The essays and interviews in Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection (Beacon Press) argue that communal living needn’t be just a forced practicality of those who are financially squeezed, but rather a winning arrangement that bolsters support and connection. 

“The messaging in American culture that living independently … is an important milestone, even an achievement, is nearly inescapable,” Rosen writes. Yet it remains out of reach for many. “Shaping our homes to better address physical, social, emotional and financial needs is essential for our survival,” she writes. 

In her late 20s, Rosen was living alone while grappling with her mental health, her sexuality and chronic pain. When her rent was increased by 10%, she moved back in with her parents and was surprised to find full-spectrum relief. She and her parents worked well together, pitching in around the household. The arrangement lasted five years, well after Rosen was back on her feet. 

“The messaging in American culture that living independently … is an important milestone, even an achievement, is nearly inescapable.”

That experience brought Rosen to ask: “How might we live together in order to have happier, healthier, and more connected lives?” Alongside 21 contributors — from 20-
somethings to nonagenarians, all of whom currently reside in the United States — Rosen explores the many reasons why people live communally. 

In one tender essay, Adam Vitcavage, founder of the literary platform Debutiful, writes about repairing a family relationship in Arizona, where rent increased by 72% between 2010 and 2022 while the median sale price of houses rose by 57%. His sister moved in after a divorce, and their new proximity helped the two siblings heal their nearly estranged relationship. By living together, they were able to “stop wearing masks  …  maybe for the first time.”

Housing shortages have driven away families, forced long commutes and strained senior citizens in San Francisco, where Jake Montano’s essay describes finding a home in the queer community. Montano recalls their experiences in drag pageants under the drag name Imelda Glucose and tells how they joined a house formed by a chosen family, many of whom were estranged from their family of origin. This chosen family, they write, “plays a critical role in addressing and remedying experiences of homophobia.”

Los Angeles County’s population has decreased by more than 500,000 over the past decade, but the housing demand has grown due to an increase in single residences. There, author Gabrielle Korn started renting out her home office on Airbnb to make ends meet. Surprised by the emotional connections she forged with the guests that filtered through, she founded The Pink Door Artist and Writer Residency, inviting creatives who would not otherwise be able to afford such an opportunity. 

Housing prices in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the nation’s richest county, have skyrocketed due to the extreme luxury demanded by status-seeking celebrities and plutocrats. In response, Adam Meyer hosts popular monthly dinner parties for friends and strangers, most of whom have been priced out of homeownership. This ritual began during Meyer’s college days, when he daydreamed about all his friends living together in one big apartment building. “I really did love that part of dorm life —
walking by your neighbor’s room, seeing their door open, and chatting for thirty minutes.” 

Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection  
Samantha Paige Rosen
208 pages, hardcover: $32
Beacon Press, 2026.

Living, Together reminds us that we can reimagine and reshape the world and make it into something new. And some places have: Boulder, Colorado, recently repealed occupancy limits explicitly designed to curtail the existence of co-ops, while residents of a Durango mobile home park worked together to purchase the site with help from a land trust. In other parts of the country, Rosen takes us to intergenerational neighborhoods that benefit everyone by housing seniors alongside families adopting children through the foster system. 

In a world of private equity and astronomical prices, where vacant second homes haunt resort towns, people are coming together to solve problems and live communally. In her big-hearted introduction, Rosen nods to another anthology editor, Margot Kahn, who describes the form as “the town hall bound in pages.” Anthologies invite discussion and counterpoints. In our current world, where even town halls are sites of polarized conflict, this choir of voices harmonizing about building community deserves a warm welcome from readers.   

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Let’s get together.”

The post Let’s go in on the American dream, together appeared first on High Country News.

I am the parent of the late Ashley Johnson-Barr, a beautiful 10-year-old girl who enjoyed being outdoors, going to church and helping her friends and family. Unfortunately, she is now a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person. A year after we buried her, I suffered two strokes from all the stress: the media questions, the court stuff, everything. All that heaviness took a toll. I was going through a dark time with alcohol. I sat down in my doctor’s office, and he said, “I’m not going to let you go until you agree to go and see counseling.” That was the best thing I ever did. We (as men) were taught not to speak our feelings. But it’s OK. It’s OK to cry; it’s OK to learn from your mistakes. If you don’t have a strong relationship with your dad or your older brothers, seek someone who’s willing to help you, guide you. That’s who I want to be in my community, some sort of role model or sober mentor to all these younger brothers who struggle with addictions without anyone to look up to — to help respect them for who they are and help them respect our women and girls.

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “#IAMTHEWEST.”

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By the time you read this, the Humboldt lily will likely have finished blooming; the tall main stem will die back and the plant will go dormant until the following spring. I know this lily has other admirers, because I have seen carefully placed branches around its base to deter unknowing passersby from damaging it. It pleases me to know that there is a community gathered around this one plant, watching it go through its spectacular lifecycle and caring about its well-being. Visiting the lily not only fills me with awe — who would not feel awe in the presence of an 8-foot blooming wonder? — it also renews my faith in humanity. The fact that we are capable of caring this much for a single plant on national forest land less than a mile from the trailhead gives me hope.

One extraordinary thing about this magazine and its own community of readers is that many of you likely have similar relationships with a particular species or place or landscape. Perhaps you have volunteered to help preserve habitat or propagate seedlings or rescue injured wildlife. There is a long list of ways humans can honor and care for the world around us, bask in its magnificence and try to do our part to preserve its integrity. This issue contains a story about another endangered plant, a rare orchid that is native to desert wetlands in Arizona, and the biologists who are working to help a foundering population gain a foothold in a rugged environment. It’s a science story, yes, but it is also a story of love, as so many of the best stories are. 

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Bloom.”

The post Love letter to a blooming giant appeared first on High Country News.

As time passed, however, we found that an internship was no longer enough to land a first job in journalism. We shifted to yearlong fellowships, but as local news organizations downsized or ceased publication altogether, we started to wonder if we were preparing these brilliant young people for jobs that no longer existed. 

That was one of the inspirations behind the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative (WERC), a partnership with the national nonprofit Report for America and local news organizations across the region. It launches this month with two- to three-year positions for journalists in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, thanks to the support of our great collaborators and the HCN supporters who helped us get this thing started.

We’re excited to announce the first four WERC reporters. With this combination of national, regional and local partners, we hope to make these jobs permanent, providing Westerners with consistent, insightful reporting about our land, water and wildlife. 

Stephanie Casanova will cover the Colorado River for Arizona Luminaria. An independent bilingual journalist from Tucson, Stephanie has covered community stories for more than 10 years for publications including CALÓ News, Somos Tucson and Prism. She is a 2026 investigative fellow with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and has completed fellowships with the SPJ Future Leaders Academy, the Maynard 200 investigative reporting program and the IRE Data Journalism Bootcamp.

Chart Riggall will be stationed at the Ouray County Plaindealer on Colorado’s Western Slope. Prior to joining the Plaindealer, Chart covered courts and legal affairs for Law360 in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. He began his reporting career at the nearby Marietta Daily Journal, covering local and state politics and economic development. Before he got into journalism, he led a variety of other lives, including as a government oversight investigator, brewery hand and public-lands worker in southwest Colorado.

Teal Davis will report for Wyoming Public Media, covering wildlife, land use and the preservation of major national parks, including Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Before joining WPM, Davis worked as an environment and data reporter in central Wyoming for the Riverton Ranger and Lander Journal. Born and raised in San Diego, she interned at inewsource, an investigative newsroom, and freelanced for several publications in the city. She has also published work with KPBS, the Casper Star-Tribune and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

Nick Mott will cover the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and associated public lands, wildlife, water and rural community impacts for Mountain Journal, a project of Montana Free Press. A longtime freelance journalist in the Livingston area, Nick is the host and creator of the podcast The Wide Open and author of the 2023 book This Is Wildfire: How To Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat. He’s also written for High Country News and Mountain Journal, among others.

WERC reporters will report stories for their home publications, which can be shared with statewide and regional networks. You’ll see more of their reporting in these pages, and HCN will offer their stories to newsrooms across the West for republication at no charge.

And this is just the beginning! We plan to add four more reporters to the network next year and another four the year after that, planting WERC in 12 Western states. In the process, we’ll help provide insightful reporting for local communities and share those stories with other communities, as well as with policymakers in statehouses and Washington, D.C.

A little good news, for a change — in every sense of the word!

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Meet the West’s new environmental reporters.”

The post Meet the West’s new environmental reporters appeared first on High Country News.

Jaclyn Moyer’s article on taking the McKenzie River tributary back to Stage 0 (“The Way of the River,” June 2026) was excellent. I was deeply involved in river restoration for many years. While we were always doing our best to improve our river systems, Moyer’s piece shows that’s not always the case. Understanding how nature made that system and reverting to that is often proving to be best.

Marc Alston 
Denver, Colorado

A DEEP DIVER INTO DEEP WATER

I learned a great deal from the Native ecological perspective in “A River Robbed of
Sediment” (June 2026) and realize how pathetically narrow my exposure has been to historical river health. 

Dorothy Cox
Via email

A BLOODY COUGAR CONTROVERSY

Thank you for the informative article about the current Utah Division of Wildlife Resources program (“Utah’s controversial new mountain lion study,” June 2026). It infuriates me that the Utah DWR thinks the solution is to kill as many cougars as it can and see if that increases the mule deer population. Who has the right to live? The animals that are native to the land or the intruders with high-powered rifles, scopes and binoculars? The “study” reminds me of the eradication of beavers, otters, grizzly bears, bison, salmon and many other indigenous species for “profit” ever since the Europeans “tamed the West.” I am not a wildlife biologist, but what happened to the natural prey-and-predator relationship? It seems like that would even out natural animal populations if they were allowed to evolve naturally. 

Climate change, which we are exacerbating, makes it so much harder for so many species to survive. Why do we need to kill the animals that have found a way to adapt and survive?

Newton Morgan
Poulsbo, Washington

Hunters, houndsmen, ranchers, conservationists, biologists and the general public have all presented rational and factual arguments as to why Utah’s actions are not only unfounded, but just plain wrong.

The impact of killing the cougars is beginning to reveal itself, and it’s nothing short of horrifying: the deaths and mutilations, the collateral damage, the inhumane methods. The public is about to hit the boiling point on this.

The debate is showing signs of shifting from one of science to one of morality. Killing off our lions to improve the deer hunting industry is one thing. But to be unmoved by the events emerging from the field can’t help but make one question one’s values.

Hope remains that rational dialogue can stop the slaughter of our mountain lions. But time will tell.

Paul Garvey
Kanab, Utah

The opportunity to kill a cougar is hard to come by since they are very elusive and generally stay away from humans. There is an unnecessarily high number of these big cats in Utah. Most cubs will make it to adulthood because there is no “competition,” and if this law falls, we will soon be overrun with these predators, and our forests and ecosystems will collapse.

Russell Jessop
Eagle Mountain, Utah

DON’T WALL OFF OUR TRAILS

Just a note of gratitude for the recent article, “The Continental Divide Trail is being militarized for the border wall,” (May 19, 2026). 

The same thing is happening to the Arizona National Scenic Trail to the west, where one mile of the trail is now closed due to blasting and road construction activities. And last week the construction crews started a fire that quickly spread to 60 acres and caused widespread closures of the National Park Service unit (Coronado National Memorial), where the Arizona Trail’s southern terminus is located.

And to top it all off, the Department of Homeland Security announced its plans to build two walls through this area instead of one. It’s insane.

Thank you for giving this important issue about our public lands — and the nationally significant trails that should be protected under the National Trails System Act — some ink.

Matt Nelson
Tucson, Arizona

HIGH COUNTRY NEWTS

I loved the article about the Pacific newt in the May 2026 issue (“Meet the Pacific newt”)! I’ve been a longtime lover of these creatures, and the article was so fun and a great ode to them. Especially, I adore the artwork that accompanies it.

