ON THE FIRST DAY I lived in Northern California, I stood on the beach and stared at a golden-green object washed up on the sand — a shining coil with a perfect bulb at one end. It was, I learned, a strand of kelp, and I remember thinking it would mak

Mention the James Beard Foundation, and folks think of chic restaurants, white chef’s hats and hand-plated hors d'oeuvres. My favorite James Beard Award-winner is much more down-home. Los Hernandez is a humble eatery housed in a whitewashed, cinder-b

IF YOU DRIVE EAST on Highway 95 through the Idaho Panhandle, the Clearwater River will be on your right, winding its way slowly and surely toward Lapwai, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Reservation. The river, which is the largest tributary to the Snake Rive

TYLER MATLOCK (HE/HIM) Third-generation Coloradan, health-care professional and outdoor athlete Denver, Colorado Being a multigenerational Coloradan means that I’m a staple here. My mom and my grandparents walked the same streets that I walk in Park

Anonymous (168) In honor of Sarah Bartelt In honor of Theresa Cardenas In honor of Nicky Conroy In honor of Cycle Farm In honor of Patrick Finley In honor of Mayre Flowers In honor of Ray Haertel In honor of immigrants and migrants In honor of the jo

A Monterey County resident found a clever — and creative — way to respond to a rarely enforced regulation, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Etienne Constable, who’d parked his boat in his driveway for four years without any complaints, was order

IN THE WESTERN U. S. TODAY, water is increasingly scarce and valuable; it’s basically liquid gold. The combination of a “first in time, first in right” system for managing water rights — meaning senior water rights always have priority — with increas

WHEN YAKAMA NATION leaders learned in 2017 of a plan to tunnel through some of their ancestral land for a green energy development, they were caught off guard. While the tribal nation had come out in favor of climate-friendly projects, this one appea

WHEN COAL MINERS NORTH of Fernie, British Columbia, blast into the mountains, the piles of rocks left behind leach selenium into the Elk River, which flows south into the Kootenai River. In small quantities, selenium is an essential nutrient, but lar

IN 1953, the Anaconda Minerals Company leased nearly 8,000 acres of land in central New Mexico from the Pueblo of Laguna to mine uranium for nuclear weapons. The company gouged and blasted away at the earth, constructing the three massive holes known

WHEN THE SANTIAM FIRE RIPPED through Gates, Oregon, on Labor Day 2020, Sam Drevo escaped with his life, his puppy, Eddy, and not much else. The house he and his mother lived in, a triplex and the restored historic building that housed his kayak schoo

WE NAMED HIM LINCOLN, after the Lincoln Monument off I-80 near the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. One, because he was the color of a new penny, and two, because the day we met him, he wore the same serious expression of our 16th president. Earli

LOUIS CARLOS BERNAL was born in 1941 in Douglas, Arizona, a small border town in a region known for cattle ranching and copper mining. His upbringing as the Mexican American son of a maid and a boilermaker played a decisive role in his formation as a

IT IS ONE THING TO DRIVE through the grasslands of northern New Mexico. It’s quite another to walk through them. When the winds are relatively calm and there are clouds in the sky, the prairie stretches meditatively ahead, flanged here and there with

IMAGINE YOU’RE A PHALAROPE — a female Wilson’s phalarope, to be precise, Phalaropus tricolor. Your tiny, fragile body fits in the palm of a human hand and weighs little more than a double-A battery. You have long, dark legs, a white belly and blue-gr

Two activists, using the pseudonyms Salal Golden and Rat Daddy, sit in the canopy of the tree where they and others protested for three weeks. On April 1, activists from the group Pacific Northwest Forest Defense ascended into the upper most branches

I LOVE WALKING, whether it’s on a well-traveled trail or finding my own path in nature, if I can, wondering what things might have looked like 50 or 500 years ago. The Catalina Mountains in Coronado National Forest are only a 10-minute drive from my

“WESTERN ART,” as in visual art about the Western United States, often conjures romanticized and myopic depictions of an imagined past: Charles Marion Russell’s illustrative fantasies about cowboys and Indians; sublime renderings of the Rocky Mountai

KURT MARTHALLER, who oversees school food programs in Butte, Montana, faces many cafeteria-related challenges: children skipping the lunch line because they fear being judged, parents fuming about surprise bills they can’t afford, unpaid meal debts o

AROUND 9 A.M. on Nov. 8, 2022, Quentin Fears noticed a small amount of water in the drainage tunnel he called home. This was unusual, so he emerged, only to find that the larger flood-control channel just outside his tunnel was filled with a violent,

IN 2016, A COALITION of tribal nations persuaded President Barack Obama to not only establish Bears Ears National Monument but stipulate that it would be co-managed by tribes and federal agencies. Since then, triballed campaigns have strategically —