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.

The good news these days about Farmington, New Mexico, is that the air looks clear. That’s a huge change.

I learned to shoot on the family ranch, as ranch kids are wont to do. My gun education was furthered at a Catholic summer camp, and I still have my paper target proving my marksmanship. Hunter safety classes, and calm, clear-eyed common sense. This was the rural approach to guns I grew up with.

The prehistoric past can perk up the present. When woolly mammoth bones were found in my hometown in Wisconsin years ago, they became the centerpiece of one of our local museums. Today, they continue to attract visitors and serve as one of the city’s informal symbols.

Shortly after World War II, California fish managers had a brainstorm: They loaded juvenile trout into airplanes and saturation-bombed naturally fishless lakes in the High Sierra Mountains of California. Some of the fish hit rocks and ice, but most hit water.

In 2017, the public lost 1,470 acres of wilderness-quality land at the base of Mount Sopris near Aspen, Colorado.

Although I’ve lived in a small Western town for 30 years now, I have never known much about one of its fundamental institutions, the service club. Many small-town residents still center their lives on Lions, Elks, Rotary or similar organizations.

Reservoir manager Ken Beck says wryly that he has lots of water coming his way, “and I need a hole to put it in.”

In late March, after countless lawsuits and scientific opinions, the lesser prairie chicken in New Mexico, Colorado and eastwards finally got what it so desperately needs – federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

In just two years, wildfire has killed an estimated 13-19% of all mature giant sequoia trees. These most massive of trees grow only on certain western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that divides California’s Central Valley farmland from the Great Basin Desert.