Erin Hennessy 
Albuquerque, New Mexico

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.

The post Letters to the Editor, July 2026 appeared first on High Country News.

Then I noticed a text from my dad: 

Mom has fallen. Her CT showed a small brain bleed of about 5 millimeters. We will monitor it and hope it does not increase. It may resolve naturally. There were no broken bones. She has a nasty black eye. Must have been quite a hard fall. She was on the back deck, which was wet with slushy snow, in bare feet. She tried to move some geranium plants and must have slipped.

My stomach sank. And my immediate reaction was anger. Why was she outside?! Why was she moving a pot in the wet snow that we’d thought was over for the season?! I sent an angry response. He wrote back:

What can I say? She didn’t tell me she was going out. I heard her call and thought she was in the kitchen. I went onto the deck, and she was lying there in her nightgown, which was wet and cold from the melting snow.

My thoughts quickly shifted to the care she needed but might not be able to get. There is a health-care crisis in the rural West. The week before my mother’s fall, she spent almost a week in the hospital, waiting for a specialist who never came. Suddenly I knew why I probably wouldn’t raise goats or make gin or have a garden full of produce to sell at a farmers market. I was scared that there was no medical care. And even in places with beautiful shiny hospitals, there were not enough doctors. 

I AM FIRMLY part of the sandwich generation. I have small children I had in my 40s, and my parents are aging. One minute I’m signing my kids up for summer camp, and the next I’m asking my parents for their bank information in case I have to pay their bills. Asking for their passwords feels ugly and invasive.

Every time they visit us in Fort Collins, I ask them to move closer. My husband and I renovated our basement in hope that our parents would move in someday. We installed an accessible shower with safety bars and created a small apartment, so they’d know they were always welcome. My mother has yet to sleep there; when she visits, she sleeps in a small room upstairs to be near my girls, sharing a bathroom with toddlers.

When I beg her to move here, she says, “Why would I come live in a basement? We have a beautiful home in Wyoming. It’s where I’ve made my life.”

And it’s true: Their home is gorgeous. It’s in the foothills with an uninterrupted view of Casper Mountain. It is full of light, and they have a large garden where deer and rabbits graze. My dad lovingly plants an abundance of flowers every year. My mom has a large kitchen and a special rack for all her Indian spices. And all their friends are nearby. They have made a life in Wyoming for what will be 50 years this fall. They are rooted.

I was living in Wyoming when I was pregnant with Marigold. Because of my age, I was concerned about giving birth early. The doctors repeatedly told me not to worry. At one point, my OB asked me if I wanted to go on antidepressants. You are very anxious, she told me. But I knew there were only a handful of Level II NICUs in Wyoming, and none of them were in Laramie. And sure enough, on a night that was punctuated by the sound of owls hooting, I awoke knowing something felt off. Marigold wasn’t due for another two months. Minutes after arriving at Ivinson Hospital, I was asked which hospital in Colorado I wanted to be helicoptered to. I would not be having my baby in Wyoming.

I’ve since learned of other women who endured stress-filled life flights across the prairie to give birth, all for different reasons: No doctor, or a complex case that was beyond the capabilities of a rural hospital. A friend of mine recently had the surreal experience of going to an ER in rural Wyoming and being seen via telehealth by a doctor in Arizona.

My own mother had heart surgery in Cleveland because there was no cardiac surgeon in Casper in the late ’90s. After her surgery, she was in the hospital for six weeks. It was a lonely time, far from our community. I know of snowbirds who go to Arizona or one of the coasts for their medical care. When I was a kid, you were seen as fancy if you went to Denver to do your back-to-school shopping. Now it is medical care that the people I know go to cities for.

“Why would I come live in a basement? We have a beautiful home in Wyoming. It’s where I’ve made my life.”

HOW DO WE live in the places we love when the places we love can’t always care for us?

