On Jan. 1, I joined 15 friends on a raft trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. That morning, our boats were covered in snow; the canyon’s red cliffs, capped with white, looked like giant slabs of frosted carrot cake. The ranger said locals had never seen the place so wintry. So we […]
Sarah Gilman
Sarah Gilman is an independent writer, illustrator and editor based in Washington state. Her work covers the environment, natural history, science and place. She served as a staff and contributing editor at High Country News for 11 years.
Posted inJanuary 12, 2015: What Are We Thinking?
Where can we say ‘Yes’ to oil and gas?
What we give up in so-called sacrifice zones.
Posted inDecember 22, 2014: The Dust Detectives
Dust to dust
That early spring afternoon looked like the opening shot for a bad doomsday flick. The sky west of Paonia, Colorado, brooded yellow at first, fading to sepia around its edges. Then, as the wind rose, it gusted to a hard orange-red. The mountain skyline to the southeast — just that morning, a white and blue […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2014: The Dust Detectives
The Latest: Protective settlement reached for Roan Plateau
Industry and environmentalists compromised on the embattled Colorado mesa.
Posted inNovember 24, 2014: Transportation Transformation
Latest: New air quality requirements for Utah oil & gas
Operators must install low or no-bleed valves on tanks to curb venting into the air.
Posted inArticles
Compromise on Colorado’s Roan Plateau
Industry and conservationists reach a deal to protect tens of thousands of acres.
Posted inArticles
The Uintah Basin’s tricky oil and gas ozone problem
Can officials greenlight booming development and clean up the air at the same time?
Posted inArticles
Extreme Makeover, the BLM episode
How a gigantic federal bureaucracy is positioning itself to manage resources at a “landscape” level.
Posted inArticles
War of the words
New oil and gas ‘codebook’ aims to help the public muddle through the fracking debate
Posted inGoat
Closure of federal sheep facility would be a victory for grizzlies
On the last day of August, 2012, a collared grizzly bear dubbed 726 by federal wildlife biologists vanished into the rugged Centennial Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. A few weeks later, they recovered his collar near an established campsite. It appeared to have been cut, stoking suspicions that hunters may have shot the bear, a […]
Posted inGoat
Is Canada’s massive mine waste spill a sign of things to come?
From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
How mining transforms the West’s ranching communities
Photographs of people and places in flux.
Posted inGoat
ESA changes could help protect sage grouse on private land
In an increasingly subdivided and trailblazed West, southeastern Oregon’s Harney County is a place that can still make you feel small. From the empty blacktop two-lane highways 78 and 20, broad grasslands rise to sagebrush-studded mesas and hills that crest and break to the blue horizons like the landlocked waves of a parched sea. Drive-fast-with-your-windows-down […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Of Pulitzers and presidents
High Country News congratulates Dave Philipps, who covered the West’s wild horse controversy for us in a 2012 feature story. In April, Philipps and the Colorado Springs Gazette received the Pulitzer Prize, newspaper journalism’s highest honor, in the national reporting category for Philipps’ investigative series, “Other Than Honorable.” The three pieces “used Army data to […]
Posted inArticles
Will our ‘dam nation’ free its rivers?
A new film explores a growing movement to remove dams that have outlived their usefulness.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
In like a lion, out like a donut
Spring has hit High Country News headquarters in Paonia, Colo.: The trees are blooming and the temperatures rising, the winds are strafing our winter-complacent mucus membranes with Colorado Plateau dust and juniper pollen, and snowpack is raging down the North Fork in a torrent of red water. HCN is undergoing a sort of season change […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
The Latest: Colorado River Delta update
BackstoryOver the last 50 years, the Colorado River has rarely reached its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. The giant dams on its main stem and the water demands of some 35 million people have largely dried out its vast delta, which once sustained cottonwood and willow forests and armies of fish and birds. But […]
Posted inGoat
Coast Guard blames Shell for beached Arctic drill rig
On New Year’s Eve, 2012, Royal Dutch Shell’s Kulluk drilling platform ran aground off a southern Alaskan island called Sitkalidak. Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard released a 152-page report dissecting the incident in minute detail and squarely pinning the blame on the oil company and its contractors. The company had used the Kulluk – […]
Posted inGoat
Four women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did. It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
A plague of tumbleweeds
A handy pamphlet on how to dig out from a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions.