Read Part 1: Dredging the Columbia River at the expense of tribal and aquatic communities

One version of its story goes like this: Some 12 million years ago, the Earth’s crust thrust upward from beneath a volcanic plateau. The plateau buckled, forming the rough shape of a mountain range. Over millennia, rain and ice sculpted this shoulder of rock, carving narrow canyons into steep terrain and carting the eroded sediment downstream to deposit across gentler slopes. In these broad depositional valleys, like this section of Quartz Creek, water spread across the land to create wetlands laced with branching channels. Chinook salmon, bull trout and Pacific lamprey hatched and grew in the slow-moving water. Some migrated to the Pacific and returned years later to spawn, bringing nutrients from the sea to nourish riparian forests of cottonwood, fir and hemlock. Frequent windstorms, wildfires and landslides toppled trees, strewing them across the valley bottom. Beavers moved the wood into dams, forming ponds and redirecting water.

All this may sound like chaos, but the relentless flux sustained a kind of stability, preventing any single channel from becoming dominant and maintaining a mosaic of deep pools and turbulent confluences, sandy bars and gravel beds, fast flows and slow side-channels. The landscape supported an equally diverse range of biota, which, in turn, supported people. Native tribes and bands, including the Kalapuya, Mollala, and Warm Springs, lived year-round at lower elevations and came here in summer to fish, hunt, and gather huckleberries and hazel. 

In the mid-1800s, Euro-American settlers arrived. By 1860, the U.S. government had forcibly removed local tribes — whose descendants belong to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs — to reservations, and settlers began harvesting the forests. Quartz Creek, like many area streams, presented an obstacle, with its swampy floodplain and unpredictable flows. So the newcomers dug drainage ditches, built berms and raised roadbeds. Like wool spun into yarn, the creek’s many threads began to draw together. In turn, the valley was remade: The concentrated flow deepened its channel, while the rest of the floodplain grew drier. Fewer downed trees reached the water, and accelerated currents flushed sediment through the valley, leaving scarce calm pockets for fish. Lamprey declined. Chinook salmon and bull trout vanished altogether. 

Transforming Quartz Creek’s unruly flow into something closer to a ditch must have entailed a lot of labor, something I found myself pondering as I stood on the bridge that August morning and watched another group of humans hard at work. With the help of modern technologies — excavators, LiDAR, GPS mapping — they hoped to undo the efforts of their predecessors and remake the valley, again.

The project is the latest phase of a river restoration effort begun a decade ago in the McKenzie River watershed. It uses a new approach called Stage 0, which aims to turn canal-like channels back into dynamic wetland-stream complexes by regrading parts of a valley’s floor. It’s a bold process, requiring a tremendous disruption of the existing landscape. Studies of the long-term effects of this approach have not yet been completed, and the project’s scale is unprecedented. As geomorphologist Gordon Grant put it, “It’s a full-on field experiment.” 

The McKenzie River is beloved by boaters, anglers and environmentalists alike, and many are uncomfortable with using it to test this highly invasive restoration technique. Others see it as a chance to repair some of the damage done to the watershed, before it’s too late.

The McKenzie River once supported some 110,000 Upper Willamette River chinook salmon, a threatened native fish integral to the tribal cultures and ecological health of the Columbia River Basin. Now, the McKenzie’s population is just under 2% of that historic abundance — and it’s the largest remaining wild population, our best hope for the species’ recovery. Without intervention, some analyses predict the population could be extinct by 2050. “We know we don’t know everything,” Elizabeth Goward, community engagement manager for the McKenzie River Trust, told me. “But if we don’t act now, we could lose this species.”

BRIAN CLUER STARTED FLYING airplanes as a teenager. He spent hours in the cockpit, looking down at the land surrounding his Idaho hometown. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he became a fluvial geomorphologist, someone who studies how rivers and streams sculpt the Earth’s surface.

As a student, Cluer learned the principles established by pioneers in the field — including Luna Leopold, son of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold — who had studied river systems in the mid-Atlantic. They had concluded that undisturbed streams resembled meandering single channels, an archetype that would inform both restoration goals and the collective imagination: When we picture a pristine river, most of us see a winding ribbon of clear water between defined banks. 

In the ’90s, an enterprising hydrologist named David Rosgen began championing a restoration method called Natural Channel Design (NCD), which used formulas based on these seminal studies and exhaustive site assessments to attempt to determine how an impaired stream could be reshaped into its natural stable form. At the time, federal regulations had begun allowing developers to “mitigate” negative environmental impacts by restoring habitats elsewhere, setting river restoration on track to becoming the multibillion-dollar industry it is today. NCD was widely embraced by private companies and public agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Though Rosgen’s designs were intended to allow for some movement over time, his disciples often hardened banks with riprap and boulders, locking the channels in place. Some of these projects became infamous failures when floodwaters destroyed the fixed forms. Overall, Cluer said, many NCD projects fell short of their ecological promises.

“When you think about rivers in that way, you always get a wiggly, single-thread channel,” Cluer told me. During his decades of flying, he’d come to believe “there was something in nature much more wild and broad and spread out and chaotic and undefined than that.” He’d noticed remote river valleys that lacked defined channels and looked more like big wetlands. “That got my creative thoughts going,” he said. 

In 2008, two geologists published a paper in Science affirming Cluer’s hunch. The authors revisited the mid-Atlantic streams studied by early geomorphologists and found they were not, as assumed, “natural.” Instead, they’d been shaped by mill dams, thousands of which were constructed across the region by Euro-American settlers beginning in the late 1600s. Though no longer visible, these dams had significantly altered valley floors. The single-channel archetype, the authors concluded, was an artifact of human manipulation.

Meanwhile, researchers in the Western U.S. and elsewhere were digging deeper into historic accounts and using new technologies, such as LiDAR, to better understand a given landscape’s particular history. Though circumstances differed from place to place, their conclusions were similar: Many precolonial streams likely looked less like winding ribbons and more like multi-threaded wetlands. Combining this growing heap of research with their personal experiences, Cluer and another fluvial geomorphologist, Colin Thorne, started developing an updated model of stream evolution. Theirs began not with a single channel but with a wet valley floor webbed with streams. They dubbed this new starting point Stage 0.

WHILE THORNE AND CLUER were developing their theoretical framework, Kate Meyer, a fish biologist then with the Forest Service, was tasked with improving fish habitat in the McKenzie watershed. She and her team sought to restore a tributary called Deer Creek. Like Quartz Creek, it had endured decades of logging and “stream cleaning,” a misguided effort in the 1960s and ’70s to improve river health by removing logs and debris. Wood was all but eliminated from the system, and berms confined the stream to a straightened, high-velocity channel — “essentially a firehose,” Meyer said.

Working with the McKenzie Watershed Council, Meyer’s team planned to restore the creek by adding wood to the channel, using logjams to slow water and trap sediment. “It was what everyone was doing at the time,” she said. But the results were consistently underwhelming. High-energy streams often washed out the wood, and even when logjams remained, sediment accumulation could take decades. 

There was, Meyer knew, another way. In eastern Oregon, her colleagues had been trying a new approach: Rather than working to improve existing channels, they were getting rid of them altogether. The idea had arisen in 2002, when Paul Powers, another fisheries biologist with the Forest Service, visited an NCD restoration project in the Siuslaw National Forest that had recently been disrupted by a landslide. Initially, project leaders viewed this as a catastrophic setback: the dirt had ruined the channel they’d designed. But when Powers visited, he found that the slide had dispersed the stream across the valley bottom, creating slower flows, increased wetlands, and plentiful fish rearing habitat. He began trying to replicate this outcome at Whychus Creek in central  Oregon, intentionally directing flows out of the channel and into the floodplain.

In 2014, Meyer attended a river restoration symposium where Cluer and Thorne presented their new paper on Stage 0. “It was a total epiphany moment, to see the concepts we were working with as practitioners described from the theoretical perspective,” she said. When Powers joined the Deer Creek team in 2016, he suggested they try it there. Meyer was excited, but also nervous. “I thought, ‘You mean we’re just going to bury the stream?’”

“We know we don’t know everything. But if we don’t act now, we could lose this species.”

They started small, dismantling levees and using the material to fill sections of the channel. The stream immediately spread across the floodplain, creating multiple slower-moving channels and deep pools. In the unfilled reaches, by comparison, little changed. When Meyer and Powers invited Cluer and Thorne to visit their projects, the researchers were stunned to see their theories enacted in practice. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, these people are actually doing it,” Thorne told me. 

Emboldened by the support of Thorne and Cluer and the improvements in Deer Creek — in 2017, chinook salmon were found spawning in the creek for the first time since 1993 — Meyer and her team were eager to try a larger project. In 2018, they began work on the South Fork tributary of the McKenzie, planning to restore a 200-acre stretch to Stage 0 conditions. By then, practitioners like Meyer and Powers had developed a working methodology.

The first step, which may also be the most contentious, is to identify an appropriate site. Stage 0 is suitable for low-gradient, historically depositional valleys where streams can spread across their floodplains without disturbing infrastructure. But how much gradient is too much remains debated, and understandings of landscape histories are ever-evolving. Next, practitioners use clues such as relic wetlands or stands of old-growth trees to approximate the valley floor’s shape before it was altered by settlers. Using LiDAR, they map the precise present-day topography, compare it to the target shape, and create a grading plan. Fish are trapped and relocated downstream, and the river is temporarily diverted into a side channel. Then, operators use bulldozers and excavators to reshape parts of the valley floor, filling channels and removing levees. Logs and woody debris are arranged across the floodplain, some partially buried and others left to move freely. The wood both creates habitat and slows water, functions that are crucial as vegetation regrows. Lastly, the diversion is removed and the stream is released to disperse across the valley floor, where it begins the work of rebuilding the riverscape. 

LIKE MOST RUTS, channels are hard to get rid of, and the process isn’t pretty. When I visited Quartz Creek in August, the landscape looked downright devastated. A muddy stream flowed alongside hundreds of acres of dusty soil strewn with dead wood: giant logs, tangled branches, heaps of slash. “People say, ‘This isn’t Stage 0, it’s Ground Zero — it looks like you nuked the place,” Thorne told me. But Lara Colley, a local resident and the floodplain restoration projects manager for the McKenzie Watershed Council, was smiling proudly when she met me on site. In an orange vest and hard hat, she fanned her arm toward a mostly empty staging ground. “They’re all gone!” she said, meaning the logs. Until a few weeks ago, some 6,700 logs and pieces of wood had been stacked here; now, they were distributed across the floodplain. Colley, who dressed as a log last Halloween, had amassed the wood from Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands where trees had been thinned for wildlife habitat or removed after recent wildfires. “I could’ve looked at a log and told you where it came from,” she said. 

Since the Forest Service and the McKenzie Watershed Council began collaborating on Stage 0 projects in 2016, the Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB) and the McKenzie River Trust have joined the project’s leadership, and several other people and organizations have contributed to the effort. Each collaborator brings different perspectives and resources, Goward told me, enabling the work to persist despite recent federal layoffs and budget cuts. “I like to describe it as an ecosystem,” she said. 

For EWEB — a public utility that supplies drinking water from the McKenzie River to 200,000 people in the Eugene metropolitan area — stream restoration is part of protecting water quality. “Quartz Creek has always been our chocolate milk,” said EWEB’s Water Resources Supervisor Susan Fricke. During high flows, the creek often ran brown with sediment, taxing EWEB’s filtration systems. Spreading the flow across the floodplain will allow sediment to drop out before it reaches the mainstem, saving the utility the cost and chemicals associated with removing it. “We consider the river part of our infrastructure,” Fricke said during my visit to Quartz Creek. “Preventing the problem is so much better than dealing with it later — we’re helping protect our future selves.”

“I like to describe (the collaboration) as an ecosystem.”

The natural resources department of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs has provided feedback on the project. “Stage 0 offers a holistic view of restoring river wetland corridors that reflects the Tribes’ goals for creating sustainable fisheries populations,” tribal fisheries biologist Logan Bodiford said in an email. “Our hope is that this project will better enable tribal members to exercise their treaty rights and access culturally significant resources.”  

The design for Quartz Creek was led by Meyer, who left the Forest Service in 2025 to co-found a restoration consulting company. Franklin-Clarkson Timber Co., the private timber company that owns most of the land around the creek, provided access to it via a 50-year stewardship easement. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded most of the $9.5 million project with a $7.6 million grant (made possible by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). And the actual dirt moving and log placement was done by Haley Construction, a family-run heavy construction company based in Lebanon, Oregon, which also holds the state record for hauling the longest log, a 135-foot behemoth. 

With less than three months of dry weather to complete the project and so many moving parts — 20-some crew members, 11,200 cubic yards of slash, acres of dirt, a flowing river, all those logs — running the construction site was not easy. “It’s like directing an orchestra, getting everyone working together in a timely fashion,” Randy Haley, co-owner of Haley Construction and son of its founder, told me. “And in harmony!” Ashley Haley, project manager and Randy’s daughter, added, laughing. Restoration  projects are demanding, she said, but “it’s very rewarding to do something that benefits the community and wildlife.” Many on the Haley crew agreed. “One man recently retired after 47 years of working for us,” Randy told me, “but he comes back to work every summer just to be part of these projects.”

When Randy’s parents started out in 1958, they worked primarily in timber, building roads and hauling logs. Over the past seven decades, the company’s focus has mirrored shifting societal priorities: The Haleys have put in bridges, built dams, taken out dams, and, for the past 35 years, undertaken an increasing number of river restoration projects. “You have to be able to adapt to changing needs, to reinvent yourself,” Randy told me. 

“I thought, ‘You mean we’re just going to bury the stream?’”

 Today, Haley Construction uses its logging expertise to repair some of that industry’s damage. “The knowledge of how to work with wood, in forests and around waterways, all that now lends itself to floodplain restoration,” Ashley told me. “But we can’t condemn the loggers,” Randy added. “They were doing a job they believed was right, at the time.”

Watching the Haleys’ machines scrape at a bald valley floor that had, not long ago, been a green riparian corridor, I found it hard not to wince. It didn’t help that as far as I could see in most directions, the mountainsides were cloaked in standing dead trees: More than 173,000 acres surrounding Quartz Creek were severely burned in the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire.

This fire, it turned out, played a key role in advancing the Stage 0 work in the watershed. For one, it provided ample available logs. It also made the work more palatable to some onlookers. “It’s easier to bring heavy equipment into a scorched valley, harder to drive a bulldozer into a beautiful second-growth forest,” said Goward. But perhaps most significantly, the fire illuminated one of Stage 0 restoration’s most compelling co-benefits. The blaze burned through the 200-acre restoration site on the South Fork of the McKenzie, at the time the largest Stage 0 project ever implemented. Preliminary observations indicate that while unrestored areas suffered uniform, severe burning, the restored region burned in patches, allowing wildlife to take refuge during the blaze and the forest to recover more quickly. In some parts of the restored reach, the wide expanse of water functioned as a fire break. “We didn’t expect this to be part of fire resiliency,” Fricke said, “But it was.”

Over the course of my afternoon at Quartz Creek, the thunderheads had drifted closer, and as we left the job site, they dropped fat shadows on the ravaged valley floor. Fricke pointed to a line in the dust: bobcat prints. The trail led to the water’s edge, then vanished. 

WHILE IT CAN BE HARD TO WATCH the construction of a Stage 0 project, the concept’s appeal can be equally hard to resist. Faced with the mess we’ve made of ecological relations, who hasn’t longed for a fresh start? This approach, down to its nomenclatures (Stage 0 or, as it is sometimes called, “valley reset”), seems to promise just this: an opportunity to return to the beginning — to before the beginning. A chance to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and start anew.

Advocates and critics alike caution against this framing. “We don’t expect to put everything back to the way it was before Lewis and Clark,” Thorne told me. “What we’re doing is empowering nature — by which I mean birds, amphibians, trees, plants, bacteria, everything — to get to work on the riverscape again, to be able to make and remake it continuously.” The result, advocates believe, will be an increased diversity of habitats and biota that will strengthen the watershed’s resilience to new climate extremes. “Will it come out like it did before? Probably not,” Thorne said. “It’s a different world now, a different river, a different catchment.”

