The late Ernest Gruening, former Alaska territorial governor, former U.S. Senator and a prolific author, wrote one of the first histories of Alaska. He broke the volume into periods. Those periods included: “The Era of Total Neglect (1867-1884),” “The Era of Flagrant Neglect (1884-1898),” “The Era of Mild But Enlightened Interest (1898-1912)” and “The Era…
What’s probably the longest slot canyon in the world runs through the Coxcomb in Grand Staircase-Escante National Monument. A “slot canyon” is defined in geomorphology as “a long, narrow and deep channel or drainageway with sheer rock walls that are typically eroded into either sandstone or other sedimentary rock, with a slot canyon that has depth-to-width ratio that…
WC is, of course, a birder and a bird photographer. For more than 25 years, WC has been involved in watching, studying, photographing, chasing and supporting the avifauna of North America and the world. Mrs. WC has been involved even more extensively and much longer. You can imagine our outrage when disgraced Secretary of the…
Commentary / Geology / Science
Much of the beauty and spectacle of the rock formations of the American Southwest is a product of the ubiquitous Navajo Sandstone. In a layer ranging from a thousand to more than two thousand feet thick, and displaying a whole palette of colors, it’s the secret sauce for places like Zion National Park, the Vermillion…
Last week you met your first Guan, the Black Guan. This week it’s a close cousin, the Crested Guan, another arboreal Cracid. The Crested Guan is much larger than the Black, and is one of the largest of its genus, coming in at more than two kilograms. The bright red dewlap, red legs, black body,…
In the faint hope that a Trump voter might change his mind, or that one of the endangered species of undecided voters might benefit, WC, on the eve of the presidential election, will undertake to summarize how President Donald Trump has done in meeting his earlier campaign promises. In a sensible universe, that’s how a…
In Alaska, the theocrats, busybodies and Christianists are trying to oust judges they don’t like, and even to change the the judicial selection process. Alaskans should not let it happen. Alaska’s judicial selection process is a national model for success. It gets Alaskans smart, qualified, honest and hard-working judges. They don’t have any particular political…
East Zion is what happens when you don’t have a river to carve a big canyon. Where the Virgin River carved that spectacular gorge in the main part of the park, in East Zion the erosion, while still spectacular, doesn’t run to those kind of vertical environments. Getting there is pretty exciting: from Canyon Junction…
WC is always wary about posting photos of Utah birds. That’s the turf of Ron Dudley and Mia McPherson, both of whom are considerably better bird photographers than WC. WC’s poor efforts suffer by comparison. Bird photography wasn’t the primary purpose of WC’s most recent trip, either. Still, photos were taken and WC will share…
As Alaska continues its sad, messy, unnecessary self-destruction, WC has struggled to find a metaphor, a way of describing the crisis, that will collectively grab Alaskans by their metaphoric collars and shake some sense into them. Playing with pretty shells on a beach as a tsunami approaches? Arguing about trivia while the house is on…
The Colorado Plateau is the uplifted, roughly circular chunk of North America that spans portions of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. It’s mostly the drainage of the Colorado River. It’s a geologic layer cake of sandstones, mudstones, shales and sediments deposited over a very long time. It’s been uplifted – it’s still being uplifted…
While there are many other species of Curassow, WC hasn’t been able to photograph them, so we’ll switch to another clade of Cracidae, the Guans. And we’ll start with the Black Guan. It’s not a bird you’re likely to confuse with any other: black body, blue nares, bright red legs and bright red eye, it’s…
Thanks to some smart reporting by Juliet Eilperin and Desmond Butler at The Washington Post we now know that U.S. Geological Survey Director James G. Reilly had been suppressing a report on polar bear populations that has the potential to kill oil well drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Under pressure from the Post…
In 2019, eleven U.S. national parks had five million or more visitors. If you include all units administered by the National Park Service, there were more than 327 million recreational visits. That basically the entire population of the U.S. It’s great that we love our national parks, but there’s an increasing concern that we are…
Russ Meekins was WC’s drinking buddy, debate partner and close friend from high school through his election to the Alaska state legislature in 1972. After his election we drifted apart, WC off to Europe and then law school; Russ to Juneau where he had great success until the Hohman scandal broke. Then Meekins headed off…
WC is off chasing birds. Blog posts may be a little irregular or even absent for a bit, because WC will be avoiding the internet in a belated effort to preserve his sanity. If the effort turns up anything interesting, and WC has access to the Web, there may be posts from time to time.…
It’s not a trail. It’s a route. It’s The Narrows in Zion National Park, in southern Utah. It’s also one of the most popular hikes in North America; you don’t go there for a wilderness experience. The sheer density of hikers in the COVID Era makes prudent hiking a challenge. Add that to the demands…
