High Country News

High Country News is a non-profit news organization that produces a magazine, website, and various other publications. Their focus is on the challenges and topics relevant to the Western United States. Established in 1970 by rancher and environmental advocate Tom Bell in Wyoming, High Country News operates as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation based in Paonia, Colorado.

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Indigenous filmmakers get support from Sundance

2 days ago | hcn.org | Jason Asenap |Gretchen King

Evening on the Mescalero Reservation in southern New Mexico, at the 2011 Sundance Institute Native Lab. I took a walk in the dark, and a small fire burned in the distance, where a ceremony was occurring. It all felt familiar, like being back in southern Oklahoma at the Comanche Homecoming Powwow. But I was in New Mexico, workshopping my screenplay, a romantic comedy called Rugged Guy.
Supreme Court puts Utah’s oil train back on the rails

3 days ago | hcn.org | Lisa Sorg |Gretchen King

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News and is republished here through a partnership with Climate Desk. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a controversial Utah railway project that critics say erodes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock of environmental law for the past half century.
Can this Washington member of Congress turn the Democratic Party around?

4 days ago | hcn.org | Joseph O’Sullivan |Gretchen King

This story was originally published by Cascade PBS and is republished here by permission. Standing beneath towering shelves of kegs in the back of Vancouver’s Loowit Brewing, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has just given a thank-you talk to her supporters after squeaking through another tight election.
Sea otters to get another chance in Oregon and Northern California

6 days ago | hcn.org | Anna V. Smith

If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life.
Wolves return to the West

6 days ago | hcn.org | Jonathan Thompson

“Avintaquint is dead!May he never have a successor,” Utah’s Duchesne Record proclaimed in September 1910. “The crafty leader of one of the wiliest bands of pillagers of the cattle range that ever roamed the west” had finally met his end. Avintaquint was not a human outlaw, but a canine one — a giant gray wolf that gained notoriety by feasting on sheep and cattle throughout eastern Utah, stubbornly eluding traps, bullets and poisons for well over a decade.
The enduring appeal of nude desert self-portraits

6 days ago | hcn.org | Miles Griffis

The igneous dike cut through the enormous monzogranite boulder gleaming in golden hour rays. I followed the neat geologic line in the Jumbo Rocks area of Joshua Tree National Park, thinking about the late photographer Laura Aguilar. The quartz intrusion sent me 20 yards up a wash into the sweet and spicy needles of a piñon pine tree before it vanished underground.
Don’t turn away from news

6 days ago | hcn.org | Jennifer Sahn

Let’s be honest — it’s difficult to be a consumer of news right now. The barrage of actions taken by this administration and by Congress that will do harm to species and ecosystems is relentless. Hard-won legal protections for human, plant and animal communities are being eroded daily, while longstanding programs that employ scientists to analyze data are rapidly dismantled. Many Americans are limiting the amount of news they consume, given how emotionally taxing it has become to pay attention.
How to preserve a glacier’s legacy

1 week ago | hcn.org | Kylie Mohr

When Rose McAdoo visits a glacier, she doesn’t just bring a harness, rope and crampons. She brings a portable camp stove, sugar, powdered whole milk and heavy cream, and a gelatin substitute called agar. The glacier will also become an ingredient. McAdoo is a dessert artist, and one of her favorite desserts to make on, and with, a glacier is panna cotta.
A proposed Utah uranium mine gets the Trump treatment

1 week ago | hcn.org | Jonathan Thompson

Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. On a blustery day in mid-May, a herd of cattle grazed against the snow-dusted slopes of the La Sal Mountains — a classic Western landscape, except for the splintered remains of all the juniper and piñon trees that had been attacked and viciously shredded by a hydromower.
Class of 2025 leads the way for Indigenous graduation regalia

1 week ago | hcn.org | Shaun Griswold |Bella Davis

This article was produced in partnership withNew Mexico In Depth, a local nonprofit newsroom. The cliff fendlerbush’s blooms offered countless nibbles for one hungry young deer. Its mother watched the feast from several steps away, on the other side of a nature path crossroad below Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Getting impatient, or perhaps not feeling worried, the elder deer headed off to the Animas River and left her child behind in the bush to find its own way.