According to the National Rural Health Care Association, there are many obstacles facing rural care. Only 11% of U.S. physicians practice in rural areas despite serving a fifth of the nation’s population. Nearly 75% of smaller rural counties lack a psychiatrist, severely limiting behavioral health options. Between 2013 and 2020, more than 100 rural hospitals closed across the U.S. And the number of physicians per 10,000 people in rural areas is 13.1, compared to 31.2 in urban areas.

I laugh because I hate the city but will probably retire to one because the care will be better. Still, I can’t imagine growing old without a mountain or an expanse of sagebrush to look at.

Maybe the question isn’t how you make a home when a place can’t provide care for you, but what if the care just looks different? Maybe the care is a view of the mountains? Maybe it’s fat corn snow in the spring? Or being able to see friends within minutes? A life where people fill your fridge with casseroles and soup. Where they bring a branch of new lilacs to you in the hospital. Where they shovel the snow off your deck and crochet a blanket for you.

When I finally came home from the NICU with Marigold, I took her straight out to the prairie. For a whole month, all she had known was the inside of the hospital. The wind blew, and I covered her with a blanket knitted by the women in my knitting group. This is the prairie, I whispered to her. This is the alpenglow. This is the wind. Those are mountains. They will all care for you. She opened her dark eyes, and for the first time since she was born, I felt she understood. The land gives a kind of care that sustains you in ways no hospital ever could.  

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Urgent care.”

The post What if the mountains are the medicine? appeared first on High Country News.

TSA workers are exhausted and concerned. Not only did they have to worry about not getting paychecks for months, now the Trump administration wants to privatize the TSA. When we see them going after different agencies, we’re like, “They’re picking us all off one by one.” What we have to do is come together and stick together. In the West, there’s a lot of anti-union and anti-federalist feeling, so being a part of a union and the federal government and still being able to succeed in Idaho speaks volumes. A lot of people who aren’t involved in unions want to be supportive: We’ve gotten thousands of dollars in gift cards, and an empanada place, Tangos, had a free food day for us. All across Idaho, we’ve had donations like that. It’s heartwarming; it makes me feel like there still is community and people do care about each other.

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 “#IAMTHEWEST.”

The post ‘What we have to do is come together and stick together’ appeared first on High Country News.

The giant green anemone, Anthopleura xanthogrammica, is one of the most ubiquitous tide pool denizens, emerald and starry and found from Baja California to Alaska. At first glance, it seems more plant than animal, an electric green sunflower waving its petals beneath the glassy water. But those petals are in fact tentacles, six or more rings of them, which the creature uses to pull food into its central mouth. It has a columnar body rather than a stem, and no roots, only a foot it uses to cling to a rocky surface. A giant green anemone hardly ever relocates once it finds a suitable home. 

When the tide goes out, exposing an anemone, the creature curls up upon itself, gathering its arms into its center, like a yellow dandelion closing to the night. The giant green anemones that cling to the sides of rocks droop when closed — bulbous gelatinous gargoyles. Those on horizontal surfaces turn to orbs. When closed, an anemone can survive the harsh drought of low tide, waiting for long hours between visits from the sea.

When the tide returns, the anemone unfurls, each tentacle waving independently in the water like a dancing ribbon. It’s a deadly beauty: The tentacles are armed with stinging cells, ready to grasp its prey and inject it with neurotoxic venom. 

A brief list of creatures the giant green anemone considers food: bushels of California mussels, prized from the rocks by beating waves. Sea urchins, crabs, barnacles, their hard indigestible shells spit out from the same mouth that took them in, flecks adorning an anemone’s sticky surface like oversized glitter. Marine worms and small fish, snatched from the water while swimming or scooting past. And, at least twice on record along the Oregon coast, juvenile birds, a cormorant and a gull that died in their nests and tumbled off the cliffs into the waiting maw of an anemone.

Up against the anemone’s stinging cells, or cnidae — pronounced without the c, like the stinging nettles they are named for — few creatures stand a chance. A single anemone body will have hundreds of tentacles, each with tens of thousands of tiny cnidae. When prey brush against a tentacle, each cnida harpoons out an even tinier organelle that pierces the prey and shoots out a little capsule containing venom. Brush a tentacle with your finger, and it feels like Velcro, a little hug of barbs trying to pierce your hand but unable to find purchase through the leather of your skin. But if the prey is soft-bodied, unprotected — a naked mussel, for example — I imagine the anemone delivers brief agony before complete immobility sets in, destiny locked into place.

