New West Feature
‘Wacky’ New Mexico Town Still Waiting to Offer Space Flights to Tourists. But They’re Coming.
Two women chatted recently—yoga mats tucked under their arms—outside Rhonda Brittan’s Black Cat Books & Coffee in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
This town along the muddy Rio Grande, long known for its therapeutic mineral springs, revels in its image as an anachronistic byway where new age now melds with the old. And befitting a town which rolled the dice in 1950 and changed its name from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences—fulfilling a challenge from the TV quiz show of the same name—the dice are now being rolled here again. At stake are the future economic successes of the town and state.
Spaceport America, a $209 million taxpayer-funded project enthusiastically backed by former Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration, is expected to launch spaceships in 2013 for private citizens to take sub-orbital trips, with a ticket to ride going for $200,000 per passenger.
“I think it’s a great fit for Truth or Consequences. It’s wacky. What a weird thing it is, like having Disneyland all of a sudden crop up in your neighborhood, so we will see what happens,” said Brittan, as she poured coffee and chatted with customers.
[more]Rural Issues
Why Newspapers Thrive in the Rural West
Walk in to a town council meeting in Pinedale, Wyoming, and you’re likely to find as many as three local reporters scribbling notes and asking questions.
That news in a town of 2,030 residents is covered by two newspapers and a website is partly explained by the abundance of mineral wealth in surrounding Sublette County, which produced $3.6 billion in natural gas last year. Add to that the urgent concern about breaching a local dam threatened by record snowmelt coming from the Wind River Range, and you’ve got a recipe for a small-town media frenzy.
This scene is also illustrative of how rural journalism is surviving, even thriving, in the rural West and across the United States, in an era of precipitous decline for major metropolitan newspapers.
In the United States, some 7,500 community newspapers – papers with under 30,000 in circulation – still hit the streets, front porches, and mailboxes at least once a week. A 2010 survey conducted by the University of Missouri, Columbia for the National Newspaper Association produced some enviable statistics: More than three-quarters of respondents said they read most or all of a local newspaper every week. And in news to warm the heart of any publisher, a full 94 percent said that they paid for their papers.
[more]New West Series
Lodge Near Butte Works Off the Grid By Necessity and Choice
Three miles of winding dirt road along the Continental Divide lead to a hiker’s and cross-country skier’s paradise. Homestake Lodge is tucked in the mountains, alongside the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest just east of Butte, Mont. It is a lodge built to be green for both logistical and ethical reasons.
The owners, Mandy and Chris Axelson, built their home in 2007 and their lodge in 2008 using its extreme location as an excuse to finally live their dream of running a hostel-style cross-country ski lodge with the smallest carbon footprint possible.
They live completely off the power grid.
New West Feature
Hearing Officer: Exxon Should Get Permits for Megaloads
A retired judge and sitting hearing officer ruled this week that permits should be granted to ExxonMobil for sending oversized truckloads of specialized equipment up Highway 12 through Idaho and Montana, the Idaho Department of Transportation reported.
In his legal findings of fact, hearing officer Duff McKee said he could not find a legal basis to deny the oversized load permits. Idaho transportation officials properly followed the existing permit process, he concluded. The permits, if issued, would enable ExxonMobil to move its shipments from Lewiston, Idaho, to the Montana border.
The so-called megaloads, which can run more than 200 feet long and easily take up two highway lanes, have drawn widespread condemnation from opponents who have variously argued that they pose a safety hazard, an environmental threat and an eyesore. Manufactured in Korea, the equipment is bound for the Kearl oil sands in Alberta, Canada, a joint project between ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil. About 200 shipments are in the works.
[more]Summit Daily News Feature
A Citizen’s Look at Expansion in Breckenridge
When Jane Hendrix thinks about the impact of Breckenridge Ski Resort’s Peak 6 development on her Peak 7 residence, she’s worried about congestion at the base.
Though there’s no plan to develop the Peak 6 base area, there may be impact on the residential streets below, Hendrix said. Already, she sees crowding at the Peaks Trail parking area and on nearby residential streets from downhill skiers looking to access the lifts in a less lengthy and costly manner than parking at the gondola parking lot. Hendrix said it’s at the price of pushing out cross-country skiers and those snowshoeing wanting to trek the Peaks Trail, adding that she has counted 83 cars spilling over from the 12-space trailhead lot onto residential streets.
She wonders what will happen to those streets if Peak 6 is developed and either more skiers show up on that side of the mountain or more skiers come to Breckenridge overall.
It was a comment White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams said he appreciated. On Thursday, Fitzwilliams held a Peak 6 open house in the “belly of the beast” in Breckenridge, Breckenridge Town Councilman Jeffrey Bergeron said.
[more]New West Feature
Canadian Tar Sands Pipeline Still Opposed by EPA
As the third phase of work on the international Keystone XL pipeline looms, the foreign corporation behind the tar sands project is posturing as a handful of landowners in eastern Montana gear themselves up for a fight over land rights.
