High Country News

WHEN YOU FLY across the country, you see shapes and lines on the land scrolling far below: mountains and rivers, freeways and causeways, the green geometry of irrigated rectangles and circles. Much more difficult to discern are the geopolitical delineations: state lines, county lines, international borders, crazily gerrymandered voting districts. This borderless view is a more accurate reflection of the way people in the West are connected to and reliant on each other for essential resources and acts of kindnesses. Showing compassion for other humans and other life-forms, learning how to live in a world rife with problems yet trying hard to be on the side of solutions — this work knows no boundaries. I was thinking about all this as I traveled to New York last month to attend the…

THE ARCHIVES ISSUE Your April edition was terrific — great photos and graphics as well as quality stories. I particularly enjoyed Wufei Yu’s research on one Chinese American family’s history in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with its connections to Jemez Pueblo (“Origin Story”). It is difficult to be reminded of all of the mistakes our lawmakers and citizenry have made over the years in limiting the rainbow connections of all immigrant groups. Hopefully, we as a nation are learning to be more inclusive and celebrate our differences, however slowly. Jamie GaganTesuque, New Mexico What a valuable issue! It’s so good to see and share diverse memorabilia and legacy. Appreciate that your focus was a variety of collected and documented memories of women. So good to see my grandparent’s generation through the Indigenous eyes of…

DATA RELEASED in March reveals that 54 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management fail to meet the agency’s own “land-health standards.” While standards vary across states and bioregions, they generally measure biological conditions, including soil health, water quality, plant species diversity and the quality of habitat for threatened and endangered species. The standards define the minimum benchmarks land managers need to achieve and maintain in order for landscapes to be considered functional and be used sustainably. The BLM oversees 246 million acres of land — the vast majority of it in the Western U.S. The agency’s mission is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,” but according to records obtained by the bipartisan…

Backstory Broadband internet has become essential infrastructure — a fact that telecom corporations repeat ad nauseum. It’s also become a contentious issue for the National Park Service, which advocates say is shepherding companies like AT&T and Verizon into the backcountry (“Wiring the Wild,” March 2020). While reliable internet is abundant for some and scarce for others, particularly rural communities, critics are calling the agency out for encroaching on some of the last places in the country free from Big Tech and its profiteering. Followup In January 2021, under the Trump administration, the Park Service eliminated a policy that required it to inform the public about new applications for cell towers and allow it to appeal right-of-way approvals. Now, attorneys from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility say this new blow to transparency gives private…

TRACY STONE-MANNING, the Biden administration’s director of the Bureau of Land Management, got her start in conservation at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers in Montana. As the executive director of the Missoula-based restoration nonprofit Clark Fork Coalition in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Stone-Manning pushed for the removal of a Superfund site dam. Later, as a field director for U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., through 2012, she worked to build support for legislation balancing recreation and forestry. She’s held a variety of leadership positions since then: director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, chief of staff for former Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, and, most recently, senior advisor for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation. Now, as the director of the BLM, Stone-Manning is…

IMAGINE SCALING A PEAK so intimidating that it was called El Capitan, a name ringing of conquest, conferred by the Mariposa Battalion, an Indian-killing militia, in the mid-1800s. Imagine the rush of surveying Yosemite Valley from high atop it. “I wanted to test myself against El Cap,” said Alex Honnold, the only climber to free solo the 3,000-foot cliff, in an April 2018 TED talk. “It represented true mastery.” But another story of El Capitan strikes a different tone. Settler accounts say that the Southern Sierra Miwuk, for whom Yosemite is home, originally called it Measuring-Worm Stone. Two brothers were trapped atop it, and only the lowly inchworm, or measuring worm, could scale the sheer granite cliff to rescue them. It’s a story about patience, sacrifice, smallness — and, of course,…