Back in the late Pleistocene, when WC took geology, WC truly sucked at mineralogy. It wasn’t a separate class or anything; it was part of the introduction to the fundamentals. WC’s Geology 1011 professor claimed you couldn’t understand geology until you understood minerals, that you couldn’t read until you learned the letters of the alphabet,…
This is a smaller relative of last week’s Great Curassow, found in the Amazon basin and down into Paraguay and Argentina. It’s also sexually dimorphic. The males is black, with a white belly, extensive bare, black skin around the eye and a bi-colored, black and yellow bill. The crest is tightly curled black feathers. The…
WC likes technology. For decades now, since the release of the Apple II personal computer in 1976, WC has been an early adopter, a technogeek. But the Internet of Things, the addition of web connectivity to everything in site, the IoT? Not so much. WC clothes washing machine and dryer feature internet connectivity. WC gets…
William Perry Pendley isn’t the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency charged with supervision of most federal lands, and the largest landowner in most of the West. He isn’t even the Acting Director. Instead, the Trump Administration pretends he is the “official performing the Director’s duties under the Secretary’s [of the Interior]…
It’s another month shot. September 2020 was notable for WC because it contained WC’s 25th wedding anniversary. WC is continually amazed that Mrs. WC puts up with her spouse. But other than that, this post will be shorter than is typical because WC isn’t really here. WC is off chasing birds and interesting geology, before…
WC defamed the very nice Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve recently. This time, WC will make an effort to address the pretty amazing flora, fauna and geology of one of Idaho’s three national monuments.1 Craters is located on the northcentral edge of the Snake River Plain, at the north end of the…
Back in the late 1960s, WC’s girlfriend, TLA, took WC to a Gloria Steinem lecture at the University of Washington. Early in the lecture, Steinem asked the audience of 2,000-plus, the folllowing riddle: There is a bad auto accident. A young man is gravely injured; his father is killed. The young man is taken to…
A long time ago, WC was stuck defending a young bank robber. It was court-appointed; there was no option for declining. The 20-year old bank robber had three accomplices, all of whom were testifying against WC’s client. The District Attorney wouldn’t make a plea offer, for reasons completely unrelated to the bank robbery charge. So…
As promised, we’ll leave the obscure Puffbird family behind and shift the focus to the much larger, but even more obscure family Cracidae. These are the Curassows, Guans and Chachalacas of Neotropical forests. Prized by Native Americans as game birds, they have developed a healthy wariness of humankind. Those that weren’t wary became dinner, after…
It’s the end of summer, at least by the calendar, and our poor, abused planet has likely reached the end of its increasingly concerning ice loss. At least for this year. WC is instituting a new annual feature1 reviewing the severity of ice loss across the globe. Polar Ice The year 2020 was the next-to-worst…
A chance to pass along some good news, wallow in technogeekery and share a potentially brighter future? How is WC supposed to refuse. One of the obstacles to getting away from fossil fuels and the planet-damaging CO2 emissions they create has been the limitations of solar and wind power. Solar power, after all, requires the…
Silver Creek, in southcentral Idaho, is one of the state’s great conservation success stories. Managed – rescued, in fact – by The Nature Conservancy, it is a highly successful model of what can be done when collaboration is successful. It started in 1976 when the local community urged The Nature Conservancy to purchase 479 acres…
The Cassia Crossbill, Idaho’s sole endemic species, is found only in the South Hills and Albion Mountains, south of Twin Falls, Idaho. Its range is limited to about 70 square kilometers – a little over 170,000 acres, all in the Rocky Mountains Lodgepole Pine forests. As WC writes this post, more than 100,000 acres of…
At the southeast end of Camas Prairie, in Camas County, Mormon Dam impounds McKinney Creek and Carey Creek, tributaries of Camas Creek, creating the small, 19,280 acre feet Mormon Reservoir, originally known as Twin Lakes. The water is intended for irrigation; the Twin Lakes Irrigation & Canal Company, based out of nearby Fairfield, operates the…
Out in the middle of the northeastern Snake River Plain, surrounded by sage brush, cheatgrass, black basalt pressure ridges and cow pies, you can find Idaho’s Mammoth Cave and Shoshone Bird Museum. The visit was Mrs. WC’s idea. Idaho’s Mammoth Cave It’s not really a cave; it’s a lava tube, a place where pahoehoe lava…
Here’s a final Puffbird to wrap up this family of birds. It may seem like WC has been writing about Puffbirds for months, but in reality WC has photographed only a tiny fraction of the 36 members of this family. So many birds; so little time. The Barred Puffbird has a pretty restricted range, from…
Since Mordor was opened to tourism in February 2020 – the arrival of COVID-19 was likely but not certainly a coincidence – it’s become a popular destination for those folks wanting to escape from the pandemic and yet be reasonably safe from infection by the virus. Mordor, of course, is all about social distancing. WC…
In any sensible Administration, in any sensible Congress, a special prosecutor would have been appointed a long time ago to investigate U.S. Attorney General William Barr. But we don’t have a sensible Administration; we have quite the opposite. We don’t have a sensible Congress; we have an impotent Congress, where the Republican majority will do…