The $13 billion project comes courtesy of TransCanada, a Canadian firm. It runs approximately 1,711 miles from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the proposed route—1,384 miles of it— is in the United States. The first two phases of the pipeline have already been completed and are fully operational, the company’s website reports. It is supposed to be completed by 2013 and has been in the works for more than three years.
The company says it has already held dozens of meetings for public involvement and points to a Department of Energy study that concluded the pipeline could reduce American dependency on foreign oil from nations outside North America by up to 40 percent. The American Petroleum Institute, which supports the pipeline, also suggested recently that the U.S. could lose the tar sands crude to more cooperative overseas markets if the process continues to be stalled. But the proposed route cuts through a small triangle of northeastern Montana, and locals are not happy about it.
[more]Daily Yonder Feature
Re-Bound for Lost Springs, Population: 4
It is hard to find anyone at home in Lost Springs, Wyoming.
I should know – I’ve tried, on several occasions. A few years ago my motive to visit Lost Springs was to hang out at the Lost Bar as part of my “research project” to visit and document some of Wyoming’s remote watering holes-cum community centers. The Lost Bar was on a route, more or less, between the Western Saloon in Glendo and the Bill Yacht Club in Bill (population somewhere between 5 and 10, depending on the railroad schedule).
If the name Lost Springs sounds familiar, it may be because the town made national news of late. The victim of an egregious misapplication of arithmetic, Lost Springs was credited in the 2000 census with a population of only one, instead of the actual count of four. Many passing motorists’ heads have swiveled at the Population One sign on moderately busy U.S. Highway 18/20. And as goes the head, so goes the car, bewitching travelers into taking pictures of each other standing in front of the sign. Once they’ve stopped, they can’t resist the allure of the Lost Bar, the Lost Springs Post Office & Antique Store, the inviting grassy town park complete with swing set, and the pleasant public restroom.
[more]New West Book Excerpt
Chasing the Colorado River
Growing up on a cattle ranch in the Elk Mountains of Colorado, I spent many hours operating a haybine. Essentially an oversized lawnmower on steroids, a haybine perches the driver high above tines furiously whisking up stalks of grasses like timothy and brome, leaves of clover, and vast plumes of grass pollen. The sound of machinery belts whirl and groan, and typically a hot August sun beams across your trail of dust. It is the ideal place to focus on water.
From this elevated, noisy seat, your senses become immersed in hay. The smell of cut grasses chokes you. The subtle changes in the whine of the machine relate directly to the thickness and type of grass you are cutting. And the view, roughly 10 feet above the meadow, is a perfect vantage to see where water seeped into the high-mountain roots and where it didn’t. Dry spots stand out like brown beacons in a maze of green life.
Our somewhat antiquated hay-cutting machine boasts a sixteen-foot cutting bar, twirling wire fingers, and large rollers that break the grass stalks to “condition” or dry the hay faster. It is a dangerous machine that you respect. When I lost the tip of my thumb to it as a teenager when the engine wasn’t even running, it earned mine.
But more importantly, despite its clatter and clunkiness, the haybine provides a wondrous tool to witness the laborious hours of a summer’s irrigation. I can see exactly where I (or maybe my brother) missed an irrigation set, or where our gravity-fed sprinkler over-soaked a spot, nurturing less desirable wiregrass to shoot stalks skyward.
Daily Yonder Feature
More Non-Indians Choosing Tribal Colleges
Chris Hilfer and Noel Stewart, both white, learned unexpected lessons during their first year at college. They found out what it’s like to be in a racial minority.
Both young people are non-Indian or non-beneficiary students who are enrolled in tribal colleges. Hilfer, 22, attends United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) in Bismarck, North Dakota; Stewart, also 22, attends Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet reservation.
The greatest numbers of non-beneficiary students are located on “checker board” reservations, in which Indian land is not contiguous, such as the Blackfeet and Salish Kootenai reservations in Montana. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to divide reservation land and allot tracts to individual tribal members. The head of each household received 160 acres with the remaining land available to non-Indians. Over time, many Indians sold their property or lost it through a variety of swindles. Today many non-Indians may live on land that is surrounded by reservation land.
New West Feature
Rocky Mountain Wildfires Set to Intensify?
A NASA global wildfire model does not cast happy projections for the forests of the West in future. As global temperatures increase and the West becomes drier, fire activity in the region could increase by 30 percent to 60 percent from present day levels by the turn of the century, according to NASA scientist Olga Pechony, who designed the model with colleague Drew Shindell.
At the same time, Pechony and Shindell expect that the wetter, eastern half of the country will experience a drop in wildfires as warmer temperatures lead to more humid conditions there.
Increased wildfire activity would continue a trend that has been playing out over the past 30 years due to warmer and drier conditions in the West making fuel for wildfires more flammable, Peter Hildebrand, director of the earth sciences directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in April.
As the earth heats up circulation systems are changing and the winter storm track is being pushed further north. This results in less precipitation, higher temperatures and more evaporation in the Rocky Mountain West, Hildebrand explained.
[more]