High Country News

1 week ago | hcn.org | Caroline Tracey |Gretchen King

This story is co-published with The Border Chronicle. On a hillside above an oak-lined wash, 25 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the state of Sonora, a norteño ballad trumpeted from a portable speaker as Eduardo de los Colores sang along, swinging a pickax at the ground. It was early February, and Colores and a group of Sonoran university students were uprooting catclaw mimosa, a thorny shrub that invades overgrazed grasslands.

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Anna V. Smith

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance, a collaboration between High Country News, Grist, ICT, Mongabay and other Indigenous media outlets. In mid-April, the Trump administration cleared the way for a controversial copper mine proposed for western Arizona. The mine would destroy parts of Chi’chil Biłdagoteel — known as “Oak Flat” in English — over the objections of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and at least 21 other tribal nations.

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Ethan Linck |Gretchen King

What was the dire wolf? Like many species lost before living memory and known only from remains, the 1854 discovery of a jawbone from this extinct North American predator was more suggestion than revelation. “Certain naturalists may regard the fossil as an indication of a variety only of the Canis lupus,” or gray wolf, wrote paleontologist Joseph Leidy, describing what he tentatively called Canis primaevus.

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Nick Bowlin

Last year, a mass of Arctic air sent temperatures  in Bozeman, Montana, plummeting to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — temperatures at which exposed skin can develop frostbite in less than half an hour. Massive snowstorms might be welcomed by Montana’s recreational skiers, but for people sleeping outdoors, cold weather can kill. And for years, Bozeman’s unhoused population has ballooned alongside its housing prices, with campers and RVs congregating along undeveloped streets on the city’s fringes.

2 weeks ago | hcn.org | Sarah Tory

For years,Crista Valentino felt uncomfortable about how Jackson, Wyoming, her adopted home, promoted itself as a tourist destination. Ads showed cringe-worthy montages of frolicking bear cubs and jagged peaks in nearby Grand Teton National Park. “I always felt a little bit icky, like we were marketing Jackson as a commodity,” she said. The Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board was primarily responsible.