Critics argue that historic Stage 0 landscapes aren’t just impossible to recreate, but, in most places, likely never existed at all. David Rosgen, now 84 and still involved in implementing NCD projects around the country, believes the web-like stream networks described as Stage 0’s starting point occurred only in extremely low-gradient valleys and deltas. In those landscapes, he told me, Stage 0 restoration can work. “But a good idea applied as a universal solution is a bad idea,” he said. He believes that places like Quartz Creek and the South Fork of the McKenzie are too steep to have ever maintained wetland-stream complexes, and thinks these rivers would be most stable and ecologically beneficial as meandering channels. 

With its emphasis on allowing natural processes to shape streams, Stage 0 runs counter to Rosgen’s method. But Gordon Grant, who recently retired from a 40-year career as a research hydrologist with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, sees similarities in the rush of enthusiasm for each. “There’s a particular bandwagon effect that seems to associate with restoration,” he told me. 

“It’s a different world now, a different river, a different catchment.”

Grant spent his career studying how Western Cascades streams respond to logging, dams and climate change. “If there is any river system on Earth I have any claim to even modestly understand, it is the McKenzie,” he told me. So when he learned of the Stage 0 work there, he began looking into it. “I’ve never tried to restore a river, and have nothing but admiration for those who do,” he said. “But I don’t necessarily worship at the same church as the restoration community.”

A self-proclaimed science geek, Grant describes the landscapes being created on the McKenzie as “novel geosystems.” “There’s nothing in the history of these creeks that looks like that,” he said. “I like experiments; it’s how we learn things, how we get better.” But experiments, he told me, warrant careful study before widespread implementation. From “stream cleaning” to NCD projects gone wrong, there’s no shortage of cautionary examples, he said. “So let’s stand back and ask: What potential risks are being set into motion here?” 

Grant, who authored a paper titled “When do logs move in rivers?” is especially concerned about what a severe flood might do to the large wood used in these
projects. Mobilized logs can wreak havoc on infrastructure — bridges, dams, docks, embankments — and endanger boaters and swimmers. Though Stage 0 projects are designed with grate-like logjams intended to trap wood within the restored reach, the systems are far from foolproof, especially in high-energy mountain stream systems like those in the McKenzie watershed. “The potential for mischief has not been fully reckoned with,” Grant said.

When I visited his office last winter, Grant stood at a whiteboard and, in a valiant attempt to explain fluvial dynamics to a journalist with a thin physics background, painstakingly drew out basic equations: Q (flow) = Velocity x Depth x Width. I did my best to follow along, but my eyes were drawn to a poster taped to the side of a file cabinet: an outline of a face with the words “Bang Head Here.” Still, I understood enough to get Grant’s point. Floodwaters are shockingly powerful, capable of lifting enormous logs and tossing them downriver as if they were pool toys. When the last major flood hit the McKenzie, in 1996, Grant was there to watch. “The stream you visit at low-flow, moderate-flow, even big winter flow, is nothing like what you see in an extreme flood,” he said. “And a 100-year flood means each year we have a 1 out of 100 chance it will happen. That’s a significant risk.” 

There are, of course, risks involved with leaving things as they are — extinctions, worsening wildfire impacts, diminished water quality. Which risks are acceptable, Grant pointed out, “has a lot to do with who’s sitting at the table.” On this project, he told me, “it’s mostly people trying to make the world better for fish.”

A FEW DOORS DOWN from Grant’s office, I met Rebecca Flitcroft and Brooke Penaluna, two research fish biologists with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. Though salmon drive the Pacific Northwest’s restoration economy, Flitcroft told me, “The biggest gap in the literature on Stage 0 is actually around the question of: What does this do for fish?” Fish are notoriously difficult to monitor, so researchers often assess impacts by measuring changes to habitat. “The assumption is: if you build it, they will come,” Flitcroft said. 

So far, research suggests that Stage 0 projects can, in fact, build it. A study of
17 sites across Oregon and Washington found that Stage 0 restoration increased low-
velocity rearing habitat, broadened the wetted area of valley floors by several factors, and increased the overall production of macroinvertebrates, essential components of salmonid food webs. 

These shifts may benefit not only salmon but Pacific lamprey, a native fish of particular cultural significance to Indigenous communities. Historically abundant in the Columbia River Basin, lamprey were an important food source for many regional tribes, but their populations have declined dramatically. Lamprey share many habitat needs with salmon and, like salmon, provide vital ecosystem benefits. Larval lamprey filter-feed in river sediments for up to 10 years, purifying water and cleaning gravel beds in the process; adults transport marine nutrients to freshwater creeks. Until recently, however, lamprey have received little attention from non-Native conservationists.

Not all the findings of the Stage 0 study were glowing. Salmon need cold water, and researchers found that temperatures tended to rise after restoration. Sediment composition shifted from coarse to fine — which can be great for lamprey, but can clog salmon gills and fill in the gravel beds needed for spawning. eDNA analysis showed increases in overall aquatic biodiversity, which includes not only native species but invasives. “When you open up a channel, you open it up to everybody,” Penaluna said.

Still, the biggest question is what happens in the long term. Though a Stage 0 project can be constructed in just a few months, the real work of restoring the river begins only after the excavators depart and the water returns. Will these sites cool as shade trees regrow? Will the composition of sediment shift? Will the logjams stay put? 

“The assumption is: if you build it, they will come.”

Luke Whitman leads the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s effort to monitor changes in Upper Willamette River chinook populations over time. Immediately after the South Fork Stage 0 project was completed in 2018, he told me, the number of spawning beds skyrocketed from 44 in 2018 to 272 in 2019. By 2025, the count had fallen to 58. “They’re still slightly above pre-restoration numbers, but the higher levels haven’t been maintained the way we’d hoped,” Whitman said. The reason is unclear, but he suspects it’s due to the Cougar Dam, which lies upstream of the restoration area and prevents scour flows, the floods that historically rearranged sediment and vegetation. “I don’t think we’re getting enough water to keep some of the new channels active, to keep moving things around,” Whitman told me. Still, he believes Stage 0 is a worthwhile experiment. “We’ve got to get creative wherever we can on the McKenzie. Not just with restoration, but with dam management, too,” he said. “Wherever we can take a shot, we should try.”

IN THE LAST WEEKS OF 2025, heavy rains drenched the Western Cascades. In Deer Creek, powerful flows moved wood throughout the restored reach. “It was both very exciting, because it was the most change we’ve seen on any project yet, and at the same time concerning, because we ended up with longer stretches where wood moved out,” Meyer told me. Without logjams to slow water in these places, the river could start down-cutting into a single channel again. In an ideal system, the deluge that washed out the logs would also bring in wood from the surrounding forest. But here, where the catchment has been logged for decades, downed wood is scarce, and the trees are much smaller.

“Originally, we thought it would just take one intervention and then you could walk away forever,” Meyer said. But river systems are nested inside larger systems, and many of the processes involved — wood and gravel recruitment, flood scouring — are still impacted by logging and dams. Restoration alone can’t fix all the processes, Meyer told me. “So we need to acknowledge that, and think more about long-term stewardship where we monitor and manage these sites over time.”

Thorne agreed. “There aren’t any one-and-dones for rivers,” he said. But he cautions against rushing into action. It’s hard to break a Stage 0 project, he said. “It can be rearranged, the wood and sediment moved around, but nature will repair it over time.” After a moment, he added, “Or it won’t. And the creek will be set on a different trajectory than the one we had in mind.”

IN LATE JANUARY, I returned to Quartz Creek with Goward. Bright sun slipped between clouds, warming the day to an unseasonable 60 degrees. Snow covered distant peaks, but only a dusting powdered the nearer ridgelines. 

I stood again on the bridge spanning the creek. The valley still looked disheveled, piled with tangles of logs and mounds of slash, but the dusty wasteland of last August was replaced with flows of clear water. Braided streams curled across the valley, parting around logjams and lapping at mounds of newly deposited sand. 

Watching the creek, I thought of something Gordon Grant told me. He’d turned from the equations scrawled on his whiteboard and said, “You can’t model something like Quartz Creek.” Because of the high-energy flows and the complexity introduced to the system — the unprecedented amount of wood, the intersecting paths of flow — “it’s beyond the capacity of our hydraulic computational fluid dynamic models. … It’s unpredictable.” He’d meant the words as a warning, which they certainly are. But they’re also a promise. Unpredictability, after all, is another word for possibility. 

Humans can’t control the outcome of a Stage 0 project any more easily than we can disentangle ourselves from it. Instead, the process requires that people participate   alongside a host of other actors — trees and rain, stones and fish, beavers and mayflies — allowing unforeseeable interactions to shape the future river. Here, vulnerability and hope are entwined.

“You can’t model something like Quartz Creek.”

Except for a few scattered firs, nearly all the trees stood leafless. Some had lost their foliage for winter, but most were dead. With snowpack lingering at a record-breaking low, the next wildfire season was already
looming.

After the Holiday Farm Fire, Goward told me, locals were devastated: “People looked around and thought, ‘This place will never be the same again.’” Below us, the stream rippled over gravel, and I could hear the pebbles — pulverized bits of the volcanic plateau that once lay here — clinking against one another. At the water’s edge, blades of new grass emerged through heaps of slash. “Everything around us is changing,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is restore the river’s ability to change with it.”   

Photographer Sarah Koenigsberg is a filmmaker and science communicator whose work is grounded in the West.

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The way of the river.”

The post On Oregon’s McKenzie River, an unprecedented approach to restoration takes shape appeared first on High Country News.

On the summer day they planned to close on it, two wildfires broke out just outside of town. Though the Salt and South Fork fires destroyed 1,400 structures, the Sextons’ new home was spared. But the morning after the family moved in, a firefighter knocked on the door. “He was like, ‘Y’all need to go,’” Lindsey recalled. After just a few inches of rain, the normally sleepy creek had jumped its banks, and a flash flood was headed their way.

The fires had torched vegetation and seared the soil that typically absorb rainfall, turning the mountain slopes around Ruidoso into dangerous runways for mud and debris. As monsoon season hit full swing, the floods kept coming. The Sextons built an 8-foot sandbag barrier between the river and their home. Then, last July, a record-setting 20-foot wall of brown water rounded the riverbend. Corey helped rescue two people trapped in the water. But as the river rushed by, he saw a small child pulled under and swept away.

That 4-year-old girl was one of three people lost to the July 8 flood, which damaged hundreds of homes and upended lives throughout a community already struggling to recover from disaster. Experts warn that more danger lies ahead: Flood risk can intensify for several years after a blaze, and heavier rains could be even more devastating. Now, the Sextons want out. But they don’t feel good about selling their house to another family. “Somebody else buys it, and then they’re in the same predicament,” Corey said, looking around the living room they’ve given up decorating. “I don’t think that anybody, honestly, should be on the river.”

LOCAL OFFICIALS share his concern. This spring, they announced a plan: With help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lincoln County is offering to purchase at-risk properties at pre-damage rates and demolish or relocate the houses, permanently converting the land into open space to act as a buffer against future floods. With $235 million in funding secured, officials hope to buy some 400 properties from willing sellers — a proposal that could dramatically reshape the 8,000-person town.

Since the late 1980s, voluntary buyouts like these have helped tens of thousands of U.S. homeowners across all 50 states escape flood-prone homes on riverbanks and coastlines, including after catastrophic hurricanes like Sandy and Harvey. But Lincoln County is among the first places in the country to use buyouts specifically to address post-fire flooding. As climate change exacerbates these compounding disasters across the Western U.S., the community’s new effort offers one path forward for mountain towns fighting to survive.

Ruidoso is a conservative place, not one where you’d expect leaders to welcome what some Facebook commenters have deemed a government “land grab.” Harlan Vincent, the region’s Republican state representative, was initially skeptical of buyouts. A hard look at the economics helped convince him. Before last summer’s flood, New Mexico had already allocated $100 million toward recovery from the South Fork and Salt fires. Now, Ruidoso’s mayor estimates that recovery could cost a billion dollars. Even with tens of millions promised in federal aid, it didn’t seem responsible, fiscally or otherwise, to keep rebuilding in areas that would flood again and again.

Lincoln County was already working with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) on mitigation strategies like debris removal and aerial seeding. The agency also offers a buyout program, though it had never been used following a fire. But Lincoln County met the criteria: It urgently needed to restore its watershed and protect life and property still in imminent danger after a disaster. NRCS accepted the county’s buyout proposal and agreed to pay up to 75% of the costs.

Local officials hope a new state fund can help make up the rest. This spring, Vincent and other lawmakers convinced the New Mexico Legislature to set aside $70 million for land acquisition, restoration and disaster recovery including potential state matches for local governments that have received federal emergency grants. “When you go up against Mother Nature, it’s not going to work out so good for you,” Vincent told me. “We’re trying to get along with her.”

“Somebody else buys it, and then they’re in the same predicament. I don’t think that anybody, honestly, should be on the river.”

That doesn’t mean giving up on flood-prone areas. Instead, Lincoln County officials say buyouts could help Ruidoso recover its outdoor economy — by designating new public land. Vincent estimates that the community has lost more than $100 million in tourism revenue following the floods. Creating a new riverside park equipped with water retention and safety features like dams and detention ponds could help draw visitors back to town. “Think of the opportunities we can build around that,” Vincent wrote in a January op-ed in the Ruidoso News. “(M)ore places for people to walk and picnic with their families, fish in the river, and see healthy wildlife populations.”

While buyout programs in other states have created trails, wetlands and parks in floodplains, that kind of proactive planning is still atypical, said Liz Koslov, a University of California-Los Angeles sociologist who studies buyouts. “A lot of the time, it just looks abandoned,” she said. “What happens to land has totally been an afterthought.”

Thoughtful landscape design is especially important in wildfire country, Koslov said. Open space helps protect against flood damage, but if it’s left unmanaged, overgrown vegetation could pose new fire risks. In a community facing multiple hazards, simply abandoning land is not an option.  

ONE AFTERNOON in early March, Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns drove me around the back roads of Ruidoso, pointing to homes with broken windows that sagged toward the water. “We’re gonna open this all up,” he said, to make sure “we don’t have more homes floating down the river.”

To be eligible for a buyout, applicants have to meet NRCS requirements — including U.S. citizenship and permanent access to at-risk property. From there, it’s up to the county to decide who to prioritize. Burns and his colleagues have categorized more than a thousand vulnerable properties into five tiers based on existing damage and future risk. The county plans to focus on applicants in the first two tiers — people whose homes have been completely destroyed or severely damaged.

This is where buyouts inevitably get messy. At a packed public meeting in late March, residents peppered Burns with questions: How would an appraiser assess the value of homes that have washed away? Would second homes be eligible? What about the mobile home parks whose displaced residents did not own the land they lived on?

“When you go up against Mother Nature, it’s not going to work out so good for you. We’re trying to get along with her.”

By early May, the county had received more than 300 applications from property owners, Burns said. Just over 150 had been deemed preliminarily eligible, and appraisers had begun visiting properties. But how many people would end up participating in the program was still unclear.

Residents have their own complex calculus to consider. Just across the river from the Sextons, a man named Mike Abraham showed me around his backyard, which was buried beneath silt and debris. The floodwater line came up nearly 3 feet on his house. “I’ve been through four disasters, each time trying to rebuild,” he told me. “This last time has decimated me completely.”

Abraham spent months after the July flood bouncing between hotels and friends’ places. Now, he’s camped out in the two undamaged rooms in his house, without heat or running water. Still, he’s not ready to leave. The property has been in his family for 45 years, and he’s lived here for two decades. With more mitigation infrastructure, he thinks the worst impacts of future flooding could be avoided. And he worries that a buyout wouldn’t cover the cost of a new home in the area, where housing stock is limited.

That concern is real and common, said Miyuki Hino, who studies climate adaptation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Especially for lower-resourced households, just being handed a check is not enough to really make the move a success,” she said. Without careful consideration of what comes next, a buyout can end up exacerbating inequality and fracturing the community it aims to preserve.

Abraham wasn’t sure what it would take to convince him to leave this home. As we stood talking in the yard, two elk wandered over, just across the river. We watched as the animals folded their legs and lay down in the sun. “What price do you put on that?” Abraham asked. “What price do you put on waking up every day and seeing nothing but beautiful life?” 

This is the first in a series of stories about the Ruidoso buyouts. Next, we’ll explore what equity and fairness might look like during a buyout process.