The giant green anemones that cling to the sides of rocks droop when closed — bulbous gelatinous gargoyles.

The only part of the human body a giant green anemone can sting is the tongue. The hands, the arms, the feet, the face: The rest of the body is invulnerable to this flowery sea creature’s stinging cells. But the tongue — that seat of the voice, of speech and song, of noises sparked by joy and laden with sorrow — is tender, unprotected, naked. You are open to risk and pain and barbs if you’re willing to lower it to the sea.

I did it, once. It was a dare by a marine biologist friend. On a cold and windy evening on the Oregon coast, the sun setting orange and pink over the ocean, I knelt beside a rocky pool. In an act of giddy benediction, I opened my mouth and pressed my tongue gently to a giant green anemone, the strangest kiss I’d ever shared. At first there was the familiar hug, the needle press of tentacles — then a piercing, the strangest buzz, a stinging vibration coursing through my mouth. 

That feeling stayed for half an hour, a zinging along the tip of my tongue. A little bit of electricity, passed from the anemone to me.   

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 “How to touch a star.”

The post The electrifying allure of a tide pool creature appeared first on High Country News.

IDAHO

Here’s a hare-raising news story. While releasing rabbits into your neighborhood might seem like a harmless way of getting unwanted pets out of your, um, hare, rabbits have a tendency to, well, behave like rabbits, swiftly propagating and eventually taking over, which is what happened in the Boise Bench, a prime residential area located above downtown Boise. In the last several years, the proliferation of libidinous Leporidae has become an issue, and some residents are not particularly hoppy about it. “They ate my shrub,” Melody Haile told Idaho News 6. “It’s a problem. They’re really taking over now.” The bunnies are burrowing under her bungalow, tearing up her yard, eating macramé lawn chairs and digging big holes next to the foundation. “Now, we routinely walk the house and make sure they’re not digging at the house.” Humane Society representative Kristine Schellhaas thinks the bunny abundance might be owing to Easter, noting that rabbits “are really great gifts when in chocolate form (but) not necessarily an animal you want to get.” The Humane Society is asking people to surrender their unwanted bunnies at the shelter instead of letting them frolic around freely. Or better yet, think twice before getting into the bunny business.  

CALIFORNIA

If you plan on visiting the coastal paradise of Montecito, California, the sixth-most expensive ZIP code in the U.S., be sure to drop by what locals have dubbed the infamous “Pig House.” It isn’t hard to find: Just a few blocks from Butterfly Beach, the home is truly hog heaven, featuring a menagerie of swinish tchotchkes and farmyard furbelows both inside and out — even a backyard grill shaped like a big “pink oinker,” SFGATE reports. Nikki Grosso, the 77-year-old owner (and curator) of the Pig House, estimates that there are about 6,000 pigs “scattered around her home,” making her porcine property really stand out in what she calls “hotsy-totsy Montecito,” home to many wealthy celebrity types. Grosso’s pig accrual started when she was living in Los Angeles in the 1960s. One year she gave her husband, Ronald, a “cheeky” ceramic pig for his birthday — Ronald was a police officer — and the collecting took off from there. But she really went whole hog after they moved to Montecito in 1993, though Grosso stopped collecting pigs after Ronald passed away in 2019. “There were too many by that point,” she said. There have been mixed reactions to her “piggy paradise” over the years, with some neighbors calling it an eyesore while tour buses often stop outside to take photos. In any case, Grosso is planning to sell both the home and her collection in the near future and move back to LA. If you’re in the market for some unique curly-tailed knick-knacks, you’re in luck: She will likely sell her treasures online.

