Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Moms are graced with a skill set of special powers, abilities that somehow emerge during childbirth. Call it the Unknown Hormone. These powers include the ability to remember the birthdays of every single person in your family tree, find objects that have been lost since the Bay of Pigs, make a gourmet dinner out of Top Ramen and a packet of mustard, and detect any lie that a child utters, no matter how small or how white.

Western Book Roundup

Helen Thorpe‘s Colorado Book Award-winning Just Like Us is out in paperback now, and it includes an update about the lives of her subjects, four young Mexican women who grew up in Denver, two with U.S. citizenship and two without. On May 12, Thorpe will speak at the Arvada Public Library, and on May 15 she will participate in the Dean’s Forum at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. In October, Just Like Us will be the featured book for One Book One Town in Carbondale, Colo.

• Brady Udall‘s excellent novel The Lonely Polygamist is out in paperback now too. Udall will appear at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, along with Cristina García, Gary Ferguson, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest from June 23-26. The conference is open for registration now. (Check back on New West in late June for David Abrams‘ report on the conference.)

Also in the Roundup: Robin Black is this year’s Lighthouse Fly-By Writer, the new Mountain West Poetry Series, lit champ Jennifer Egan to headline the Literary Sojourn in Steamboat Springs, and Women Writing the West conference tickets are on sale now.

Adventure Journal Feature

Black Canyon of the Gunnison climbers, you’ve been warned: Pack water. Yeah, you’re supposedly right above water (the Gunnison River!), but before too long it might just be a muddy wash. Hikers in Canyonlands, don’t trust that map — it’s going to be sand for you as well. Even Glen Canyon (i.e., home of ever-shrinking Lake Powell) and the Grand Canyon are due to dry up faster than you can spit into a Mojave wind, according to two grim reports recently released.

The first is a climate study by the Bureau of Reclamation (a.k.a., the biggest water resource manager in the U.S.). While the report covers the hydrology of all the of major rivers of the West, the most stressed zone now and in the future will be the upper and lower Colorado River basins, which encompass the spine of the Rockies from western Wyoming through western Colorado, eastern Utah, and nearly the entirety of Arizona. That’s a lot of territory, and within it, you’ll find many of the places hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, cavers, paddlers and fisher people cherish. And it’s all going to get much, much drier, thanks to climate change.

High Country News Feature

Spring semester is winding down, and the students in my course Rhetoric of the Environmental Movement are reading Edward Abbey’s 1968 memoir, Desert Solitaire. After having duly investigated news reports, scientific studies, websites, and environmental impact statements, they appreciate Abbey’s lively and eccentric voice and his vivid descriptions of the landscape of Arches National Park. As we discuss Abbey’s contribution to environmental discourse in the U.S, it’s a treat for me, too, to revisit Cactus Ed each year. I’m always confronted with fresh perspectives and layers that have eluded me in previous readings.

Like my students, I have difficulty pinning any particular genre to Desert Solitaire. It contains, in varying degrees, nature writing, Montaigne-style essay writing, scathing polemic, satire, instruction-manual-style directions, travel narrative and confessional memoir. Where does Abbey stand on environmental preservation? I ask in class.

At first, students want to pin him as a liberal, a libertarian, a primitivist, an anarchist, a romantic or a radical, and they can find passages that seem to support all of these contradictory labels. Likewise, passages are dug up that refute them all. He was a wily, unpredictable dude, both in his writing and his storied personal life and death, and to underscore this I sometimes share “Ed anecdotes” with the students, such as that about his secretive burial in Southern Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta wilderness.

Food and Ag News Nuggets

When President Barack Obama took office, hopes ran high in the sustainable and local food world that the USDA would finally be an agency of change in agriculture.

And, by and large, the agency showed promise in fulfilling that hope out of the gates. The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign was a big hit. School nutrition measures have been too. But now, on top of everything else (see this piece from Tom Philpott on Grist that explains why the agency is falling out of favor, particularly on the GMO issue), there are budget cuts to contend with and that can make change even harder.

At the Atlantic’s food summit Tuesday, Kathleen Merrigan, the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, talked about the balance between budget and innovation at the USDA.

Trail Running

Devon Crosby-Helms and Krissy Moehl (pictured) are putting you and pretty much everyone else to shame. The ultra-endurance studs ran together earlier this month with a goal of settting the fastest time for a woman going from rim to rim and back to rim of the Grand Canyon, tracing the classic route that starts on the South Rim, goes down the South Kaibab Trail, crosses the Colorado River, ascends the North Rim on the North Kaibab Trail, and then turns back around.

They covered 41.8 miles and 10,710 feet of both down and up. The record was 9:25, set by Emily Baer in 2003. The men’s record, 6:56:59, was set by Dave Mackey in 2007.

The new record for women: 9:12:29!

Even if you’re a fairly avid runner, Crosby-Helms and Moehl do this kind of stuff with metronome-like frequency.

Western Book Roundup

Deanne Stillman‘s Mustang continues to find new audiences off the page. According to Hollywood Reporter, actress Wendie Malick will star as Velma Johnston in the movie “Wild Horse Annie,” in development for summer 2012 for the Hallmark Channel. Kimberly Nordyke writes:

“The movie is being adapted from a portion of Deanne Stillman’s epic book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. It centers on the late Velma Johnston, a leading animal rights activist who campaigned to protect America’s wild horses. Her quest culminated in the U.S. Congress’ passing the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.”

Also in the Roundup: A new story by Thomas McGuane in The New Yorker, Boulder writer Florence Williams is a finalist for a prestigious award, the busy career of Boulder scholar Adam Bradley, and the Colorado Book Award finalists and Oregon Book Award winners are announced.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

“How about this program, dad? Personal Expression. Poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, creative writing, stuff like that. Looks pretty cool.”

“Yeah, all that sounds great. You’re a creative guy, you’d probably enjoy it. But don’t expect to ever make any money doing any of that. Being a cartoonist or a musician might attract the chicks at first, but when they find out you’re Tap City, they’ll run off with the first real estate agent who gives her a ride in his Jag.”

New West Film

From the rim of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River below seemed both meek and mighty. It looks like a tiny band of water barely visible below millions of years of rock, but it was this river, blasting through fierce rapids with dirt and debris, that carved through a mile of rock like a diamond saw.

This is the Colorado River in its finest moments. River runners know it as a death-defying series of rapids, but even this whitewater is only a fraction of the hydraulics that once raged through the canyon, in the days before Lake Powell tamed it.

In its grim less spectacular moments the Colorado is not a river at all. It is an unremarkable trickle through concrete canals, and then, not even that. Just a dry riverbed that delivers not even a drop to the sea.

“It looks like the end of the line,” says photographer Pete McBride, as he and his companion, author Jonathan Waterman, find their canoes lodged in a foamy brown muck. “It looks like the garbage disposal at the end of the river.”

Food and Ag News Nuggets

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has been talking up biofuels this week, taking on critics who say federal support of ethanol should be eliminated.

First, he came out strong against suggested cuts to the 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit on ethanol to a Senate committee, saying in a (very complete, worth the full read) report from Phillip Brasher of the Des Moines Register that: “If you create a cliff, you’re going to create a significant job loss in rural America at a time when we’re just beginning to turn a corner in terms of the economy.”

Also in this week’s roundup: The coming of GMO veggies, a plan for urban agriculture, organic growing continues to grow and more.