The West’s Water
Photo Essay
Water, or perhaps the absence of water, defines the Wyoming landscape and shapes the species that live on it. Big sagebrush (Artemesia tridentata) is one species particularly well adapted to Wyoming’s arid climate.
Water, or perhaps the absence of water, defines the Wyoming landscape and shapes the species that live on it. Big sagebrush (Artemesia tridentata) is one species particularly well adapted to Wyoming’s arid climate.
This story is a sidebar to One Irrigator’s Waste is Another’s Supply: Upstream Efficiencies Mean Less Water for Downstream Users in Nebraska’s Panhandle.
As a child in northeastern Wyoming, I remember my summers as irrigation season.
This story is a sidebar to Supercomputer-Powered Model Improves Water Planning: A Hi-Resolution Hydrologic Model Peers into the Future of Western Water.
In the summer of 1860, farmers in central Colorado found Left Hand Creek dry.[1] They started looking for replacement water.
Square solar panels congregate on weathered tree stumps in a small open area in the Medicine Bow National Forest.
My partner Matt and I left the Lupine Meadows parking lot in Grand Teton National Park at sunrise, his long stride covering miles quickly, my short stride moving fast to keep up.
“They’re really beneficial, to get the shrubs in, get the water up.”
The Upper Green River Basin of Wyoming, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, is laced with clear running streams and fosters abundant habitat and some of the most robust greater sage grouse, mule deer, and pronghorn populations in the world.
“The most important questions have to do with the long-term behavior of systems,” says Indy Burke, University of Wyoming ecologist. The system she’s talking about, in this case, is western landscapes.
I was fortunate to grow up on the banks of Trout Creek, one of the many streams winding its way out of the Wind River Mountains onto mile-high flatlands and eventually to the lower elevations of the Big Wind River, if you consider 4,000 to 5,000 feet to be low.
On a warm summer morning in western Nebraska, 77-year-old farmer Bob Busch stood next to a sugar beet field in a worn denim shirt
Inside the University of Wyoming’s 3-D visualization cave, winter is coming.
A front loader picks up massive boulders as if they are pebbles. A bulldozer shoves rocks into a mound. High-pitched beeps ebb and flow as the machinery works back and forth.
Innovations Turn a Rocky Mountain Disaster into a Clean Energy Opportunity
On a morning in early March, I ride with Cody Neff, owner of West Range Reclamation (WRR), in his truck from Frisco, Colorado, to the company’s nearby worksite
The Economics of Protecting Homes in the Wildland Urban Interface
This photo, taken by Casper Star-Tribune photographer Alan Rogers during the 2012 Sheep Herder Hill fire on Casper Mountain, says it all:
An Artist Reckons with the Blaze that Consumed His Family’s Home
On a June morning Bently Spang’s mother, son, niece, and nephew watched a column of smoke climb into the sky about eight miles north of their home.
If Bark-Beetle-Killed Trees Aren’t Using the Water, Where is it Going?
“We call them zombie trees.”