MONTANA

T. rexes and stegos and velociraptors, oh my! The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, hosted its 5th Annual Dinosaurs and MOR! Festival, March 27-29. There were panels, workshops, keynotes and kid-friendly activities, and participants who completed paleo-related activities received passport stamps from various stations on the Montana Dinosaur Trail — including the Rudyard Depot Museum and Montana State University’s Dead Lizard Society — as well as a Junior Paleontologist Certificate signed by MOR’s paleontology curator, John Scannella. The speakers’ list featured a “who’s who” of paleontologists, field experts, museum curators and biologists from around the U.S. and Canada. Check out the Museum of the Rockies webpage, and the Montana Dinosaur Trail. And plan on attending next year with your binoculars, pith helmet and (maybe) some velociraptor repellent.

IDAHO

What do you do when your state bans pride flags from government buildings? Answer: Come up with a creative alternative. That’s precisely what happened in Boise after Republican Gov. Brad Little signed HB 561, a law that prohibits the flying of any flags that are not “pre-approved.” To comply with it, City Hall took down its pride flags — which had flown for over a decade — and then wrapped its flagpoles in LGBTQ+ pride colors and hung up a rainbow-striped banner that reads “creating a city for everyone.” The city stated that the decision was made in order to “demonstrate our unwavering commitment to the people that call Boise home,” KTVB reported. In addition to the ingenious workarounds at City Hall, light displays featuring the light blue, pink and white of the transgender pride flag were installed around the building’s windows and perimeter, illuminating Boise’s downtown at night.   

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 “Heard around the West.”

The post Bazillions of bunnies, Montecito’s ‘hog heaven,’ and pride will always prevail appeared first on High Country News.

Wilson was unapologetic. “I’ve been a socialist for a very long time,” she told Jacobin magazine, “since before it was cool to be a socialist.”

Whether you consider them cool or dangerous, radical or inept, socialist mayors are not a new phenomenon. During the early 20th century, the Socialist Party of America was a viable third party, especially in the West, part of a broader workers’ movement that ranged from traditional unions to the more radical “Wobblies,” or Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

I grew up in Utah and now live in southwest Montana. These stridently red states were once fertile ground for a brand of socialism centered around worker solidarity, public health and progressive attitudes toward equality and class. But the region’s prevailing narrative — Western individualism and conservatism — tends to obscure this rich labor history.

When I was a kid in Park City, Utah, in the 1990s, it was already a resort town, though less so than it is today. But underneath its ski slopes lay a pattern of mines, like a subterranean rune telling the story of a time, not too long ago, when Park City was very different. In public school, we learned the mining history of the Wasatch Mountains; the region’s labor history was ignored.

In 1902, however, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) endorsed the Socialist Party platform, and the Park City chapter later invited Mary G. Harris Jones — Mother Jones, co-founder of the IWW — to speak at the 1907 Labor Day parade. 

Park City’s mines were deadly, but the closest hospital was in Salt Lake City. “Injured miners had to travel by train to Salt Lake City to get treatment,” writer Gerald McDonough, grandson of Bartley McDonough, the local WFM president, told me recently. “By the time they got there, they’d died.”

Whether you consider them cool or dangerous, radical or inept, socialist mayors are not a new phenomenon.

After an explosion at the Daly West Mine killed 34 miners and injured several others, the WFM fought for the establishment of Park City’s first hospital. What does it say about the companies that profited from some of the world’s deadliest workplaces that it required union agitation after a disaster to establish a city’s first hospital? And why had we never learned about this in school?

According to Utah historian John Sillito, the dissonance between the labor history of places like Park City and its present image as a rich person’s playground is no coincidence.

“The interests that controlled Park City then continue to control Park City and its history,” he told me over Zoom. “It’s in no one’s interest in Park City to advertise something other than snow.”

And yet Utah, the state that continues to re-elect Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who groundlessly blamed the murder of a Minnesota lawmaker last year on “Marxists,” was once home to a successful Socialist Party.

Lee is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary, Sillito and his colleague John McCormick note that more than 40% of the state’s socialist membership in the early 20th century was Mormon and that, from 1900 to 1920, Utahns elected more than a hundred socialists in more than two dozen cities as mayors, county commissioners, city councilmen and justices of the peace. Part of the reason? Mormonism.

