New West Network

My Page: Ken Wright

Livin' La Vida Local

The river is up, and the boaters are out. Along Durango’s Animas River, and all over the West, rafts float and kayaks surf waves and endo in holes. And it’s not just river running: in the river, fishermen are fishing. In the hills above the rivers, hikers are walking and backpackers are camping, mountain bikers are riding and horseback riders are packing and climbers are scaling. And downstream, canyoneers are exploring and sightseers are looking and birders are stalking …

And on and on. Isn’t this why we live in the West? Because right around us, all around us, where ever we live out here, is big, open, and wild places. And lots of public spaces where we can get out and challenge ourselves and savor the land.

It’s good people get outside and appreciate the land. But behind this boom is a nagging question: Where is the accompanying boom of people standing by the land? Where is the army of defenders fighting to keep the “public” in our public land? [more]

San Juan National Forest revision plan

We have a lot of landscape treasures here in the San Juan country, but among the richest is the Hermosa Creek Valley. I’m not giving away any secrets here. Jeep tours, four-wheel drives, campers, mountain bikers, motorcyclists, hikers, fishermen, hunters, outfitters, horse packers, and livestock all find something alluring here. The upper section of the 35-mile-or-so long drainage has a road and was once mined and logged, The lower section and many of its steep, remote side drainages are accessible by well-maintained multiple-use trails.

Despite this heavy use, this valley is magic. Here is still found most every critter native to this region except grizzly and bison. Isolated populations of cutthroat trout with, as near and can be told, untainted gene pools hide out here. Stands of fat, ponderous old-growth Ponderosa pine, like the ones that used to be common to this area, still stand here. For elk and deer, the drainage offers a huge block of habitat and a major migration corridor linking the Animas Valley with the high country.

A remarkable place. An area big enough to absorb visitors while remaining a living remnant of what this area once was. It is also how many of the people who love this place want it to stay. But change may be a’coming. And those lovers may have only a few days to speak their mind about what happens to the Hermosa area. [more]

Take the long way home ...

“Ken’s Shortcuts,” my wife calls them. As in, “Oh, no. Is this another one of Ken’s Shortcuts?”

These roads always seem longer, the ride rougher, the turns tighter than on our normal routes. They may not save time, but they always offer better scenery. [more]

Wolf Creek Controversy Update

The bell has rung for the next round of the political cage-fight that is the proposed Village at Wolf Creek development. In this round, appeals are being filed in response to the Forest Service’s approval in April of an access road to the inholding on which developer B. J. “Red” McCombs, co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, would build his billion-dollar mega-resort. The resort would sit at 10,300 feet on Wolf Creek Pass, and house up to 10,000 people. [more]

Livin' La Vida Local

I took a trip last week, and I although I never got more than 100 miles from home, I found a whole new world right inside my old one.

I’d gotten this 8-day gig with an educational tour company out of the Front Range that was taking a group of 8th graders from San Francisco around the Four Corners for a combination of service work, education, and adventure touring. They ran a river, climbed a mountain, worked with the Forest Service, stayed with an Indian tribe, worked on archaeological sites, went to a powwow, and more. A sort of rite-of-passage into high school for the 26 students. I was solicited as a guide to the area, drawing on my experience as a regional writer and journalist, former park service volunteer, long-time commercial river guide, and well-traveled unprofessional region-wide wanderer.

I think it was mind-expanding (at times mind-exploding) for the kids and their chaperone teachers. And for myself, it was quite fun, and needed. Since last fall, I’d been hunkering down hard in my little office, doing in a sort of financial penance following a summer-long road-trip adventure my family took last year. So when I enlisted for service on this grand cultural, social, historical, geographic and geologic exploration, I was seeing less the work and more a paid-for vacation, even if it was right in my backyard.

To my surprise and pleasure, I also soon realized how much I’d been missing my backyard. And how good it felt to wander around it again.
[more]

Desert Rock Energy Project update

The massive coal-fired power plant proposed for the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico has taken another step toward becoming reality after the Navajo Nation Council approved the project early this month, reports the Navajo Times. The council approved a 50-year business site lease for the Desert Rock Energy Project by a 66-7 vote in a special session on May 12. The $2.5 billion plant would be built on 600 acres of rural reservation land south of Shiprock, N.M., near Farmington, and would generate 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which would be shipped along a new major powerline corridor to Las Vegas, Phoenix and other Western metropolitan areas. [more]

Saving Places for Tradition

Solitude. Tradition. Challenge. Freedom. Health. Family.

Now there’s a list, eh? And how do you come by those good things?

By hunting and fishing in big, wild, open spaces, according to the vision of a new sort of environmental group. Or a new sort of hunting organization. Or a new kind of fishing advocacy club. Or whatever it is, for unlike any other kind of pro-wilderness coalition out there, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers is all those things. [more]

His Side of the Mountain

When I was a kid, my favorite book was My Side of the Mountain. It’s the story of a young boy who leaves his city home (with the blessings of his unimaginably understanding parents) to move to the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York, where his family has inherited an old homestead property from his grandfather. Once there, the boy carves out the inside of an enormous old tree, creating a tiny hidden “cabin” inside, and moves in for a year – right on the edge of a town -- living off the bounty of those wildlands.

If that kid had grown up and moved to southwestern Colorado, he might be David Petersen. And if, later in life, he looked back and wrote a book about how he applied his wilderness adventure to his life, it could be Petersen’s On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life, recently released in paperback. [more]

Book Review: "1491"

The truth changes things. And some of those things are hard to change. Take, for example, our vision of what the “New World” was like before the “Old World” stumbled across it in 1492.

That vision, to make a broad generalization, is this: before Columbus’s ominous arrival, the New World was a lightly populated land inhabited by peaceful people living in a Garden of Eden-like harmony with a big, unbroken wilderness. These people had been living like these primitive hunter-gather lives since they crossed the Bering Land Bridge some 10,000 years ago. This world persisted unbroken until after 1492, when native peoples were decimated by the overwhelming technology of the Old World invaders. After that, the archaic and virgin New World primeval wilderness was tamed and domesticated.

If that sounds familiar, then pretty much everything you thought is wrong. [more]

Livin' La Vida Local

A typically lovely Four Corners morning – diamond-clear and as brilliant as a bright idea. So while the air’s still cool, and to put off my anchoring myself in front of the computer, I decide to mow the lawn. Such as it is, in our case. Typical Four Corners, again: aside from my wife’s colorful gardens, our yard is generally dry, spotty, downright dusty in places, with islands of what is recognizable as “lawn” growth dotted with puddles of richer, healthier weed gene pools. Today the dandelions are doing particularly well, expanding their collective reach into the thirsty grass like a rising sea level. I mow them down, as is my urban duty, shredding their serrated leaves and decapitating their complex little buttery-yellow heads. But I don’t feel bad – I know they ain’t dead. They’re weeds – resilient and adaptable and clever. And I know my intent is not to kill. I look at it as more like … caching. I keep my secret crop on the lowdown for some hard time when it’ll be needed to flourish, because every part of impressive dandelion is edible, and can be used for everything from nutritional greens to a coffee substitute to wine. But I’ve always had some kind of weak spot for weeds. [more]