A teardrop trailer parked roadside.

Over Look / Under Foot

Two artists road trip through Utah’s national parks

Text and photographs by Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn
Captions by Birch Malotky

As tent campers and national parks enthusiasts, we spend a lot of time in the company of Airstreams, Winnebagos, and Jaycos, and have come to appreciate that for many, the RV makes a kind of relationship to nature possible.

Four people with backpacks and helmets stand in a forest with a view of a lake behind them.

Restoring Connection to the Land

Indigenous trail crews empower the next generation of environmental stewards

By Cecilia Curiel

For the last several years, Shonto Greyeyes of the Diné (Navajo) Nation has made his living in some of the Southwest’s most sought-after landscapes—

Photo of two elk silhouetted against a sunset.

Elk Heyday

Booming elk numbers create a rare opportunity for hunting and tourism

By Janey Fugate

While scouting for mule deer on a chilly October evening in southeast Wyoming, the last thing I expected to see was several hundred elk.

Photo of a red fox sitting on a paved sidewalk near a sprinkler in a campground.

The Outdoor Recreation Ecosystem

How accounting for human behavior can improve wildlife management

By Molly Caldwell

On a summer evening in a Grand Teton National Park campground, the smell of barbecue drifts along a cooling breeze, signaling dinner time to nearby red foxes.

Cliff Notes

Cliff Notes

How place and technology meanings shape conflict around outdoor recreation development

By Wes Eaton and Curt Davidson 

In the fall of my first semester as a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming, a stranger knocked on the half-open door to my new office and said, “There’s a town in Wyoming where people are saying that an outdoor recreation development proposal is tearing their community apart. Want to look into it with me?”

A rock climber ascends a sport route in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming.

Ascending to the Challenge

Rock climbers in a remote Wyoming canyon may help shape national public lands climbing management

By Nita Tallent

On an early summer day in 2018, a group of sport rock climbers—packs laden with ropes, quickdraws, harnesses, shoes, and chalk—clambered up a makeshift trail in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming.

Photo of students standing in a lake with their arms around one another.

Reimagining “Leave No Trace”

Can outdoor recreators minimize impact in the backcountry while connecting deeply with place?

By Sam Sharp

It’d been raining all day when we heard them: bullfrogs, croaking from the woods. We stopped, dropped our packs, and marched through the leaf litter to find them.

Red and orange blanket flowers blooming through a tarp.

Wings Over Wyoming

Cultivating pollinator support at state parks

By Amy Marie Storey

In 2019, a plain mowed field in Oklahoma’s Sequoyah State Park transformed into an acre of wildflowers. The verdant space served both visitors and pollinators.

A bunch of tents pitched in the desert with red rock buttes on the horizon

When You Gotta Go—Pack It Out

Finding solutions for human waste in the backcountry

By Kristen Pope

Among stunning red arches, balancing rocks, canyons, pinyon-juniper, and cacti, a hiker in southern Utah sees something white in the distance. Is it a wildflower? Approaching the “blossom,” the hiker instead finds something far less picturesque—used toilet paper and human feces.

White dog and man walking on a trail.

Untethered

Managing off-leash dogs on public trails

By Sabrina White

“Boulder, as a town, has always been super supportive of dogs and people recreating together off-leash,” says Lisa Gonҫalo, recreation management coordinator for the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks.

Family hiking through wildflowers with trees behind.

Making Space

Land trusts take on community access to outdoor recreation

By Meghan Kent

In 2009, Colin Betzler moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, as the first paid executive director for the local land trust. Like for many people, the Bighorn Mountains drew him to the area. On a clear day, the fortress-like summits of Cloud Peak, Blacktooth, Innominate, and Mt. Woolsey reign over the Sheridan valley.

Sunrise and lens flare over a field in the Bighorn Mountain Range near Buffalo, Wyoming

Wild and Working

The promise of western lands

Perspective by John L. Koprowski

I was a youngster in Cleveland, Ohio, when the Cuyahoga River started on fire…again!

oil derrick

Living in a Natural Resource Economy

What can Wyoming learn from studies of the “natural resource curse”?

By Emilene Ostlind

Wyoming has long produced the most coal of any US state and lands in the top ten states for natural gas and oil production. In a fossil fuel driven economy, all that mineral wealth should make Wyoming rich, and sometimes it truly does.

A New Lease on State Land

A New Lease on State Land

How conservation is hoping to buy a seat at the land management table

By Birch Malotky

In early November 2020, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s (WOC) staff huddled around a laptop and logged into their freshly minted account on energynet.com, an online marketplace where 199 leases for oil and gas development on Wyoming state trust lands were up for auction.

Sagebrush in Prisons

Sagebrush in Prisons

Inmates are saving an iconic American landscape—and themselves

By Frani Halperin

On a very windy fall day, Gina Clingerman, project manager for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Abandoned Mines Lands program in Wyoming, walks through rolling hills where a wildland fire torched more than 14,000 acres of sagebrush steppe in 2020.

Driving Through Medicine Bow Forest at the beginning of a snow storm

Road Wager

Agencies bet that hundreds of miles of temporary new roads can help a forest

By Nathan C. Martin

The Medicine Bow National Forest is the most densely roaded forest in Wyoming. Interstate 80 borders it to the north, and winding byways bisect its major mountain ranges—the Sierra Madre and the Snowy Range.

Mountain biker ascends gravel path into mountains.

Reclaimed Wildness

Riding Coal Basin’s closed mining roads

By Manasseh Franklin

While quietly pedaling a narrow, paved road near Redstone, Colorado, I rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a small black bear. 

Weeds illustration

Nonnatives, Invasives, Weeds

Plants as stories of human meddling

The Wyoming census for the plant kingdom is out! Over 2,900 different kinds of vascular plants grow in the wild in Wyoming according to experts at UW’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium. They include more than 2,500 native species along with 372 nonnative ones as of 2018.

Cheatgrass field

Cheatgrass on Fire

The race to save an ecosystem

Locals speculate that Nevada’s largest fire may have started with a Fourth of July firework launched in a canyon. But no one really knows. The 2018 Martin Fire seemed small and innocuous, until a weather cell moved into northern Nevada.

Wildflowers in field

When Natives Persist

One researcher examines how native plants can compete with invasives

In the spring of 2019 Elizabeth Leger drove out from her botany lab at the University of Nevada, Reno to her field site on the western edge of the 435,000 acres burned in the Martin Fire.