This reporting was supported by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Managed retreat in a mountain town.”

The post Lincoln County, New Mexico, wants to turn flood-prone properties into public land appeared first on High Country News.

Chinookan canoe construction reflected the diversity of the region’s people and the lower Columbia, comprising a vast 146-mile estuary from the river’s mouth to the western Columbia River Gorge. The most famous and largest canoes measured up to 60 feet long, designed to navigate powerful wind and waves near the river’s mouth and big enough for three tons of people and cargo. Among the smallest were 10- to 14-foot canoes made for gathering wapato, a wetland plant with emerald, arrowhead-shaped leaves and edible potato-like tubers. The boats were sleek, light enough to carry under one arm and ideal for the slow-moving shallow waters around present-day Portland, where wapato thrived. 

Canoes decorated the river’s sandy shorelines. Villages lined its banks. Before the 1800s, no levees separated the waterway from the floodplain. No dams blocked salmon. Cold water roared over rapids and sighed through the estuary. Braided channels thick with insects and songbirds curved through marshy bottomlands. Minnows, suckers and sturgeon filled the clear backwater tidal sloughs. These extensive channels snaked through the broad estuary like veins from the region’s heart, the Columbia, known as wimaɬ to upper Chinookan peoples and iyagaytɬ imaɬ to the lower Chinookans at the river’s mouth. The habitat supported one of the world’s largest salmon runs, when 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead returned from the ocean to spawn in their ancestral rivers. 

The Columbia sustained so much life in part because of an often-overlooked element of river ecology: sediment. Tiny particles of sand, silt and clay built and maintained the estuary’s wetlands. When rivers are allowed to twist and turn and spill out of their banks, nutrient-loaded sediments settle across floodplains. Deltas, sandbars and marshes form. These habitats support not only plants and fish, but also human cultures; Chinookan peoples along the lower Columbia comprised one of North America’s densest civilizations. International commerce flourished for millennia, fueling emporiums like Celilo Falls. Canoes carved to handle the river in all its complexity carried tubers, hides, shells, beads and salmon. Moving sandbars created some of the most productive fishing sites. “The sediments and the soils are the foundation of humanity,” said Roger Amerman, a geologist, artist, elder and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who specializes in Columbia Plateau tribal histories. “Not just our culture, but all cultures.

“If that’s poisoned or removed,” he said of sediment, “we’re impoverished, in every kind of way.” 

But the early United States saw the millimeter-sized particles as an obstacle to economic growth. In 1824, when Congress tasked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to “improve” navigation on the nation’s rivers for commerce, sand impeded the cargo vessels that replaced Chinookan canoes. Sand grounded ships with drafts so deep that they scraped the riverbed. The Columbia’s powerful mouth was especially dangerous, where river and ocean currents collided, creating sandbars hidden below white water and earning it the nickname “the graveyard of the Pacific.”

By the 1860s, the Corps, a military and civil-works engineering agency within the U.S. Army, started dredging the riverbed to create a 107-mile international shipping channel through the estuary, from the river’s mouth to Portland. The agency installed dozens of water-control structures that altered the flow and sediment, squeezing the waterway into a narrow, faster channel suited for vessels heavy with gold, wheat and timber. Later, between the 1930s and 1970s, the Corps and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built a series of hydropower dams upriver that further inhibited water and sediment to flood the estuary while also severing fish migration, devastating salmon populations and tribal lifeways.  

The Corps helped fulfill the long-held colonial vision of the Columbia as an imperial river. Before Europeans even saw the waterway, they dreamed of “the Great River of the West,” as the French labeled it on maps, where profits would flow. While Chinookan peoples built boats to fit the river, the Corps built the river to fit boats. That legacy endures today, here and along the country’s other largest rivers, through flood control, dredging, navigation locks, dams, jetties and levees. 

At 43 feet deep and 600 feet wide, the Columbia’s current channel is nearly three times its natural depth and half its width in places. Wetland-replenishing sediments are largely trapped behind upriver dams like Bonneville. Sand that slips past the concrete barriers is dredged out and piled elsewhere in and along the river. A 2005 report by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency tasked with overseeing salmon recovery, found that dredging and filling in wetlands has been one of the major causes of habitat loss in the estuary over the last century. Seventy percent of the river’s marshes have been eliminated. More than one-third of its salmon and steelhead populations are extinct, and those that remain are at risk, listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The Corps has long framed dredging as a necessary chore that causes minimal ecological and cultural harm. Each year, under the agency’s command, 6 to 9 million cubic yards of sediment, mostly sand, is vacuumed out to keep giant freighters packed with wheat, petroleum, fertilizer, cars and electronics — $31.2 billion worth of goods — moving up and down the lower river. So much sand has been removed — piled on land, on river islands, in the river outside the shipping channel, in the ocean — that officials now say they’re running out of places to put it. If too much sand piles underwater in bars or shoals, the Corps would have to issue draft restrictions for commercial vessels, limiting their cargo. “We’ll eventually reach a point where we’re not keeping up with the shoaling to maintain that channel,” said Dan Robledo, who is managing the Corps’ 20-year, $578.7 million plan for dumping sand. The agency published its final report in early May. 

In an emailed statement, Kerry Solan, public affairs chief for the Corps’ Portland district office, wrote that while the lower Columbia has been altered by a “variety of factors or parties,” the agency’s navigation mission can “contribute positively to the estuary’s health.” The Corps claims it can rebuild wetlands using dredged sand, although it lacks a restoration plan and budget. Tribal leaders warn that the agency’s plan will continue to harm culturally significant and treaty-protected species, like salmon, lamprey and sturgeon, especially as the ongoing climate crisis warms the river and weakens its flow. 

“There’s a misleading effort made to say this is necessary for the economy,” said Kathleen George, a tribal council member and ceremonial fisher for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which includes several Chinookan bands whose ancestral homelands span much of the estuary. Commerce has always flowed on the river, not in steel cargo containers but in canoes. “It is often presented as if the economies of the people who rely upon salmon and steelhead and sturgeon and lamprey are not important,” she said.

“We are prioritizing other values on the back of our river.”

UP CLOSE, TAN, WHITE AND GRAY flecks of quartz sparkle and sift softly through your fingers. Depending on where you are on the river, the grains vary in size. Downstream of the Cowlitz River near Longview, Washington, pumice and other volcanic sediments from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens still thicken the river. The sand is lighter, finer, measuring about .2 millimeters. Other tributaries deliver coarser sands, sometimes up to 4 millimeters. 

Underwater, sand settles. Miniscule transparent crustaceans that feed salmon find shelter here. Young eyeless and toothless lamprey burrow their tubular bodies in the grit, while 800-pound, 12-foot-long sturgeon — the ancient “grandfathers of the river,” George calls them — use their chin whiskers to locate critters in the murky bottom. 

A natural riverbed has texture. Thick mud-like sediments entomb tree snags. Currents tug and pull sand into mounds. 

Like all major rivers, the Columbia carries sand and other sediments. From its glacial headwaters in southern British Columbia, it churns through granite mountains, snatching quartz from rugged landforms and eventually pounding it into sand. Along its 1,243-mile journey, through high-desert basalt plateaus and the deep forested gorge cut by the waterway through the Cascade Range, the river is joined by a dozen major tributaries that contribute more sand along with glacial and lowland gravel, silt and clay. The Columbia gathers and grinds these sediments from as far away as the Grand Tetons and exhales them into its estuary, primarily from April to July, when snowmelt and heavy spring rains swell the river to its highest flow, called the spring freshet.

Sediments are deposited when water slows down, commonly at riverbends, like at Kelley Point Park in North Portland. The landscape has been heavily altered by the Army Corps at the now-channelized confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Here, the hard basalt of the Tualatin Mountains forces the Columbia to curve northward, creating the notch of Oregon’s northwestern corner. As the river navigates the bend, sediments drop out. Before the Corps, sand could spread out, then smaller silts and clays settled on top, creating mushy new ground. Sand itself lacks nutrients, but the finer-grained materials are packed with phosphorus and nitrogen that encourage plant growth, replenishing and sustaining wetlands. 

“We are prioritizing other values on the back of our river.”

The process of eroding and building land is fundamental to a river, a constant if slow-moving geographical revision. Over millennia, mountains become tidal marshes. At Kelley Point and other sandy beaches, visitors can still hold this history — miniscule quartz fragments possibly 300 million years old — in a single handful of sand. 

In the upper Chinookan language, the Kelley Point Park area is known as wakshin, “the dammed-up place.” Sandbars, snags and marshes created wetlands so dense that, in the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark initially missed the present-day entrance to the Willamette. Chinookan canoes, their bows and sterns chiseled with elaborate images of animals, were pulled up along the shorelines of nearby sandy islands. At that time, Kelley Point essentially connected to Sauvie Island to the north. Only during high water, like the spring freshet, would the land masses separate into an obvious confluence like today’s. 

This was the first place that the Army Corps reshaped in Oregon, beginning in the 1860s. Portland-bound ships frequently bottomed out just downstream, where the river was sometimes only 6 feet deep. Portland officials tried to dredge the shifting sandbars but petitioned Congress to send engineers from the Corps to take over. “The amount of commerce to be benefited by the completion of this work is very great,” said Major Robert Williamson, who oversaw the Corps’ first projects along the Columbia and Willamette. Like many early Corps leaders, Williamson graduated from West Point, the U.S. military academy overseen by the Corps, which created a steady stream of engineers to, among other missions, transform the nation’s waterways. Before the Civil War, he surveyed portions of California and Oregon for railroad routes. But shipping heavy materials, like wheat from eastern Oregon, Washington and Idaho — still among the Columbia’s primary exports — was cheaper by water, even after transcontinental railroad lines arrived. 

By 1869, under Williamson’s command, the Corps dug a 17-foot-deep channel using a Portland dredge vessel. The gray sand filled marshes to build port facilities, and throughout the Portland area, people “with real estate stars in their eyes” used river sand to create developable land, historian and Portland State University professor emeritus Carl Abbott said.

To eliminate sandbars, Williamson super-vised the construction of wing dams, or pile dikes. The structures, still visible today, comprise a series of logs that reach toward the middle of the river diagonally across the current, gathering sand and diverting the flow away from the shoreline and toward the shipping channel. The water’s increased velocity scours loose sand in the riverbed. 

Over the decades, the Corps built 233 wing dams on the lower Columbia and created 15 islands from scratch, many of which span several thousand feet, strategically placed with one goal: narrow the river and quicken its flow. 

Still, local officials and industry leaders craved an even deeper Columbia. Portland shippers lobbied the Corps for a deep riverbed and safe passage through the river mouth to accommodate bigger ships, helping ports compete with those in deep salt water, like Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. In 1878, the Corps dredged the Columbia to
20 feet. By 1976, after vessels ballooned with the advent of steel shipping containers, the river was dug to 40 feet. 

In the 2000s, the Corps deepened the channel to its current 43 feet. The additional 3 feet allowed companies to pack 10,000 more tons of cargo onto ships traveling
to and from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and elsewhere. Their bottoms narrowly skirt the riverbed, sometimes by just 2 feet. “Would I rather have a 50-foot channel?” Bill Wyatt, former executive director of the Port of Portland, told
The Oregonian in 2010. “Yeah. But we’re going to make 43 feet work.” 

While Chinookan peoples built boats to fit the river, the Corps built the river to fit boats.

Today, Kelley Point Park is a sliver of green at the tip of North Portland’s industrial thumb. Freighters dwarf the cottonwood trees and leave wakes that slap the shorelines. Hyundais fresh from South Korea glitter at the neighboring Port of Portland terminal. Tugboats hum. The park marks the present-day confluence of the Willamette and Columbia, but the waterways’ joining was constructed by the Corps. Where marsh vegetation once thickened Kelley Point’s northernmost beach, a wing dam stretches out. It looks more like an abandoned dock than a water-control device. Currents whirl around the logs where cormorants perch. 

To the untrained eye, the river looks natural, a blue-gray expanse flowing toward the ocean much as it has for millennia. The Corps’ changes are immense, yet subtle. Reshaping sediment isn’t as brazen as the walls of concrete that block the Columbia upriver. “People think the river is free-flowing once we get past the dams,” said Rachel Cushman, secretary-treasurer of the Chinook Tribal Council and a citizen of the Chinook Indian Nation, whose unceded homelands surround both the Oregon and Washington sides of the river west of Longview to the river’s mouth. “It’s very much engineered to flow the way that it does.” 

DREDGE OREGON operates 24 hours a day, six days a week, with a crew of around 45. The barge, owned by the Port of Portland, is among a small dredging fleet that slurps sand in the shipping channel primarily from June until December. Its 11,000-pound steel sphere penetrates the riverbottom, churning sediment like an industrial eggbeater. As sand loosens, particles plume in an aquatic dust storm. Vibrations rattle the riverbed. Sand is vacuumed into a pipe, at about 15 feet per second, and spewed as far as two miles away. Few nearby residents notice. 

“If dredging is working well, you won’t know about it,” Dredge Oregon’s navigation director, Don Tjostolvson, told a local news reporter in 2024. Ships travel in and out, he said. The economy flows. 

As a riverbed is hollowed out, though, complex relationships break down. With a deeper channel and less friction from fewer sandy bumps, mounds and bars, salt water can reach farther up the estuary, and water levels around Portland are lower, according to a 2019 study by Portland State University researchers. 

Creatures living in or close to the riverbed — young lamprey, sturgeon, crustaceans, crabs and clams — can get sucked into dredge pipes and killed, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When sand is dumped on land or in the river outside the channel, piles can bury and suffocate critters. “We are completely displacing that benthic component of the river system,” Kathleen George of the Grand Ronde said, meaning the river-bottom species that form the basis of the food chain. “The Corps has very little understanding of those impacts.” Fish and Wildlife officials also acknowledged that the Corps has not studied dredging’s effect on aquatic species in the Columbia. The Corps declined to comment. 

Lamprey, a traditional food for Columbia River tribes, are of particular concern. These ancient eel-like fish migrate to and from the ocean, like salmon. For five to seven years, juveniles bury themselves in river sediment, feeding on microorganisms. But now, George said, “we see lamprey numbers year after year declining.” There were once several million, but today fewer than 20,000 return to Bonneville Dam, according to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Less than 15% can navigate past the dams.

Research in other rivers may provide some insight. A 2018 study conducted for the Corps in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, for example, found that dredge pipes suctioned a significant number of lamprey, invertebrates and other fish species. In the early 1970s, as some of the first dredging studies were performed, Fisheries and Oceans Canada estimated that in spring 1974, about 26,000 juvenile salmon were killed on a single day during dredging in the lower Fraser River in British Columbia. In several cases, researchers halted operations when they found the pipes inhaled substantial numbers of salmon and ooligan, or smelt, though some dredge companies didn’t comply. 

In its review of the Corps’ plan for dumping dredged sand in the lower Columbia, Fish and Wildlife determined that it would harm some aquatic species, including lamprey. “These activities can have substantial and lasting effects on both fish and benthic communities, particularly in light of climate change,” officials wrote, recommending further Corps studies. The National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that while the Corps’ dredging and sand disposal is expected to “adversely affect” the region’s federally threatened and endangered salmon, it’s unlikely to jeopardize their long-term survival. That assessment, George said, allows ongoing damage to salmon and cultural sites along the river. “We need to do more to help salmon recovery by working to rebuild numbers,” she said, “not create more injury or further delay long-needed improvements in an already broken system.”    

Tribal leaders and federal officials are also concerned about contaminants. Dredging may expose fish to banned toxins still present in the sediment, including PCBs, chemicals used in products ranging from plastics to motor oils. These substances have been found in the river’s clams, fish, otters and fish-eating birds, federal officials noted. As sediments suspend in the water, toxins may be released and consumed by bacteria, insects and small organisms that fish eat, cycling through the food chain. In a 2007 study led by the National Marine Fisheries Service, juvenile chinook salmon from the Columbia’s mouth contained the highest concentrations of PCBs found in any Oregon and Washington estuaries. Lamprey and sturgeon also have elevated levels of PCBs and mercury, prompting advisories from the Oregon and Washington health departments against eating either species. 

Currently, the Corps tests sediment every five years. Officials assert that the sand is clean, but tribal leaders urge more testing, given the sheer amount of sediment moved — several million cubic yards annually. Tribal opinions differ concerning what contaminant levels are safe, said Cushman, of the Chinook Nation. For the Corps, “The standards are in favor of capitalist endeavors,” she said.

UPRIVER, A DIFFERENT sediment story has unfolded.  

Behind Bonneville Dam, the river has become “a sandbox,” as Yakama Nation research scientist Bill Sharp, who is non-Native, described it. Cold water from tributaries like the Klickitat, Hood and White Salmon flows into the mid-Columbia, bringing with it glacial sand and silt. But instead of meeting a fast-flowing river that delivers sediments to the estuary, the particles hit a series of warm lakes created by the Corps’ hydropower dams. 

In this stretch, the Columbia runs through a rocky gorge. For millennia, the rugged basalt outcroppings allowed Native fishers to net 100-pound chinook salmon at places like Celilo Falls, near the present-day town of The Dalles. To improve power generation and barge navigation, the Corps in 1957 constructed The Dalles Dam eight miles downstream from Celilo. As the dam’s steel and concrete gates closed the morning of March 10, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America was drowned by the afternoon. The dam is among 18 federally owned hydropower facilities on the Columbia and Snake rivers mainstem that desecrated cultural sites and villages, displacing tribal communities.

When the dam was first constructed, its pool reached 60 feet deep, a tribal fisherman told Sharp. Now, it’s 15 feet. As wildfires rip through eastern Washington, Oregon and Idaho, more sediment spills into the Columbia. About 70% of the sand carried by the Columbia can’t pass through, Portland State University professor David Jay told The Columbian in 2018. The river is clogged, hot and shallow, Sharp said, and “bad things happen.” 

The dangers once posed to cargo ships by sandbars on the lower river have now been passed upstream — and onto tribal fishers. Boats run aground on sandy shoals, damaging engine equipment. Over the years, Sharp said, several fisherman friends have died. 

With so much sediment piled behind the dams, dredging this stretch of the river is one of few ways the Corps could cool the water and improve habitat.

Sandy deltas create hazards for fish, too. Young salmon travelling downstream from tributaries meet the Columbia in a sand-choked confluence where shallow pools
heat well above a lethal 68 degrees. Eleven years ago, hot water killed about 250,000 endangered adult sockeye — nearly all of the run — as they tried to return to their Idaho spawning grounds.

With so much sediment piled behind the dams, dredging this stretch of the river is one of few ways the Corps could cool the water and improve habitat. For years, tribal leaders have asked the agency to dig the mouths of several tributaries, but the Corps has yet to do so. The agency conducts some maintenance dredging to keep the mid-Columbia shipping channel 14- to 27-feet deep, extending to Lewiston, Idaho, on the Snake River. Only barges with shallower drafts can travel on locks past the dams.  

In October, leaders from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) met in Astoria in a room overlooking the 4-mile mint-green bridge across the river’s mouth. Ships passed by, but one stood out. “That boat out there,” a member noted, “that’s a dredging vessel.”  

Bronsco Jim Jr., a CRITFC commissioner and chief of the Kamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation, watched the dredge. Cargo ships the size of a city block anchored nearby. “That’s big money there, that’s priority,” he said. “But when it comes to native species and what we’re talking about in our concerns, there’s no priority.” 

A Yakama Nation councilman once joked to Jim, “Tell them there’s gold in there, and maybe they’ll dredge it.” 

FEW RIVERS AND HARBORS across the country are naturally deep enough for cargo ships. Nationwide, the Corps digs 210 million cubic yards of sediment from waterways every year to clear pathways for the massive vessels. The agency holds the most power over earth-moving in the country, fundamentally altering slow geologic processes and turning them into political acts. The consequences of moving so much sediment are unknown and understudied, as noted in Silt Sand Slurry, a 2024 book that examines dredging practices. Congress authorizes the Corps’ work and mission, but the federal government lacks a long-term nationwide dredging plan. There is no established maximum depth that the Corps could dig the Columbia. With salmon near extinction and climate change expected to diminish the river’s already weakened flows, some federal scientists and tribal leaders have urged the agency to consider alternatives. 

A “paradigm shift” is needed, Cowlitz Indian Tribe Chairman William B. Iyall wrote in a 2024 public letter in response to the Corps’ proposed plan, urging officials to take a hard look at whether the river’s current 43-foot depth is ecologically and culturally viable. The Corps could opt to dredge less, he wrote. More goods could be delivered via rail or air. Ships could decrease their drafts. 

But any broad change would have to come from Congress, Portland district officials said in an emailed statement. And from the agency’s standpoint, its work is not necessarily at odds with a natural river. When the agency digs sand from the shipping channel and spews it elsewhere, the sand is still in the system, Hans Moritz, a hydraulic engineer for the agency, said, though its placement is controlled. “We try to keep the river fed with sediment in a judicious way,” he said.

“If I have to explain to someone what I do for the Columbia River, I help manage sediment for the river, by the river, of the river.

“It’s a symbiotic thing.” 

In the 1990s, ecosystem restoration was formally adopted as part of the Corps’ civil works mission. Lt. Gen. Henry Hatch said at the time that engineers held “most of the keys to the solutions of the world’s environmental problems.” Much of the restoration challenge, though, lies in undoing the agency’s own extensive river reshaping that began long before federal officials understood the concept of ecology.

When Congress authorized deepening the Columbia to 43 feet in the early 2000s, the Corps pledged to restore wetland habitat. But many projects never panned out, a 2010 investigation by The Oregonian found. The Corps declined to say whether any wetlands have since been restored. A 2024 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that over the years, the agency has failed to inform Congress about the status of mitigation projects for fish and wildlife. 

Under its new plan, the Corps has proposed rebuilding marshes by spraying sand across several thousand acres of shallow water and shoreline habitat in the lower Columbia. Few, if any, studies on the river have found that the Corps’ dredged material has improved wetland habitat, especially for salmon, though a Corps official cited a 2025 study showing that sand placed on river islands has provided nesting habitat for the streaked horned lark, a federally threatened songbird. Dredged sand is coarse and doesn’t hold the nutrients that facilitate plant growth. And immense changes to the river’s flow — through dredging, wing dams, levees and dams — have caused invasive plants to thrive. Much of the estuary’s greenery is non-native reed canarygrass and purple loosestrife, plants that threaten to colonize any open space, including newly dredged sand piles, tribal leaders and Oregon and Washington fish and wildlife officials warn. 

“That’s big money there, that’s priority. But when it comes to native species and what we’re talking about in our concerns, there’s no priority.” 

Scotch broom, gorse and European beach grass have taken over Sand Island at the river’s mouth, a traditional Chinookan fishing site in what’s now called Baker Bay, near Ilwaco, Washington. “There’s really beautiful historic photos of people seine netting over there,” said Cushman, describing nets that extended horizontally across the water, with floats on top and weights on the bottom, catching salmon fresh and fat from the ocean. Chinookan peoples had numerous trading posts and villages where fishers seine-netted along the lower river. It made up the river economy, she said.

In the 1930s, the U.S. military removed Chinookan people from Sand Island to make way for the shipping channel. The Corps stabilized the sand, installing wing dams and pilings to help ships navigate the mouth. Invasive plants took hold. While the Corps controls the sand, Cushman said, “they’re not caring for the actual place.”  

According to Cushman, Chinookan tribal members have no say in federal river management as they’ve been fighting for sovereignty and federal recognition since first signing treaties with the U.S. government in 1851 that were never ratified. The tribe briefly regained recognition in 2001, only to have the federal government strip it away 18 months later. The Corps does not consult with Chinook leaders, Cushman said, though other federal agencies, like the Fish and Wildlife Service, have agreements with the tribe. 

Grand Ronde’s elected officials said they were not consulted during planning for the proposed dredge project, George said. In a written statement, the Corps did not acknowledge this but said that it is committed to “conducting robust, meaningful government-to-government consultation with all federally recognized tribes.” 

The lack of consultation leaves cultural sites and resources at risk. Of the Corps’ 106 sites where it plans to spray dredged sand along the lower river, about half have not been surveyed for cultural resources, the Corps’ report showed. There’s a “high likelihood” that cultural resources would be present, requiring future surveys, though some sites have limited access and impacts may be unavoidable, the report stated. 

But what the Corps considers a cultural resource differs from tribal definitions. Katherine Pollock, the Corps’ Portland district archaeologist, said that fish, including salmon, are not legally a cultural resource. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about them,” she said. “We do. They just get looked at from the biological perspective.” 

Such a definition is “inappropriately narrow,” George said. Cultural resources comprise not just archeological objects. “They are steelhead. They are sturgeon. They are lamprey,” she said. They are a healthy river. 

LAST YEAR, in late June, dredge pipes delivered a slurry of sand and water just a few hundred feet from the Columbia. Bulldozers flattened the pile into a settling pond about the size of a football field. Dan Robledo, the Corps’ project manager, gestured toward the massive gray mound — 300,000 cubic yards of sand freshly dug from the river, across from Kelley Point Park. A vessel blared its horn, and the single note echoed across the smooth silver water.

Over the years, the pile will amass more gritty girth. Some of the sand mountains along the river stand 60 feet tall. The shoreline resembled a construction zone, the early process of laying foundation. 

For Robledo and others at the Corps, dredging the Columbia River is straightforward. Congress has charged the agency with a duty. The U.S. economy needs a deep river. “We have the mission to maintain the navigation channel to enable the use of this major transportation artery,” he said. 

The Corps has deepened and channelized so many rivers across the country — the Sacramento, Columbia and Mississippi, among others — that the work has transformed the visible memory of what a river is, what it looks like and who it serves. Kelley Point, now a place where two large bodies of water meet, where differing paths converge, is deeply scarred by colonialism. Differing values imposed on the river have all but erased the cultural landscape. It has become just as difficult to remember a river’s true dynamic nature as it has to recognize its undoing. 

The landforms built by the river’s sand — Sauvie Island and Kelley Point — still exist. The geologic ingredients for extensive marshes, where wapato once grew and canoes cut through the shallow, slow-moving water, are still present. The Tualatin Mountains’ navy ridgelines border the river, guiding it north as it has flowed since the volcanic rock blanketed the landscape. The river still bends and slows here, still has the potential for sand to spill out and build something new.   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A river robbed of sediment.”

The post Dredging the Columbia River at the expense of tribal and aquatic communities appeared first on High Country News.

It was a pretty uncomplicated moment. I had a daypack with some salami and cheese, plenty of water, a map, a first aid kit and an extra layer of clothes. I’d bed down that night in a tent that I’ve had for 30 years, in a sleeping bag of the same vintage. In a world as complex as ours, it’s remarkable that the best of times can be so simple — that so little can feel like enough. 

Reconsidering the concept of what is enough is going to be an important part of facing the future, as a region and as a society. It can be hard enough to learn to live within our own means, and yet this moment requires that we also learn to live within the bounds of what our ecosystems can handle and inspire our friends and neighbors to do the same. This is especially true when it comes to natural resources. When people feel entitled to take more than their share, it can leave a place utterly ruined — whether it’s a tiny pond, a teeming ocean or an entire planet. For these reasons and more, it is best to practice restraint. To tread lightly and leave some for others. To divert limited resources to those most in need.

I’d brought all the water I needed on that trip to the Mojave Desert, where washes only flow in the immediate aftermath of rain. I’d planned my meals and brought clothes that could be layered to suit the weather. With a little forethought, I had all I needed. Everything in its right place. It’s appealing, isn’t it? Simplicity and restraint. Wonder and awe. The best days of our lives are not about things but the people and places we love. And making sure there is enough to go around.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Enough to go around.”

The post On walking away from it all appeared first on High Country News.

Ben, on the other hand, dug graves in tiny Loma, Colorado, where he grew up, and scrubbed toilets in return for a membership at the local climbing gym. He developed strong arms and a propensity for upward motion: He later managed that gym and now owns his own.

Mia went on to become a two-time national champion sport climber and a top finisher in World Cup and X Games competitions. (Climbers will appreciate that in 1996, she was the first woman in the U.S., and the fourth in the world, to climb a 5.14a. “Hanging on by your fingernails” pretty much captures it.)

A generation later, Ben traveled the world as a sponsored athlete, with “first ascents” from Brazil to Madagascar. He was among the first climbers to be allowed access to the crags in the Qingfeng Valley, at the boundary of Zhangjiajie, China’s first and largest national park. (The expedition is the subject of a short documentary film that will tie your stomach in knots.)

Both these wall climbers now work at High Country News. 

After retiring from full-time climbing, Mia worked in fundraising at a long list of nonprofits, ranging from The Nature Conservancy and the Colorado Outward Bound School to the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the ACLU and the universities of Michigan and Colorado. She’s been acting as our director of philanthropy for about a year and a half, helping us streamline and focus our fundraising efforts and take good care of all of you HCN supporters.

Ben, too, has retired from professional climbing, heeding the adage, “There are bold climbers and there are old climbers but there are not old and bold climbers.” He joined us in April as revenue products manager, focused on increasing other forms of income, from ad sales and sponsorships to group subscriptions and a few new ideas that are still in development.

Condolences: We were sorry to hear of the death of longtime HCN reader William “Scott” McKay of Nephi, Utah. Scott was a middle school science teacher who “loved rivers, wild places, and wild things, particularly raptors and other birds,” according to an obituary shared by his brother Tom. When he wasn’t piloting a raft or surveying raptor nests, Scott played the flute for the Nephi city orchestra and served, along with Sharon McKay, his wife and fellow teacher, on the board of the Children’s Justice Center, which offered a safe space for traumatized children.

To honor Scott’s life, Juab School District staff and students took part in a day of service, and Nephi’s mayor, Justin Seely, issued an Arbor Day proclamation. “If you would like to honor this remarkable man,” his family members wrote, “go pick up some litter in a public place, play some John Prine, take a hike, do a good deed for someone, look up at the birds, and always recycle!”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “All signs point up.”

The post The climbers of HCN appeared first on High Country News.

Last summer, walking down a small slope on the dirt path near my house felt like stepping through a portal. To life and breath and soil. Away from busy cars. Powerlines. Sidewalks. The mail-order-kit houses erected in the 1950s during the oil boom, all lined up, one after another. Away from neighbors I felt shy around and mostly didn’t know yet. In the neighborhood we’d chosen because it was known to be uncharacteristically neighborly. Where there is, however, a standing, though unenforceable, restrictive covenant, which says: “The property hereby conveyed shall not be sold or alienated in any manner whatsoever to other than Americans of the white race.” 

So, as you can imagine, entering that portal meant entering the familiar world of the good nature of trees, who always welcome. And other plants that didn’t abide by often cruel, made-up human rules. 

Daily walks, wherever I am, have always been important for me. My therapist friend tells me that walking is a form of somatic therapy. Body healing that calms the nervous system. Movement that allows us to process emotions and trauma. I know I need these walks, and I know I enjoy them more when I’m surrounded by the quiet of trees and growing plants that are ever-changing throughout the summer. 

Other plants didn’t abide by often cruel, made-up human rules. 

So I was surprised when I looked down at the forest floor of my new walking route on the trail system of Alaska’s largest city and felt like a stranger. I knew the ferns. But I didn’t yet know the difference between pushki, or cow parsnip, and devil’s club, two showy plants with leaves as big as Thanksgiving platters. I hadn’t yet realized that pushki has a soft, hollow green stem while devil’s club has a strong, dark brown, spine-covered branch-like stem. Other patterns of new-to-me plants pushed out from the soil, and I wanted to know them, too. If I knew who they were, maybe I could gather the courage to get to know some new people, too. 

My introduction to having a relationship with plants wasn’t on a trail but in Gram’s kitchen, as a kid. If I had a cough or sore throat, Gram gave me a mug one-quarter full of a brown cold tea. Though we grandkids didn’t like the astringent, bitter medicine taste of sargiq, or wormwood, we drank what Gram gave us, because Gram knew best. Now I pick the tall stalks every fall to dry upside-down in my kitchen, then store them in jars to make tea for my family whenever we catch a cold or have a sore throat. And today, whether I’m walking on the Anchorage trails or back home on the river beach in Unalakleet, I am drawn to the plants, knowing that many are helpers, some are food, and a few, like rich purple monkshood, are straight-up deadly. 

On my new neighborhood trail, in a place where I felt like a foreigner, I knew I needed to be introduced. Like at a dinner party. Or a backyard barbeque get-together. I needed a casual, safe situation where introductions were expected. 

SO, NATURALLY, I met devil’s club, or S’áxt’, as it’s known in Tlingit, at the hospital clinic. The same place where I get penicillin shots for strep throat, estradiol patches and progesterone pills for perimenopause, and colonoscopies.

The Alaska Native Medical Center has a Traditional Healing Clinic, where Indigenous healers provide counseling, physical services, a healing garden, talking circles and cultural classes. For two months, I saw a healer every week to relieve pain in my shoulder and hip. She offered a class on making a healing salve out of devil’s club. I immediately signed up and waited, impatiently, for my introduction to a plant I knew was important to local and Southeast Alaska Native peoples.

Seven or eight of us met in what felt like a lab in early summer. White 5-gallon buckets sat on the table filled with stalks of brown, thick, spiny, crooked stems. Our instructor told us to pick the stalks in early summer and to wear leather gloves to protect our skin from the plant’s sharp spines, which contain a sap that can cause blisters and pain. In fact, most people who come across S’áxt’ avoid it at all costs because any spines that become embedded in one’s flesh can cause a severe infection. Devil’s club’s scientific name is Oplopanax horridus, or “horrid, armed ginseng.” A proper introduction to this plant was necessary.

Our instructor, Ruby, is Tlingit and was introduced to S’áxt’ by her grandmother, who made tea from the cambium in her kitchen. Ruby taught us to scrape the spines and outer skin off the stems with a spoon. We then peeled the next layer, the smooth cambium, off the stalk in white tendrils. This was the medicine. Like sargiq, which I knew, S’áxt’ could be made into tea for colds and sore throats or a healing salve for aches and pains and a long list of ailments. The plant teaches me that even the most feared and aggressive-seeming life can be soft and have something to share if you take the time to get to know it. 

New-to-me plants pushed out from the soil, and I wanted to know them.

I left the clinic with cambium ready to soak in a carrier oil like grapeseed or olive. In the fall I mixed the oil with Vitamin E oil and beeswax from some Anchorage friends who keep backyard bees. I gifted a tidy jar of the salve to them and shared others with more of my friends and family. I kept a small tin case of it for any rashes, cuts or achy joints at my house.

Later in the summer, my husband, young son and I went biking along the Anchorage trails. Among the ferns, in the golden sunlight that filtered through the birch and cottonwood branches, I saw some large showy leaves on a plant taller than me. Cone-shaped clusters of small red berries dotted the cacophony of plants, showing off their glory at the tail-end of the season. I smiled. And said, “Hello,” to S’áxt’. Happy to know them. Feeling like I was no longer a total stranger in a new place. I was getting to know my neighbors.  

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Plants make good neighbors.”

The post When the most aggressive-seeming greenery has a softer side appeared first on High Country News.

“Every day when I come in, I don’t know what to expect, whether it’s the plumbing or flooding or the crumbling walls,” said Brown, who has managed the Death Valley Junction, California, hotel since 2022. “But I love hearing the stories that guests bring in.” Ancient plumbing, heating and roof leaks are just some of the daily challenges that come with working in a 103-year-old adobe hotel in Death Valley’s harsh climate. 

On the brick fireplace mantel, the staff has hung pink satin ballet slipper stockings beneath a framed portrait of Marta Becket, a gifted performer and the longtime proprietor of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, whose work and legacy the dedicated staff and board members are determined to preserve. 

As the story goes, in 1967, Becket and her husband, Tom, rambled into Death Valley Junction to fix a flat tire. At the time, it was basically a ghost town, with nothing open save an auto shop and a gas station. 

The crossroads had long been an established trade route for the federally recognized Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, who lived year-round in the desert until they were forcibly removed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, displaced by mining expansion and the creation of Death Valley National Monument in 1933.

By the 1960s, the area was mostly deserted: The old borax mill had moved south to Boron, the Tonopah-Tidewater railroad was ripped out for wartime materials in the 1940s, and Corkhill Hall — the Spanish Colonial-style adobe hotel, workers’ camp, garage and theater — had fallen into disrepair. 

The old hotel sat at the edge of the Amargosa Desert (Spanish for “bitter”) in a basin vulnerable to monsoons, which flooded the region then and continue to batter it with increasing intensity. 

Becket, a seasoned touring ballerina on a brief vacation over Easter weekend, peeked through the locked doors of the old adobe theater at the end of the colonnade. She spotted a stage and fell instantly in love. A split-second decision to contact the owner and lease the complex for $1 and a handshake would transform both the ghost town and the rest of Becket’s life. Over the next five decades, she turned the abandoned theater into an opera house and revived the old hotel.

“I longed to find a place where I could dance and dance — creating a new repertoire of beauty,” she told Desert magazine in 1972. 

From 1968 to 1972, Becket renovated the hotel and repainted the theater by hand. She painted the stage walls in trompe l’oeil style to mimic red velvet drapery and elaborately carved and gilded Rococo woodwork. A wraparound mural animated the theater’s adobe sides and back wall, depicting balconies filled with life-size figures from 16th-century Spain. Two of Becket’s cats — one orange, one black — are shown curled beneath painted seats, while white clouds and pink cherubs float overhead on a blue-sky ceiling. In 1968, she gave her first performance here to an audience of 12.

Renamed the Amargosa Opera House, from the time it re-opened in 1972 until 2012, Becket performed en pointe every Friday, Saturday and Monday night, rain or shine, with or without an audience. Sometimes only her cats watched. The theater existed to showcase her dancing, and her final performance was on Feb. 12, 2012. Every one of the theater’s 113 seats was full, and people stood in the aisles to watch the 84-year-old dancer in “The Sitting Down Show,” so named because she could no longer perform on her feet. 

“I love hearing the stories that guests bring in.”

“The theater interior looks just the way it did when Marta painted it,” said Fred Conboy, board director of Amargosa Opera House Inc., the nonprofit Becket founded in 1974 to preserve her work and legacy. Theater lights made from old Folgers coffee cans still shine down on the stage. “Conservation of the murals is tied to the conservation of the structure,” Conboy explained. 

Becket, who died in 2017, created a destination unlike anything else in Death Valley, in an area where the population has, at times, dwindled to fewer than four people.

Since her passing, the nonprofit has hosted occasional lectures and concerts. “We once had a tribal blues band — the vibrations nearly peeled the paint off the walls,” Conboy recalled. This past February, the Opera House enjoyed a sold-out Valentine’s Day and 57th anniversary event with community groups like the Desert Players, who performed a variety show inspired by Becket’s work. 

Across the street from the hotel, the old stucco garage where the Beckets had their tire fixed nearly 60 years ago is still standing. Becket’s old costumes — velvet bodices with metallic braiding and soft bell-shaped skirts of layered tulle — decorate the windows of a single-room storefront and one-time art gallery adjacent to it. 

But sustaining an arts complex in Death Valley isn’t easy. The 1972 Desert magazine article mentioned the area’s precarious weather, particularly the seasonal rains that threaten the century-old adobe. Since then, the problems have only worsened: At least four “1,000-year rain events” have occurred each year since 2022, and last year’s summer monsoons flooded the theater. November 2025 was the wettest in 115 years, with nearly a full year’s worth of rain falling that month alone. 

And Becket’s artistic legacy is at risk: Without significant repairs, the Opera House and Hotel face closure, or worse, the buildings physically collapsing.

After the flooding in 2025, the hotel staff and board team — about five people — initiated Campaign Amargosa to raise funds for repairs and preservation. According to Conboy, the infrastructure is the top priority — plumbing, electricity and the leaky roof, which has blown off the building more than once. 

Private giving and donations through Campaign Amargosa are the foundation’s secondary source of financial support; the hotel — which barely breaks even — remains the main source of operating revenue. It’s one of the only places open for lodging when Death Valley is busy, especially in spring, when the wildflowers bloom. In late fall, as the holidays approach, every room in the hotel is booked. 

Los Angeles-based artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, who has been visiting the hotel since she was a teenager, cited Becket’s project as deeply influential. One November, she brought friends to the hotel to camp and cook a Thanksgiving meal together. 

“A couple of bikers came through, and they knew about Amargosa; there was this sense of magic in knowing that someone could love this strange and quiet and beautiful place as much as I did,” Carcedo said. She added, “I haven’t returned to Amargosa for a few years now, as a way of preserving my own dreams and memories of this place.

“Standing at a junction, the site of Marta’s Opera House will always be part of the desert’s very layered and complex historical landscape. It feels very important to remember Marta as an artist and visionary whose life was unpredictable in many ways.”

If ever there were a metaphor for arts funding in the United States today, especially in rural areas, this is it: a crumbling but delicately appointed adobe arts complex, slowly succumbing to the elements while a team of enthusiasts works overtime to keep it from dissolving into the landscape around it.

“Standing at a junction, the site of Marta’s Opera House will always be part of the desert’s very layered and complex historical landscape.”

Even Becket realized that preserving her dream would always be an uphill battle. “Even if it’s torn down tomorrow, no one can take away the hours of joy I spent painting it,” she said in the 2000 documentary Amargosa, eyes glimmering in the desert light. “It’s the experience that matters.”

A mural in the lobby shows the town’s eventual fate, painted presciently by Becket: a sun-washed desert framed by a painted archway, as if the wall itself opened onto the landscape just beyond. Sparse shrubs dot the sandy plain of the Death Valley desert floor, while the two low, colonnaded ruins of the complex stretch inward from either side, their repeating arches casting long, rhythmic shadows. Soft brown swirls suggest the gusts of powerful winds that blow across the valley. 

In the distance, above the Black Mountain range to the west, a ghostly silhouette of Becket in her tulle ballet skirt spirals into the sky.    

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A ghost town opera house battles the elements.”  

The post The Death Valley opera house that’s sinking back into the earth appeared first on High Country News.

When the winter rains arrive, they emerge from their hidey-holes and migrate to lakes and streams to breed, skipping years when it’s too hot and dry to travel or the wet season is late.

After breeding, females return to their forest hideaways, while males linger to cannibalize a few eggs and larvae before following suit. Pacific newts are indiscriminate diners: They eat mostly bugs and worms but will happily devour other amphibian eggs — even other unfortunate amphibians, if they can get their jaws around them. Not too many predators eat Pacific newts, according to Julie Vance, an environmental program manager at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.  Instead, their biggest threats include climate irregularities and roads that separate their forest homes from breeding waters. In some areas, California has listed Taricha as a “Species of Special Concern” and is encouraging building tunnels under roads to reduce mortality.   

THAT’S AMORE
If you see an underwater mass of newts in the wintertime, that’s a mating ball. There’s a lone female somewhere in the center. Pray for her.

POP ART
Pacific newts usually lay their eggs on submerged roots or sticks. “Unlike a lot of other amphibians, their eggs are not like a squishy loose water sack,” said Vance, adding that it’s firm and “feels kind of like silicone. And when those eggs hatch, it almost looks like popped bubble wrap.”

DOOM TOXIN
The newt’s bumpy skin glands produce tetrodotoxin, the neurotoxin in pufferfish and blue-ringed octopuses, which Vance calls “more hardcore” than common alkaloid amphibian skins. If you eat a newt (please don’t), death begins with a tingling that spreads from the mouth to the extremities. The colorless tetrodotoxin crystals block sodium intake, shutting down nerves and muscles. About an hour of nausea, floating sensations or feelings of doom precede total respiratory collapse. There is no antidote.

NEWT PATROL
In the Santa Cruz Mountains, newts migrate to and from the banks of Lexington Reservoir every year for mating season. The journey involves crossing Alma Bridge Road, a winding mountain lane that kills thousands of newts each season. A band of citizen scientists called the California Newt Patrol has stepped in to assist. According to their numbers, newt deaths on Alma Bridge Road have declined. But it’s not because more newts are surviving: There just aren’t that many newts anymore.

WHEREABOUTS
Pacific newts live all along the West Coast, with Sierra newts holing up as far inland as the Sierra Nevada. 

TAG, YOU’RE IT
Newts, including Taricha, can regrow lost limbs and toes. This means biologists can’t toe-clip a Pacific newt to tag it; that toe will just fall off and later reappear. Instead, scientists tag newts with injected or implanted PIT tags, like the microchips used for pets.

FAFO YOGA
When threatened, newts flash their bright underbellies to warn predators about their poison. This is called aposematism, i.e., the FAFO (fuck around and find out) signal, which dares anyone to try. Females are more toxic than males, though it’s unclear why. Rough-skinned newts, which live farther north, are the most toxic of the four species — especially the ones in northern Oregon. An urban legend from Oregon’s Coast Range claims that three hunters died when they drank Taricha coffee after a newt got into their camp kettle. Newts on Vancouver Island and around Crater Lake, however, produce less poison.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Get to know the Pacific newt.”  

The post Get to know the Pacific newt appeared first on High Country News.

The spell of October’s chinchweed marked the unexpected start of a second spring that I didn’t think would last beyond Halloween. Pectis papposa naturally comes to light weeks after summer monsoons, but I had never seen the tiny yellow flowers spill so magically across the Mojave. Especially so late in the year. Their bright display was a struck match to my exposed cornea, hypnotizing me into oblivion. It was disorienting — experiencing so much life even as the Northern Hemisphere began to tilt away from the sun.

Fall was supposed to be a time of shedding sunny summer habits, harvesting and hunkering down for cold, snowy nights. But the second wind of spring meant those cozy habits could die hard: We baked in the sun like chuckwallas, planted penstemons and searched for fairies in the buds of our bladderpod.

Howling storms hit the desert one after another, flooding nearby communities with wildfire debris and turning our dirt road into a date shake. Hints that second spring was transforming into forever spring came queerly as the days grew shorter but stayed warm. Some Joshua trees bloomed around Thanksgiving, and botanists worried they might not be serviced by the yucca moth, their only pollinator. But it wasn’t until the winter solstice that all hell broke loose: The flowerfields of Anza Borrego Desert State Park gushed with color three months early. My husband and I skirted the Salton Sea to see them and were lulled by tens of thousands of devil’s lanterns as we walked toward the looming phantom of a mountain. Giant white evening primrose flowers (Oenothera deltoides) lit the way and led us deeper into a beautiful nightmare.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync? What’s the difference between strolling through an unusual bloom with chronic climate dread and attending Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball while LGBTQ+ rights are torched? Bright lights, whether flowers or strobes, can ignite us in dark times. But they can also be distractions: Did the deep state seed the clouds to cause the blooms and sidetrack us while they built concentration camps and mined our mountains to arm war criminals? Slow down, Sherlock; it’s OK to occasionally photosynthesize and expose our showy sex organs in the breeze as we monkey-wrench dystopia. We might lose ourselves if we don’t.

In true spring, after winter’s big rains, Anza Borrego’s flowerfields are often filled with Northbound songbirds, bees and the flap of over a billion painted lady butterflies. But that afternoon, during one of the darkest days of the year, there was an eerie silence that stopped my husband and I in our tracks. I knew then our reality had become a modern Southwestern Gothic. All the components of terror were there in our tale: supernatural plants, a chronically ill narrator (“Greetings …”), a generational curse called climate change, a vampire (more on that later) and, of course, a lone raven quorking by the road. 

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync?

I’d been thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray, perhaps one of the queerest Gothics, which some view today as an allegory for climate colonialism. Oscar Wilde’s main character, handsome Dorian Gray, descends into reckless hedonism throughout the book. One day, he wishes for a portrait of himself to “bear the burden of his passions and his sins” while he remains forever young. As the portrait’s face becomes hideous over time, he locks it away in a secret room. At one point, after a loved one dies, Dorian even declares, “If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.” This denialism is prevalent in our 21st century and at the heart of why some authors are increasingly drawn to the Gothic as they write about climate change. “The Anthropocene remains a prophesy, a promise of future violence, and thus a ghostly, haunting presence,” the editors of Dark Scenes of Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene wrote.

Things only got creepier as forever spring was interrupted by summer-like heat spikes that broke California records in March. We followed more blooms during one heat wave, dropping to the floor of Death Valley, where we found sprawling gravel ghosts (Atrichoseris platyphylla) and caltha-leaf phacelias (Phacelia calthifolia). BEWARE THE PURPLE FLOWERS, a small visitor center sign declaimed like a soothsayer, warning of dermatitis. We slept naked without sheets under the “Worm Moon” before it eclipsed in bloody streaks, sweating the whole night through. In that silvery light, I could see the haunting bodies of flowers outside our tent. We humans often report ghosts of people, sometimes animals, but rarely other lifeforms. Especially extinct ones. Imagine crushed endangered buckwheat haunting Cybertrucks. Or a ghost eubacteria, like prochlorococcus, appearing at the foot of an oil company CEO’s bed on Christmas Eve.

Waking up to sunwashed flowerfields was the Dr. Jekyll to the night’s Mr. Hyde. We moseyed through desolate washes and canyons to find yet more uncanny blooms. Following a wash within a maze of an alluvial fan, we came to a lovely vista. The hills below us rolled, and 3-foot-tall sunflowers danced on every crease. We got low on the sand beside the flowers for a bug’s-eye view, looking up like the sphinx moth caterpillars that were munching their leaves. Joy and whimsy were so back.

But then we discovered a horrific murder scene: a sunflower strangled by bright orange vines. A small-tooth dodder plant had leapt out of the ground, pierced the desert gold with its “teeth” and was extracting its resources like a pumpjack. This slow violence on a 94-degree winter day was the key that unlocked Dorian’s secret room for me. Inside hung the ghastly portrait of the parasitic human greed that had caused this bizarre and worrisome Western winter. What happens when the haunted castle we were taught to fear is actually a superbloom? 

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A beautiful nightmare.”  

The post The Southwest’s superbloom was a beautiful nightmare appeared first on High Country News.

Overshadowed by the ongoing political brawl over the Colorado River, the Arkansas River Valley rarely appears in national news. But since Dec. 30, when President Donald Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have secured favorable terms for funding to complete a $1.39 billion, 130-mile water pipeline, the region has become the stage for yet more drama about water in the Western U.S.

The Arkansas Valley Conduit is part of a decades-long effort to replace the dwindling, contaminated water in this stretch of the Arkansas Valley with clean water from Colorado’s Western Slope and the Pueblo Reservoir. If completed, it will supply water to roughly 50,000 valley residents, many of whom can no longer count on municipal supplies for safe drinking water.

Pundits portrayed Trump’s veto as retaliation against Colorado politicians: Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who helped force the November vote for the release of the Epstein files, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who has resisted pressure to pardon Tina Peters, a county clerk in western Colorado convicted of tampering with voting machines during the 2020 election. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, both Democrats, condemned the administration for “putting personal and political grievances ahead of Americans.” The Salida-based Ark Valley Voice declared a “Reign of Retribution Punishing Deep Red Southeastern Colorado.” The New York Times, emphasizing the same irony, observed that “A Trump Veto Leaves Republicans in Colorado Parched and Bewildered.” 

For those managing the project, the veto is a setback but not a showstopper. The first dozen miles of the conduit have already been completed, and enough capital is on hand for at least three more years of construction. “Some (coverage) has been saying it’s the end of the project, which is totally false,” said Chris Woodka, senior policy and issues manager of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “It’s still being built; the veto was not for any reason that had anything to do with the project, and we’re working in every way we can to make this affordable.” 

For valley residents, the issue is personal. This rural region is more culturally aligned with western Kansas than with Front Range cities. Like people throughout the Great Plains, the local residents are grappling with eroding social services and the rising cost of living. The scarcity of safe water magnifies uncertainty. “If you don’t have clean water,” said Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District and a sixth-generation rancher, “you really don’t have anything.”

“HOW EASY IT IS,” wrote William Mills in his 1988 book The Arkansas, “to take a river for granted.” 

The Arkansas Valley of Colorado is the ancestral homelands of the Plains Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. A geographical corridor across the Southern Plains, it was a route for incursions and ethnic cleansing by non-Native fur trappers, traders, military expeditions, hide hunters, railroad developers and settlers. Those settlers include my ancestors; I grew up in southwest Kansas, where generations of my family farmed and ranched along the dry Cimarron River. The Arkansas Valley, with its dwindling water and flatlands, feels like home.

By 1900, settlers had diverted the Arkansas into a maze of ditches. Irrigation and migrant labor supported sugar beet factories, vegetable cultivation and Rocky Ford’s famous melons. Such practices remade the riverbed, increased salinity, and reduced flow. As with the Colorado River, water rights were assigned partly on wishful thinking. Today, the Arkansas Valley is one of the region’s most over-appropriated basins, and the river’s annual flow has dramatically declined. A short distance past the Kansas line, the river is entirely dry.

The Arkansas is being drained in new ways. Climate change and a record-breaking snow drought are intensifying the scarcity. Over the last half-century, growing Front Range cities have purchased water rights from farmers in the valley. Exchange agreements allow cities to swap these rights for ones farther upstream, leaving the downstream flow diminished and dirtier. Between 1978 and 2022, nearly 44% of the irrigated farmland in the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District was taken out of production.

Critics call it “buy-and-dry.” They say the removal of water has disastrous consequences for an agricultural region. “If you take all of that water out of an economy that completely depends on it,” Goble said, “it just breaks a community.” Faced with the prospect of litigation from local water districts, cities like Aurora claim to be developing more sustainable arrangements.

“If you don’t have clean water, you really don’t have anything.”

THE ARKANSAS’ WATER is changing, too. The river is diverted into dozens of canals and fields. What doesn’t evaporate or get absorbed returns as runoff or sinks through the alluvial gravels that connect to the riverbed. Each time a drop of water returns, it carries more dissolved minerals. As the river’s volume lessens, the concentration increases in what is left. By the time the river reaches the Kansas border, the water regularly contains 4,000 milligrams or more per liter — making it about eight times saltier than a typical sports drink and unsuitable for growing many crops.

Minerals are not the only problem. The river basin and alluvial gravels are also contaminated with radium and uranium. Last year, a study by the Colorado Geological Survey found that the levels of radioactivity in more than 60% of the private wells sampled in the valley exceeded federal standards. 

The radionuclides are called “naturally occurring.” But natural uranium usually stays locked in rock. In the valley, irrigated agriculture sets it into motion. Uranium is mobilized by complex interactions between oxygen, sediments, water, microbes and nitrate. Nitrate is a common fertilizer. One study found that valley farmers had over-applied it for decades. This pulls out radionuclides, turns them loose, and flushes them into the river’s shallow aquifer. Levels rise as the river moves east through agricultural lands.

Contamination is not news in the valley. People have worked on cooperative solutions for decades. To meet safe water standards while the conduit is under construction, the towns of La Junta and Las Animas installed filtration systems. But cleaning the water creates hyper-contaminated wastewater, which is currently diluted and poured back into the river.  “The only true solution,” said Bill Long, president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District board, “is a new source.”

THE CONDUIT WOULD PROVIDE safe water to a region too often disregarded. But the project also raises questions about what can truly be bypassed and what cannot, and about the fate of the river itself.

Near Cañon City, upstream from the conduit, the Lincoln Park/Cotter Superfund site contains a former uranium mill, millions of tons of radioactive waste, coal mineworks and tailing ponds. The site sits less than two miles from the Arkansas River. It is known to be contaminated with the same compounds — radionuclides, selenium, sulfates — that affect communities downstream.  

Local residents have worked for decades to raise awareness and hold a revolving cast of agencies, regulators and owners accountable for the pollution. “It has taken us a lifetime,” said Jeri Fry, co-chair of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste. “As the years have gone by, we have been the ones holding the memory.” 

“The only true solution is a new source.”

Without memory, they say, contamination is normalized as background, treated as an isolated issue, or denied. “We’ve been stonewalled on many of our legitimate concerns,” said Carol Dunn, vice-chairperson of the Lincoln Park/Cotter Community Advisory Group. She believes state regulators avoid testing for fear of uncovering inconvenient facts.

The most inconvenient would suggest connections between contamination in the valley and industrial pollution upstream, which affects not only Cañon City but the communities of Leadville, Pueblo and Fountain Creek. For Fry, all of the known and unknown pressures on the river point to the same fundamental problem. “We are not treating our water as though it is a sacred thing,” she said. “And it is. It’s got to be.” 

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The absence of clean water.”   

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

The post Colorado’s Arkansas Valley water confronts contamination, climate change and political drama appeared first on High Country News.

French conservationist Jacques Cousteau dubbed it “The Aquarium of the World.” In 1987, his team captured never-before-seen footage of the Gulf’s sea lions, sharks and great diversity of fish. I think about this every time I swim in its waters or eat the local seafood: Will we ever understand all its riches? Around 10% of the species are found nowhere else on Earth, and Cousteau warned us years ago about the dangers of excessive commercial and illegal fishing. 

Mexican scientists have been concerned about one particular bycatch: the vaquita, a porpoise found only in Gulf of California’s northwesternmost tip, an area that’s just under 900 square miles of the approximately 62,000-square-mile Gulf.

We know little about them: Adults can reach five feet and frequent shallow coastal waters, eating fish, squid and sometimes krill. Unlike dolphins, which they resemble, vaquitas are shy, avoiding vessels and surfacing briefly before returning to their secret underwater lives. This makes studying them challenging for scientists used to collecting data from boats or onshore.

The scientific community only learned about vaquitas in 1958, when two American zoologists found a skull on a beach. Almost three decades later, a whole carcass turned up. By then, experts speculated that the vaquita was disappearing fast — the most endangered marine mammal on Earth.

IN 1997, there were an estimated 567 vaquitas, and scientists predicted they would be extinct by 2021. Every year, the odds increase that this little porpoise will vanish. And yet, it persists, along with multiple campaigns to save it.

In 2023, I traveled to the Baja California town of El Golfo de Santa Clara, a sparsely populated area peppered with estuaries and wetlands near a desert devoid of tourists. There, I met Carlos Tirado, the leader of a regional federation of small-scale fishers, who told me that “99% of the local population” engaged in subsistence fishing. In this little corner of the “world’s aquarium,” the vaquita also finds its nourishment. 

Tirado saw a dead vaquita when a fellow shrimper caught it in his gill net in 2014. It was beautiful, he said, with dark rings around its eyes and mouth. Mexican newspapers estimated there were only 11 or 12 vaquitas left at the time, based on echolocation recordings and rare sightings.

“Of course, I wouldn’t want the vaquita to disappear,” Tirado said, adding that he believes fishers have a right to earn a living.

In the early ’90s, the Mexican government created a protected area near the Golfo de Santa Clara coast that permits some commercial fishing. The vaquita population seems to have stabilized since then, hovering around 10 individuals. Sea Shepherd, a global conservation organization, patrols its range. But fishers and environmentalists still disagree over the use of gill nets.

MYRIAD EFFORTS — cross-country interventions, collaborations, funding — have been dedicated to saving the vaquita, maybe even encouraging its reproduction in captivity. Many are devoted to saving it, yearning to understand it before it’s gone.

Conservation isn’t just a race against extinction: It is a story of determination, even when you can’t always see what you’re trying to preserve.

In 2017, three years after Tirado saw the dead vaquita, the Mexican government and a San Diego-based conservation foundation launched VaquitaCPR, an emergency rescue mission to capture and temporarily relocate as many vaquitas as possible to a marine sanctuary off the Gulf of California coast. They only caught two: A young vaquita that showed signs of distress and was released. The other, an adult female, went into shock and died. The most ambitious such program to date, became “a setback for vaquita conservation,” according to VaquitaCPR scientist Barbara Taylor.

Conservation isn’t just a race against extinction: It is a story of determination, even when you can’t always see what you’re trying to preserve.

VAQUITAS ARE BELIEVED to have lived in the Gulf of California for 2.5 million years, even though we’ve only known about them for decades. A long game of observation and interventions, conservation is always a bet against previous mistakes, often a progress- and-setback scenario full of mysteries and surprises. The vaquita’s story exemplifies this, time and time again.

Nonetheless, recent efforts to tell the vaquita’s story, nourish cross-border scientific collaboration and curb illegal fishing through education programs and alternative job opportunities seem to be paying off. I met a number of fishers who were aware of the vaquita’s range and vulnerabilities and eager to engage in sustainable fishing to do right by the sea that feeds them and their families. Yet this February, the Mexican government announced plans to shrink the area in the Upper Gulf of California where gill nets are prohibited by 85%, bowing to fishers’ demands. Conservation groups are sounding the alarm again: Two steps forward, one step back.

The latest findings suggest that vaquitas may survive, even with a reduced genetic diversity, if illegal fishing ends. One theory suggests its population has been relatively small, yet resilient all along. We simply don’t know enough about the enigmatic creature — either about its mating behavior or its actual population.

We do know that females give birth to a single 2-to-3-foot-long calf around March every other year. Last October, two acoustic and visual monitoring projects confirmed there were around 10 vaquitas — a small number, but one that remains steady, rather than showing a continuous decline. In a drone video released by Sea Shepherd, there is also recent proof of new calves: footage showing a mother and her baby coming up for air ever so briefly before they swim next to each other playfully and then disappear into the bright turquoise depths.

Suddenly, the vaquita became real — not just for conservationists and local fishers, but for millions around the world. This little porpoise isn’t a collection of facts. It’s not yet a story of extinction in real time, but one of lessons — about conservation, collaboration, and the importance of advocating for an extraordinarily elusive species. Lessons that must be as tenacious as the vaquita itself.  

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The resilience of the elusive vaquita.”  

The post The resilience of the elusive vaquita appeared first on High Country News.

In the video, Semu talks about wanting to build an intertribal camp to teach people about “Mother Earth,” describing what later became known as Red Wind. Semu, however, was actually born Paul Olivas and grew up in a working-class Spanish-Mexican family around Ventura, California. Despite his claims, he and his family never “headed for the hills” to avoid the genocide brought on by settlers in early California. 

“Right now there’s only quarter-bloods and half-bloods and a lot of them that say they are. All of a sudden it’s fashionable to be an Indian,” he says in the recording.

According to Brian Haley, a professor of anthropology at State University of
New York at Oneonta, Olivas descended from California’s early colonists. “Semu” was known simply as Paul until the 1960s, when the Los Angeles Times ran a story in which he claimed he was the last full-blooded Chumash from the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. He said he didn’t speak English until he was 9 and was an intertribal medicine man for the Laguna Tribe in Barstow.  

The story of Olivas’ transformation into “Grandfather Semu” is a common, if extreme, example of how American Indian ethnic fraud, aka “pretendianism,” has become commonplace in the United States. This phenomenon intensified in the 20th century on California’s Central Coast — the original homelands of the Chumash people — motivated by a complex mix of a desire for attention, a need for cultural identity and the appetite for material gain.   

In California, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash remains the only federally recognized Chumash tribal nation in the state. Indigenous legitimacy in California is determined by mission and other Spanish era records. Chumash groups that are not federally recognized include: the Northern Chumash Tribal Council (NCTC) and the Coastal Band of Chumash Nation, the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash (YTT) and three bands of Barbareño Chumash. YTT and two of the Barbareño bands can most accurately document their Chumash ancestry and sustained culture through historic records.

Both the YTT and the Barbareño Ventureño Band document their ancestry through historic records. But according to Haley’s research on the NCTC and the Coastal Band, most of their members lack documented Chumash ancestry. He has spent decades chronicling what he calls “neo-Chumash people,” people who may or may not have actual Chumash heritage but who did not identify as Chumash until the 1970s. Haley acknowledges that Olivas had some Chumash ancestry but was several generations removed. He was certainly not the last full-blooded Chumash. 

Even though Paul Olivas aka Semu  passed away in 2004 and Red Wind is no longer a “Chumash” gathering place, some still regard him as legitimately Chumash despite the evidence that contradicts his claims. People who falsely claim Chumash and Native ancestry often organize as nonprofit groups that make millions of dollars from conservation work and from “cultural monitoring,” which involves consulting firms that ensure that artifacts and human remains uncovered by development are handled appropriately. 

“I did not know anything at all about being Indian, nothing, and so I was buying everything that they were telling me.”

A REMOTE 200-ACRE compound deep in the Los Padres National Forest about 20 miles outside Santa Margarita in San Luis Obispo County, the Red Wind community was inseparable from the counterculture movement. Semu garnered praise from Marlon Brando and musicians like the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Jackson Browne and the Eagles, who held fundraising shows for Red Wind. One of Semu’s goals, he said, was to show the world “how real Native people lived.”

The compound was organized under the title Red Wind Foundation in 1972. A tax filing from 2013 describes it as a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation whose primary exempt purpose is “religion.”

Penny Pierce Hurt, a tribal council member and cultural preservation administrator for the Xolon Salinan, another Indigenous tribe whose ancestral homelands are in the San Antonio Valley and on the Central Coast, said she was initially drawn to Red Wind because she hoped it would help her connect with her Native identity. She was adopted at birth and only connected with her Salinan father as an adult. He told her about her Native heritage.  

“I did not know anything at all about being Indian, nothing, and so I was buying everything that they were telling me,” Pierce Hurt recalled. She remembered a conversation with Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto, a Barbareño Chumash woman revered as the daughter of the last fluent Chumash speaker, who sat her down and set her straight.

“You need to stop hanging out with the people you’re hanging out with,” Pierce Hurt remembered her saying. “She said, ‘You are who you say you are, and you’re giving credibility to these people, even by sitting at the table with them.’” 

Pierce Hurt was drawn to Semu by what she thought was his authentic Native culture, even though it wasn’t her own. Looking back now, she understands that Semu wasn’t who he said he was.

Another firsthand account, described in the book Who Gets to be Indian, called the camp a “sex cult,” alleging that Semu fled after being accused of sexually abusing an 8-year-old girl. 

Others had a more positive image of Red Wind, citing the school it established.

IN THE 1970S, the environmental movement was ramping up. Word that a Chumash sacred site along the Gaviota Coast in southwest Santa Barbara would be desecrated by a proposed LNG (liquified natural gas) facility sparked an intense response in 1978. This encouraged the growth of cultural monitoring, which became a lucrative industry that contributed to ethnic fraud in the region. 

Development in California is regulated by several state laws. Both AB 52, signed in 2014, and 2004’s SB18 require public agencies to consult with tribes to comply with the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Whenever burials are unearthed, the laws ensure that human remains and other burial objects are properly and legally handled. 

The laws’ implementation is assisted by the state’s Native American Heritage Commission, which maintains a tribal contact list and a “most likely descendant” (MLD) list that developers are required to consult. Those on the list can compete for cultural monitoring contracts, which can result in a lot of money.

According to ProPublica’s nonprofit tracker, the NCTC received $1.36 million
in revenue in fiscal year 2024. 

Problems arise due to lax commission rules that enable groups and individuals without accurate documentation of California Indian ancestry to get on the MLD list and establish cultural monitoring firms. The problem is further complicated by the fact there is no law preventing a group from calling itself a tribe. This is how groups like the Coastal Band and NCTC can claim to be tribes despite most members’ lack of documented tribal heritage; the cultural monitoring firms sometimes refer to themselves as “tribes” or “tribal councils.”

High Country News reached out to both the Coastal Band and NCTC for comment. Ernest Houston, a member of the Coastal Band who serves NCTC as a tribal cultural resource monitor, vigorously defended both tribes’ Native ancestry. 

The tribal homeland of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (YTT) in San Luis Obispo County is on the Heritage Commission’s contact list. YTT Chairwoman Mona Olivas Tucker said that publicly available genealogical records prove that NCTC’s founder, the late Fred Collins, had no Chumash ancestry. Yet NCTC benefited from his false claims. Collins’ alleged ancestry was the subject of a defamation suit he filed against the Salinan Heritage Preservation Association, which was ultimately dismissed in 2017 under anti-SLAPP regulations. 

The NCTC is currently in the process of purchasing over 200 acres known as the Dos Pueblos Ranch — named for two Chumash village sites — for $62 million. The purchase is fiercely contested by the Barbareño Chumash, who claim to be the land’s true documented descendants, and the YTT community is supporting their efforts to stop the sale. 

“The people who don’t have true ancestry will often say that they’re offended to even be asked who their ancestors are,” said Mona Olivas Tucker.

“I’m not offended to be asked who my ancestors are. I have no reason to keep them hidden, but when somebody tells you, ‘You shouldn’t even ask me that question,’ it always makes me wonder what they are hiding.”

Today, the Red Wind property is still used by religious organizations. During the recent Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, a group of Spanish-speaking worshippers held an evangelical revival there. The property still contains vestiges of its heyday
as an intertribal camp.  

“I’m not offended to be asked who my ancestors are. I have no reason to keep them hidden, but when somebody tells you, ‘You shouldn’t even ask me that question,’ it always makes me wonder what they are hiding.”

 “Looking back, I realized that they were using this as a vehicle to … monitor and make money off of it. And I think that’s when they all started (to claim Chumash heritage),” said Pierce Hurt, emphasizing the lasting impact Semu’s legacy has had on Native communities. 

In the 1970s, the floodgates were opened for people without verifiable tribal heritage to claim tribal identities. Nativeness had become an exploitable commodity. Red Wind attracted a variety of people, some as opportunistic as Semu and others who were genuinely spiritually hungry. Today, people pretending to be Native continue to exploit a system that still lacks serious checks and therefore accountability, including universities, artists and writers, and, in California, even people who claim to protect Indigenous sacred spaces.    

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The dubious legacy of a psuedo-Native community.”  

The post The facade of the Red Wind commune appeared first on High Country News.

NEVADA

It’s not hard to see Elvis when you’re in Vegas — or, if not the real guy, a half-dozen or so elaborately costumed impersonators. Recently, however, an exotic toucan stole the spotlight, at least according to PawBoost, a website for missing pets. Sam the toucan — named after the eloquent spokesbird for Froot Loops, a colorful fruit-free breakfast
comestible — escaped his enclosure in November. For months, he eluded rescuers like SouthWest Exotic Avian Rescue (SWEAR). But Sam’s Free Bird days ended after he flew into a northwest Las Vegas home’s garage and was recovered, KVVU reported. Dozens of locals reported seeing the large-beaked bird flying around or perching in trees, though Katherine Eddington initially thought that the big black bird she saw was a crow with a banana. Eddington was driving north on Simmons when Sam flew over an intersection and “landed in this tree next to Burger King.” SWEAR president and co-founder Skye Marsh was relieved. “You can tell he’s had some run-ins with things. The tip of his beak is chipped off. So he’s got some stories in that little bird brain.” She was surprised his condition wasn’t worse, given that toucans are native to humid climates, not the hot dry desert. Sam is currently in quarantine and undergoing bloodwork to ensure he doesn’t have bird flu. We hope Sam once again achieves peak, and beak, performance, and remembers what his large-beaked namesake said: “Follow your nose,” ideally homeward. Good advice; toucans are better than one.

OREGON

They’ve been washing up on Pacific beaches every year for decades, and in March they returned: Velella velella, more poetically known as “by-the-wind-sailors.” These 2-inch-long floating hydrozoans are “close relatives of jellyfish and corals” and can form “vast blue and purple armadas stretching for miles.” Each has a small transparent fin that works like a sail to travel the sea’s currents. And “they feed from the surface, using stinging tentacles to hunt krill underwater,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. Strong winds wash them ashore “in staggering numbers,” sometimes amounting to “the trillions on beaches around the world, including the West Coast,” according to University of Washington researchers, The Oregonian reports. In photographs they resemble blue-tinted sea glass or even stacks of bluish mussel shells. Are they a hazard? Not really, although Oregon State University says walking barefoot through fresh “strandings” is not advised, and it’s best to avoid touching your eyes or mouth after handling them. Or don’t handle them, period: They’re like most decaying creatures, slippery when wet, and stinky. And better not let your dog eat too many of them; you’ll both be sorry.

IDAHO

If you prefer your coffee — or yerba mate — with a side of capybara and an extra helping of fluffy snuggles, then Coeur d’Alene’s new sipping spot, the Capy Hour Café, is the place for you. The family-owned team behind Big Red’s Barn dreamed up this reservation-only immersive experience that lets you hang out with adorable capybaras while enjoying açai bowls and Brazilian-inspired specialty coffees and teas. “There’s something incredibly gentle and grounding about these animals. We’re excited to create a space where people can experience the joy they bring in a completely new way,” Ginger Harris of Big Red’s Barn told Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press. The world’s largest rodent, the semiaquatic capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) resembles a giant guinea pig. Native to Northern and Central South America, capybaras are extremely laid-back and highly sociable herbivores that live in packs. The Capy Hour Café donates a portion of every ticket it sells to the Wildlife Foundation Program, which supports wildlife conservation, reforestation efforts and ongoing programs dedicated to protecting animals in the wild.  Start the day right, and wake up and smell the capy. As far as immersive experiences go, it’s considerably more relaxing than attempting yoga with crocodiles or taking cooking classes with grizzly bears. 

CALIFORNIA

If you’ve seen Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, particularly the scene where a rhinoceros appears to “give birth” to Jim Carrey, then you probably have no need to ever see it again. But on the off chance that this remains one of your favorite memories, we regret to inform you that you just missed your chance to bid on the actual mechanical rhino, which was removed from the Planet Hollywood Collection and auctioned off by Propstore Auctions. The rhino sold for $60,000 to Ripley’s Entertainment, as in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, yahoo.com reported. We definitely believe it, Ripley’s, and think the rhino’s new home is completely apropos.   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Heard around the West.”  

The post Sam the Toucan, capybaras over coffee, Vellela vellela and a mechanical rhino  appeared first on High Country News.

High in the crown of a giant sequoia, the world becomes a cathedral of green and amber, hushed but for the creak of ancient wood and the sharp, rhythmic snap of cones being pulled from boughs. Dan Keeley, 31, moved around with a practiced, fluid economy, suspended by thin lines of high-tensile rope 200 feet above the ground on the western edge of California’s Sequoia National Park. To his left, the sequoia’s cinnamon-colored bark provided a steady presence as he leaned out over the negative space between branches.

“There is a lot of trust that goes into this work,” Keeley said, speaking over the wind. He eyed a cluster of green, egg-sized cones. “Trust in the trees, predominantly, but also trust in the system — that I’m being sent to the right trees, at the right time, and for the right reason, not all of which are always the case.”

 Keeley, a lean, tanned former rock climber and arborist, is what some in the forestry industry call a pinecone cowboy, a freelance contractor hired to harvest the genetic future of Western forests. He climbs trees of important or threatened species to collect ripe cones for seeds intended to be used for reforestation. 

Keeley is part of a specialized workforce that’s become the primary resistance against the rapid erasure of a Western landscape. As megafires — fueled by climate change and a century of heavy-handed forest management and fire suppression — incinerate millions of acres in the West, natural regeneration is failing. Cones from serotinous species, which open their scales and drop their seeds in response to low-intensity wildfires on the forest floor, are now incinerated in increasingly common crown fires — high-intensity blazes that leap into the canopy. Meanwhile, other species’ seeds, dropped into the soil by wind and animals like squirrels and birds, are choked underneath layers of ash or outcompeted by invasive shrubs. The future of a relationship between trees and wildfires that has existed for 350 million years now rests on the shoulders of rope-suspended climbers who collect the trees’ cones one 45-liter bag at a time.

 The tree that Keeley balanced in stood in a thriving grove. Just over the next ridge, however, lay the blackened slopes of recent megafires: vast, silent expanses from which the forest had been effectively erased. In the region’s 2020 Castle and 2021 KNP Complex fires, an estimated 13% to 19% of the Sierra Nevada’s large giant sequoias were destroyed. That same year, wildfires across the West consumed over 10 million acres — an area larger than the state of Maryland. Keeley’s task is to gather seeds from healthy trees to ensure that the seedlings planted on those burn scars possess the genetic blueprint they’ll need to thrive in their specific soil, elevation and ecosystem.

A relationship that’s existed for 350 million years now rests on the shoulders of climbers who collect cones one 45-liter bag at a time.

The forces that elevated Keeley into the canopy are a blend of medieval ballistics and modern arboriculture. On the forest floor, Keeley aimed a retrofitted crossbow equipped with a fishing reel into the tree’s crown, then fired a weighted lead line over a sturdy branch, using it to hoist a thick static climbing rope up and over the branch. Cinching into a running bowline anchored against the trunk and using mechanical ascenders — cam-based metal handles that grip the rope — Keeley braced himself against the tree and pulled his way up, meter by meter, until he reached the tree’s peak.  

Climbers like Keeley hoist themselves into the treetops because that’s where the cones are most plentiful, while the chance of self-pollination — when a tree’s male cones pollinate its own female ones, creating less genetically robust offspring — are lowest. (The highest cones are more likely to be cross-pollinated, or fertilized by other trees, since the process is primarily driven by wind.) 

Standing on a branch, Keeley plucked a cone and used a utility knife to deftly cut it in half, revealing a cross-section of the hundreds of seeds tucked into the crevices between spiraled scales. Pulling out a single seed roughly the size and appearance of an oatmeal flake, he demonstrated how he could lay it on the palm of his leather glove and slice it in half as well, then peer through a loupe — the kind of 10x magnifying lens that jewelers use — to assess the embryo. (In practice, he often just bites the seed in half and eyeballs it.) Keeley would check one or two dozen seeds this way; if there are embryos — the miniature root and stem that will break free of the seed casing once it’s exposed to soil and water — in 30 to 50% of the seed cavities, then the seeds had an acceptable chance of becoming  seedlings at the nursery, and Keeley would harvest all the tree’s available cones. If not, he’d descend to the forest floor and move on. 

While up in the canopy, Keeley’s focus was almost microscopically trained on the job in front of him. The issue he was trying to solve, however, is geographic in scale. During last year’s cone-collecting season — which for Keeley runs from August to November — he logged over 20,000 miles commuting between collection sites in several Western states, akin to the range of a long-haul trucker. It’s a data point that shows not only how rare his skillset is, but how widely and desperately it’s needed.

After filling his 45-liter bushel bag full of cones, Keeley maneuvered the 60-pound load around a thick limb, attached it to a static rope and gradually lowered it to the forest floor. This seemingly slow, methodical practice, he noted, was in fact a race against time. “Our work is a response,” he later told me, to a “quiet crisis of urgency.” Keeley and his colleagues aren’t merely racing the weather, which can dictate cone ripeness, and the animals that compete to eat the cones’ seeds; they must also outrun the changing climate, which is wiping out forests faster than they can grow. Meanwhile, these pinecone cowboys — among the only people with the skills and knowledge to save our future forests — are being abandoned by the system that both employs them and needs them most.

IN 1933, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT established the Civilian Conservation Corps, and within it, what became known as his “Tree Army,” a division of the U.S. Forest Service that employed up to 300,000 men at its peak. They climbed into the canopy using boot spikes and waist ropes and collected cones for reforestation. 

At the time, logging, drought and unsustainable farming practices had depleted the nation’s forests and grasslands, causing disastrous erosion.The denuded landscape was also the result of a century of forced removal of Indigenous people, who for thousands of years had actively taken care of the continent’s forests. Through cultural burning — the practice of lighting frequent and low-intensity fires — some tribes cleared the understory and promoted a diverse ecosystem and the growth of healthy trees. In many ways, the Tree Army sought to mechanically replicate the regenerative work Indigenous people had achieved by fire. By 1942, it had gathered enough cones to plant over 3 billion trees. 

But federal budgets for reforestation were primarily tied to timber sales, due to a 1930 law. This worked during the post-war housing construction boom, when the agency’s labor model also shifted toward contractors, with the Forest Service stepping into an administrative management role in order to meet the country’s huge timber demand. But when timber harvesting plummeted in the late 20th century and wildfires replaced chainsaws as the leading cause of deforestation, funding for reforestation fell, resulting in a growing backlog, according to a 2022 congressional report and a 2015 Forest Service report.

This funding decline — and the emergence of firefighting as a priority — hollowed out the agency’s professional forestry core, according to the reports. From 1998 to 2015, the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce declined by nearly 40%, eliminating the silviculturists, botanists and hydrologists who monitored tree stand health and managed nurseries along with the forestry scouts and foresters who mapped backcountry stands and selected trees for cone collectors to harvest from. 

The 2021 REPLANT Act attempted to enable the Forest Service to address its 4 million-acre reforestation backlog over the coming decade by authorizing up to $140 million annually on top of the agency’s small annual appropriations-based replanting budget. But the money it allocated was restricted to funding projects; it did not grant the agency the funding to hire employees to manage these projects. Today, we still lack enough foresters, scouts and other staff to gather the upfront intelligence or administer contracts, said Robert Beauchamp, owner of Sierra Cone, one of the West’s largest cone-collection contractors. The agency’s 2026 budget shows that $337 million of the REPLANT fund has not been used. (Asked about this, the Forest Service issued a written statement saying that it allocates funding in accordance with agency priorities, “including active forest management and reforestation.”) 

“There is a lot of trust that goes into this work.”

The staffing shortage has been exacerbated under the Trump administration. In 2025, the agency lost 16% of its permanent non-fire workforce, according to a report by the USDA Office of the Inspector General, in part due to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Those employees included people who managed cone-collection contracts; Keeley says several of his jobs have been canceled due to the departure of key staff, including scientists and administrators. 

The entire reforestation pipeline, from the initial scouting of seeds to the planting of seedlings, is constricted by this shortage of agency personnel, said Britta Dyer, who until March was senior director for California and the Pacific Islands at the nonprofit American Forests, which helps agencies like CAL FIRE and the Forest Service secure funding and labor for reforestation. “There is a workforce sitting there waiting to be deployed that isn’t being deployed,” said Keeley.

Meanwhile, experienced pinecone cowboys are aging and retiring, and the profession lacks a succession mechanism, according to Beauchamp. There is no school for cone-collecting; skills are traditionally passed down through an informal apprenticeship model — though that, too, has been gutted by the instability of seasonal contracts, as experienced climbers and contractors cannot guarantee new hires consistent work. While employment statistics aren’t available due to the profession’s small and seasonal nature, cone collectors are part of a 38% reduction in employment in forestry since 1994, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Forests.  

The industry also struggles to offer stable, well-paying jobs, Keeley told me one day, calling from the tailgate of his truck. The Toyota’s camper shell served as both his mobile headquarters and bedroom, with a wooden sleeping platform and a cooler tucked under a nest of ropes and climbing gear. When we were together, he had rifled through the plastic bins stored under the platform to show me his possessions — journals and a camp stove, satellite phones, radios and first aid kits.

Cone collection is dangerous work with a short season and an increasingly lopsided risk-to-reward ratio. In a productive season, an experienced climber might earn $60,000 in contracts, Keeley said, without accounting for climbing gear, business insurance, gas and truck maintenance. Companies like Sierra Cone can gross over $1.5 million from contracts annually. But both individual contractors and companies deal with unpredictable delays in the harvesting season caused by factors ranging from wildfire smoke to government shutdowns, which cut the 2025 fall season by half. During delays, cones can overripen and collectors lose an entire harvest, meaning, as Keeley said, “We don’t get paid.” 

Finally, the industry lacks adequate standards or certifications that help to set contractors apart. This can make it difficult for land managers to vet contractors, Beauchamp explained. The Forest Service staff who write requests for proposals (RFPs) are often young and inexperienced, he said, and budget-strapped state and federal agencies regularly accept the lowest bids for cone collection, scouting and planting. This sometimes results in new contractors lacking experience in tree-climbing winning bids, then failing to fulfill collection contracts and wasting ripe cones because they aren’t prepared for the job. When this happens, it isn’t the lost income that irks Beauchamp, but the opportunity for the forests. “You can’t just ‘redo’ a harvest after the first guy fails,” he said. “You miss the weeklong window to harvest a tree; you miss the year of replanting.” (In a written response to High Country News, the Forest Service said that, in accordance with federal contract regulations, “Contracts are typically advertised and awarded based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, cost.”) 

The result is an annual reforestation shortfall that is compounding and transforming entire ecosystems. The Forest Service produces 30 million to 50 million seedlings a year, according to American Forests, a mere fraction of the 120-million annual seedling goal the REPLANT Act established. Roughly 80% of those seedlings will survive, while it takes about 220 trees to reforest each burned acre. Altogether, the agency meets just 6% of its post-wildfire planting needs annually, according to its 2022 Reforestation Strategy Report. 

And that’s just on Forest Service land: Wildfires on both public and private lands have affected, on average, 7.8 million acres a year over the last decade, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In California alone, current seedling production and planting rates mean that it would take 15 to 20 years to reforest what has already been lost, while each additional fire “puts us further behind,” said Kuldeep Singh, operations manager of seed production for CAL FIRE. While the Forest Service considers a tract reforested after seedlings survive their first five years, research says that a functioning ecosystem like the one the fire destroyed won’t return for several decades.

“Small collections, repeated annually, may not seem impactful, but they’re pretty mighty once they add up.” 

When a forest fails to regenerate, either because it wasn’t replanted or because new seedlings didn’t survive, it often becomes scrub-land, in a permanent ecological shift known as type conversion. The new brush-based ecosystem creates a more flammable fuel bed that resists the forest’s return, effectively locking the land into a cycle of fire and scrub. In areas like South Lake Tahoe, California, for example, fields of 8-foot-tall manzanita and buckbrush now dominate hundreds of acres where conifers once stood. In Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and throughout the Southwest, Forest Service research says that high-severity burn areas — which are difficult to regenerate regardless of human intervention — are increasingly repopulated by invasive grasses or the flowering plants called Brassicaceae, which store less carbon and prevent conifers from taking root. This process is permanently altering the hydrology, fire cycle and carbon-sequestration capacity of the West. 

During a February video call, Kayla Herriman, a national seed specialist with the Forest Service, said that the agency was attempting to fill its current reforestation funding and staffing gaps through a three-pronged approach: training employees across the agency, including those in non-forestry roles like recreation and wildlife, to climb trees; borrowing labor from other agencies, including workers not formally trained in seed collection; and hiring some private contractors. Herriman added that the acres reforested by the Forest Service have increased since 2023. “Small collections, repeated annually, may not seem impactful,” she said, “but they’re pretty mighty once they add up.” 

THE L.A. MORAN REFORESTATION Center in Davis, California, sits between a babbling creek and agricultural ranching fields. It smells like a lumberyard; the sharp, tannic tang of fresh pine resin blending with the scents of woodsmoke and manure. 

Before they can return their seeds to the forest, the cones in Keeley’s bushel bag take an industrial detour. Inside the facility, massive metal tumblers hummed. Over the course of 24 to 72 hours, the tumblers shook the seeds loose from the cones. Workers cleaned them and then either tucked them into meticulously labeled bags that identified species, stand and elevation — planting a tree from a 2,000-foot elevation site at 7,000 feet is often its death sentence — then stored them in sub-zero freezers or else sent them off to the nursery. In the back of the warehouse, under rows of greenhouses, hundreds of thousands of seedlings sprouted out of trays inoculated with the seeds of the species requested by land managers. Conifer seedlings in the greenhouse take from one to two years to reach planting size — roughly the length of a pencil. Then they’re loaded onto trucks and driven to burn scars. 

The final link in the reforestation pipeline is the job of planting seedlings. Keeley described the grueling intensity of this phase, recalling monthslong projects in Sequoia National Park where specialized forestry technicians carried 40-pound bags filled with dozens of seedlings over charred logs and up steep ash-covered slopes. The work required not just stamina, but  conscientiousness, Keeley said. “You have to place each tree perfectly. If you tuck the roots wrong, that tree is dead in a year.” 

Planting can provide work for tree climbers beyond the three- to four-month harvesting season, but jobs are few and far between, making it hard to earn a year-round income, said Keeley. Today’s professionally trained domestic tree planters make inflation- adjusted earnings that are 15% to 30% less than they were in the 1970s, according to the 2012 book Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest. This stemmed partly from the demise of worker cooperatives like the Hoedads, which helped negotiate wages before modern-day federal contract regulations came into effect, requiring the government to prioritize lowest-bid contracts and putting downward pressure on prices, argued the book Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest.

Today, over 85% of the planting on private timberlands and national forests is performed by migrant laborers on H-2B visas, according to the Forest Resources Association, an industry trade organization. The workers are subcontracted by forestry companies and often face abuse and exploitation, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, reportedly earning as little as 16 cents for every seedling they plant. The Forest Service responded that it “has contract officers as well as contract officer representatives in the field that work together to help ensure contract provisions are administered in accordance with laws, regulations, and guidance.” But the dynamic creates a stark disparity in the reforestation process: Specialized climbers like Keeley can earn up to $1,000 a day, while the final, critical work of restoration is performed by low-wage labor.  It is a hard job that requires bending over up to a thousand times a day, often under pressure to plant higher volumes, said Dyer. “Planting mistakes do happen.” This can undo the careful collection efforts of the cowboys in the canopy.

Advocacy groups like The Nature Conservancy and American Forests are currently lobbying for the Post-Disaster Reforestation and Restoration Act (H.R. 528), introduced by Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen in January 2025. If passed, it could theoretically create more opportunities for pinecone cowboys by mandating that the Department of the Interior, which manages the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, prioritize reforestation projects like the Forest Service does. But every expert I spoke to, from cone collectors to government foresters, said that solving the reforestation bottleneck will require rebuilding the appropriate agency workforce — something that seems unlikely under the current administration. In the wake of the recent exodus of federal employees, combined with the administration’s lack of support for reforestation and other climate-adjacent projects, Dyer anticipates less federal work this season. “Contractors should, and are, bracing for chaos,” she said.

It would take 15 to 20 years to reforest what’s already been lost in California.

Meanwhile, some agencies are attempting to professionalize the cone-collection trade. In 2022, CAL FIRE, in partnership with American Forests, began piloting two-day “cone camps,” training workers at all levels, from scouting to climbing to planting, and teaching them skills like how to estimate bushel volumes, rig ropes and carry out cone-cut tests. CAL FIRE has also implemented formal cone-collection standards, in order to ensure that students are equipped to meet its contract requirements. Yet while over 300 participants have completed the program, few have pursued careers in the industry, Singh said. “Climbing trees,” he added, is still “a declining profession.” A certificate cannot change the seasonal, hazardous and unpredictable nature of the job, nor the fact that being a privateer like Keeley hardly pays a living wage. 

Keeley, for his part, was still primarily motivated by his enjoyment of the work and his love for the forest. His focus, he said, was “the genetic preservation of threatened species.” It’s why, despite the challenges and weight of responsibility, he remained committed to his career — a dedication that becomes apparent when you watch him perform the difficult, delicate work of cone collecting. 

When Keeley finally descended at sunset  in Sequoia National Park, he was covered in pine resin, and his muscles ached from the pull of the harness over eight hours. The seeds he gathered would take at least three years to reach blackened slopes like those a mile or two away as seedlings, and the forest would not return to its previous state in his lifetime. But as he tossed the bushel bags into his truck bed, he sounded hopeful. “It seems like a slow progression towards a solution,” he acknowledged, getting into his cab, “but to a forest’s timeline, we’re making a difference.” He pulled the truck door shut and began the long drive toward the next stand.   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Pinecone Cowboys.”  

The post The plight of the pinecone cowboy appeared first on High Country News.

Half a million people — including Nuevomexicano, pueblo and Navajo communities — lived within a 150-mile radius of that atomic bomb test. In the decades that followed, Benavidez Garwood, who is of mixed Spanish and Navajo descent, though not enrolled, lost both of her parents, three of her 10 siblings and one of her own daughters to cancer or complications from cancer, along with many other close relatives, who all grew up in Tularosa and believed that their illnesses were linked to the atomic bomb test. Over 80 years later, Trinity’s dark legacy endures in the ongoing rates of cancer and illness in nearby communities. The locals, many of whom call themselves “downwinders,” commonly say, “We don’t ask if we’re going to get cancer; we ask when.”

“When something’s arbitrary, then it’s not justice.” — Tina Cordova

On July 16, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, New Mexicans gathered outside White Sands Missile Range to celebrate the installation of a new sign commemorating the state’s downwinders. The sign showcased a map made by Bryan Kendall in 2021, which revealed the radiation fallout from the bomb alongside quotes from some of the downwinders. Later, the evening’s mood became more solemn as downwinders invited community members to remember loved ones who had died by decorating a park with luminarias dedicated to their memory. Hundreds of paper bags formed a glowing spiral across the field, and the ceremonial reading of the deceased ones’ names went on for hours.

But last year’s sign dedication was also a time for celebration. Not only had the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC), the advocacy group that represents New Mexico’s downwinder communities, successfully petitioned the state government to memorialize their experiences with the sign outside the Trinity Site, they also succeeded in gaining amendments to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) that would finally include and benefit New Mexicans.

In 1990, the Department of Justice established RECA to provide compensation to people with exposure-related illnesses. The original bill, however, did not include New Mexican downwinders. In July 2025, after a 20-year legislative campaign, they were finally added to RECA through President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This amendment acknowledges the entire state of New Mexico as “an affected area” and allows anyone who resided in the state between Sept. 24, 1944, to Nov. 6, 1962, to apply for a one-time payment of $100,000 if they can prove that they were diagnosed with certain cancers covered under the bill. Descendants of those who have died can also apply and divide their ancestor’s payment among family members. This is a considerable improvement, although there are still severe limitations to compensation for the many people who have been impacted by 80 years of radiation and contamination in their soil, water and communities.

“We went on with our lives like nothing happened…until everybody started dying.” — Lucy Benavidez Garwood

“If they’ve lived in New Mexico all their life and they got cancer (the government) should either give them health care or compensation or both.” — Doris Walters

“We were a sacrifice zone,” Tina Cordova, co-founder of the TBDC, said about the decision to detonate the bomb in New Mexico. “The government knew in 1945 that they were going to damage us, but they didn’t care.” Cordova receives calls every day from people who are going through the RECA application process and need help accessing old documents that could prove they or their family members are eligible for compensation.

“It’s definitely a victory,” Cordova said about the July amendments to RECA. But “our fight is not over. They did away with the health-care coverage; they didn’t add all the areas that have downwinders, like our brothers and sisters in Guam, Colorado and Nevada.”

Cordova described some of RECA’s provisions as “arbitrary”: the kinds of cancers that are covered, for example, as well as the date cutoffs and the geographic boundaries. “When something’s arbitrary, then it’s not justice,” Cordova said. “We have to go back until we get what we are after.”

Since the amendment was enacted last summer, 9,757 downwinders have applied for compensation. Most of these claims are still processing, but 1,218 of them have been approved, resulting in a total payout of $121,800,000. A team of volunteers from TBDC assists people with applications and tracks how many claims are approved each week. The process has been slow, and many people will wait a long time to receive compensation because, Cordova said, the Department of Justice is “woefully underprepared for what they are going through,” an “issue that has developed out of them ignoring us for 80 years.” Now, Cordova and the TBDC are working with the New Mexico Department of Health to train staff at field offices to assist downwinders with tracking down records and working on claims. 

“Hopefully, the next generation won’t shut up.” — Pat Muncy Hinkle

Benavidez Garwood’s skin cancer is not on the list of eligible cancers, and so she cannot receive compensation. However, her daughter, Doris Walters, has applied for compensation for breast cancer. Like Cordova, Walters has been an important resource for community members searching for decades-old medical records. She answers phone calls most days, “guiding (people) where to go … because I know what I went through. I know how hard it is. … We all work together.” Sticky notes in Walters’ home hold the names of helpful contacts at archives and medical facilities. “A lot of people I know are not getting to file because they were born after the date,” she said. “If they’ve lived in New Mexico all their life and they got cancer, (the government) should either give them health care or compensation or both,” Walters said, adding, “It’s the young ones that are suffering now.”

Amber LaMay’s daily pill routine in 2024. At only 39, she has many autoimmune diseases that are rare for her age, and many of her friends and neighbors are also getting sick in their 30s and 40s. LaMay believes that people get sick in Capitan because “(the radiation) is in the soil”. Sofie Hecht

“The hardest thing for me is the things I gave up… I had these dreams… then I started getting sicker.” — Amber LaMay

Paradoxically, the One Big Beautiful Bill, which has opened up the possibility of compensation for previously ineligible downwinders and post-1971 uranium miners, continues to support the rapid development of extractive energy, including coal, uranium, oil and gas, while making it harder to develop renewable energy like wind and solar power. Both OBBBA and other Trump administration bills are eager to provide tax breaks to nuclear energy while encouraging more coal power development and jumpstarting domestic uranium mining. Meanwhile, the fight continues — for environmental regulation, the cleanup of abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation and full federal recognition of downwinder suffering.

“In New Mexico, we’re all downwind of something,” Cordova said.   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A Legacy of Disease.”  

The post The dark legacy of the atomic age is still playing out in New Mexico appeared first on High Country News.