Flight Interrupted

Flight Interrupted

Biologist works to protect eagles on collision course with wind power

By Jill Bergman

There are places in Wyoming where the sky is more imposing than the land. The force of wind and emptiness define this spare country.

Creating a Sustainable Destination

Creating a Sustainable Destination

Jackson Hole seeks a better tourism future

By Kristen Pope

Hiking mountain trails festooned with larkspur, lupine, and arrowleaf balsamroot flowers; paddleboarding on an alpine lake beneath the Tetons; seeing playful bear cubs frolic; and watching bison graze by the Moulton Barn with a backdrop of towering peaks—these are just a few of the reasons people come to Jackson Hole.

Bison on Wind River

Bison on Wind River

Restoring a wildlife economy and revitalizing culture

By Janey Fugate

Rolling over a dirt road hemmed in sagebrush, Patti Baldes steered her ATV down to the bison herd that she and her husband, Jason Baldes, restored to the Wind River Indian Reservation after a 130-year absence.

A building on a truck with construction in the foreground

Not Fade Away

Communities in rural Montana reach beyond agriculture

By Samuel Western

I’m in upper eastern Montana, a land of undulating drainages, heading north on Highway 87.

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.

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.

Two cows and a calf on a grassland

Free-Range Carbon

Not a silver bullet, but maybe a gold standard, a new market tool benefits climate, ecosystems, and people 

By Birch Malotky

When I get Dallas May on the phone for the first time and ask how he’s doing, he immediately tells me, “We were getting ready to start selling cattle and a week later the rains started.

View inside a white bucket with several tiger salamanders and a ruler for scale. Photo credit: Cody Porter

Amphibian Crossing

By Rhiannon Jakopak

Carrying salamanders across roadways helps local populations persist

On a rainy April night when temperatures peeked just above freezing, around 30 people spread out along a well-traveled street next to a city park in Laramie, Wyoming.

Watercolor and ink illustration of man surveying a desert landscape. By Claire Giordano

Ernie’s Road

The engineer behind a lonely desert highway

Text and images by Claire Giordano 

My mom tells stories of a magic road. It wound from a gleaming blue alpine lake to the desert below. It required no gas, didn’t wear out brakes, and had the most beautiful vistas. 

Rocky Mountain Elk in the prairie, with a dirt road in the background

Intersecting Roads

The need to value and safeguard wildlife movements

Perspective From Corinna Riginos

Roads may well be humankind’s greatest source of metaphors, inspiration for a plethora of phrases about journeys and all the bumps, bends, twists, and turns along them.

Gordon Custer with lab equipment

Looking Underground

Tiny soil organisms may hold the key to managing invasive plants

The four members of Gordon Custer’s research group gather around as he walks through the steps of data collection.

Kelly Springs

Released to the Wild

Unwanted pets take a toll on ecosystems

Stepping through the tall grass, a family made their way to the edge of Kelly Warm Spring, a geothermal spring with a temperature that hovers around 77 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, in Grand Teton National Park.

Prairie and dirt road with hills in distance

Federal lands in public hands

The long history of Congressional intent to keep public lands public

Bob Keiter is the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law, University Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Wallace Stegner Center of Land, Resources, and the Environment

Federal Lands Infographic - for text equivalent, see chart below

Your Federal Public Lands

The United States of America is unique in the world for its vast system of federal public lands, which make up more than a quarter of the country’s land area. Those federal lands, mostly concentrated in the 11 westernmost states and Alaska, span everything from rivers and canyons to sagebrush steppe and alpine peaks.

Two people on a canoe in a lake

Why We Have Federal Land

The citizens and leaders behind our public land heritage

On June 30, 1864, the US Senate approved a grant of federal land to the state of California, a tract in the Sierra Nevada at the headwaters of the Merced River “known as the Yo-semite valley…with the stipulation…that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation…for all time.”