The experts tell us an energy gap looms. Fossil fuels are phasing out, and solar and wind power can’t produce enough electricity to meet the demand in coming decades.

Guides in the outdoor industry inevitably come up with collective nicknames for customers. On horseback they’re “dudes,” on the river they’re “mers” – short for customers – and they’re “sticks” if you’re trying to trick a trout. Sometimes the terms trend a little negative – “flatlander” comes to mind, and there’s another name I’ve come to use but need to explain it.

For the past few years, I’ve participated in “Thistle Thursdays,” targeting a popular trail near Jackson, Wyoming.

Hunting may be losing popularity nationally, but in the West the number of hunters is climbing.

Here’s a statistic to be unhappy about: Colorado and Utah host the fifth and sixth most expensive housing markets in the country, according to Bankrate.com.

Skunks love autumn as our backyard gardens fill up with ripe vegetables. But in my northern New Mexico corn patch, that meant a determined skunk chowing down on ears of corn every night. What followed next was a conundrum: I wanted it gone but didn’t know how to make that happen.

The notion, ubiquitous in America, that all beavers everywhere are a panacea for what ails an ecosystem is misinformed. Yes, beavers are beneficial – in the right places.

Dozens of TVs, refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers and abandoned cars had either been gunshot, torched or both.

Trace was born at home in Page, Arizona, to John and Beth (Jacobson) Hepworth on September 18, 1986.

After a quiet year of preparation and premature eulogies, Burning Man roared into the news this August. There were unplanned fires, protesters and three hurricane-fueled rainstorms that turned the Nevada desert into a sea of mud.

When President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in 2021, public-land lovers felt they had achieved a lasting victory.

Tragically, after existing in the Mojave Desert for 2.5 million years, Joshua trees are now in catastrophic decline, the victim of development, invasive plants, climate change and most dramatically, fire.

If you’ve ever bought a calendar or coffee table book featuring the grandeur of Colorado’s 14’ers, the stunning color photographs were almost certainly by John Fielder.

At any given moment during this smoky summer of 2023, hundreds of wildfires were blazing in the United States – more than 850 as of late July, according to the nonprofit Fire, Weather & Avalanche Center. Most of those wildfires ignited in the forests of the American West.

Grizzly bears in Alaska, called brown bears, that live around the town of Bethel, population 6,325, should have a good life as they don’t interact with many people. But their future is in peril.

Driving back to Colorado State University with a van full of students after a day of working to heal some beat-up land north of Fort Collins, I wondered: Could ecological restoration be a new form of outdoor recreation?

When I was leading groups into the Wyoming wilderness in the 1990s, once we left a trailhead we were on our own.

When the Wilderness Act became law in 1964, it put wildlife and wild lands first, decreeing that these special places should be left alone as much as possible. This unusual approach codified humility, arguing that some wild places, rich in wildlife and natural beauty, needed as much protection as possible.

The small towns of Paonia and Hotchkiss in western Colorado are seeing fewer tourists this spring. Exceptionally high runoff blew out a culvert on State Highway 133 about seven miles northeast of Paonia, which then allowed rushing water to carve a gully into the roadbed.

If you think that race is only an issue in the country’s biggest cities, consider a murder trial that recently concluded in the small town where I live, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon.