins Stephen Seiffert Chris Stidley & Ed Bedrick Earl Sutherland & Judy Gilbert William Hearst MC DAF ALASKA Cliff Eames | Copper Center Rachel Myron & Stephen Lewis | Tenakee Springs Leon Shaul & Kathleen Jensen | Douglas ARIZONA Christine Adams | Sedona Bert Akerboom | Tucson Michael Baron | Flagstaff Florence Borgeson | Flagstaff Rodney Carlson | Phoenix Charles & Louise Conrad |…

JUST EAST OF WHERE the Colorado River used to trickle into the Gulf of California, the dunes of the Gran Desierto de Altar are slowly migrating. Sand blows up their gentle sides; at the top, grains tumble down, and the dunes creep stealthily along. Observing these incremental processes IRL can illuminate the story of rock outcroppings like the Grand Canyon’s Coconino sandstone, which features sweeping diagonal lines signaling the direction wind traveled 280 million years ago. As geologists say, the present is the key to the past. But the rock record also documents far-reaching and sometimes global catastrophes, like the “Big Five” mass extinctions that irrevocably changed our planet, shaping everything that came after. As it turns out, the past — with its mix of both incremental and catastrophic happenings…

I LEAD TOURS into deep time. Specifically, I take people around downtown Seattle to explore the stone that makes up our buildings. On the corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street is an elegant six-story structure built with two-foot-tall blocks of rough-hewn sandstone, about 44 million years old, quarried in Tenino, Washington. The building rose soon after much of downtown Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, and the jagged stone gives it a feeling of rugged permanence, certainly what the city needed after the great fire. Nearby on Fourth Avenue, 330 million-year-old oatmeal-colored limestone from Indiana adorns a social club listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Peering through a hand lens, I can tease out a diverse array of fossil invertebrates in the stone: conical horn corals,…