When the LDS church moved West, it established the United Order in many towns, a centrally planned economic system that asked business leaders to relinquish ownership to the collective, pool their resources and provide communal labor.

Most Utah socialists were classic “sewer” socialists, focused on local reforms in sanitation, sewage and public health. In Bingham, Utah, for example, socialist officials expanded sewers, established a city dump with regular garbage collection and required electrical utilities to insulate power lines.

In those days, socialism flourished throughout Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Montana, especially in places where mining created massive income divides. The socialist who was elected mayor of Butte, Montana, in 1911 and 1913 left behind a balanced budget, improved sanitation and safer streets. 

My grandfather, who became a Butte miner in the 1930s after high school, survived a cave-in when the mine he worked in collapsed. He loved talking about Butte but never mentioned its rich labor history. Then again, he wasn’t born until 1920, right at the end of the Socialist Party’s heyday. Perhaps no one had told him, either. 

In 2024, I became the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives’ Carrie Johnson Research Fellow, diving into old newspapers, meeting minutes and historical scholarship, becoming increasingly fascinated by the town’s dramatic worker legacy. Unlike Park City, the workers’ story remains a part of Butte’s identity.

Tim Harper’s father worked for the mines as a union electrician. “Dad always said, ‘The worst union in the world is better than no union at all,’” he told me over coffee recently.

“Our ancestors grew up in the mines,” Harper said. “They died in the mines. The company wouldn’t help them. Only the union would.”

The mine owners’ callousness and opposition to labor organizing, especially in the early 1900s, is hard to overstate. Chris Fisk, who taught history for 30 years, mostly at Butte High, always discussed the unsolved murder of IWW organizer Frank Little in 1917. Little was dragged out of a boardinghouse in the night and lynched from a train trestle, and his killers are widely believed to have been connected to the mining company.

“A person trying to (work and) better themselves is not a bad thing,” Fisk said. “Murdering someone is. My students tend to understand that.”

Many Western unions were divided between far-left socialists and moderates as well as along ethnic lines. Murray, Utah, one of the few Utah cities to elect a socialist mayor and majority socialist city council, built a publicly owned power plant that still operates today. Yet in 1912, Murray’s socialist officials refused to support a strike by mostly Greek smelter workers and passed a law preventing white women from working in Greek coffeehouses. 

Socialists of the early 1900s dared ask the question: What obligation does a corporation have to its workers, and what does it owe the community?

“It was clearly a fear of Greek men interacting with non-Greek women,” Sillito said.

Internal divisions frayed the coalitions, but ultimately the federal government buried the Socialist Party of America and the IWW. During World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used unsparingly to shutter the Socialist Party’s newspapers and even imprison its most prominent leaders.

Yet the movement’s reforms remain with us. Socialists dared to ask the question: What obligation does a corporation have to its workers, and what does it owe the community from which it reaps its profits? 

I thought of this recently as I drove past a billboard outside Butte, opposing the development of a new data center near the city. 

“The tech companies get the boom,” the billboard warned, “we get the bust.”

It’s addressing big tech in 2026, not the mining companies of the early 1900s. Still, it raises the question: Who will stand up to powerful interests this time 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 “The surprising socialist history of the Rocky Mountains.”

The post How socialism built the reddest states in the West appeared first on High Country News.

What the website doesn’t show are the company’s largest federal contracts: the billions of taxpayer dollars Barnard has been awarded to build President Donald Trump’s border wall. Also unmentioned are its founder’s financial ties to the president.

Trump made finishing the border wall a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, and soon after he took office, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated $46.5 billion for the project. The administration has since waived dozens of federal contracting laws to expedite construction, and more than $28 billion in contracts have been awarded to a small group of companies, according to Customs and Border Protection.

A High Country News analysis of publicly available federal spending data finds Barnard is among the biggest winners. The company and its affiliates have been awarded more than $5.6 billion in federal border construction contracts since Trump returned to office. Add their previous border wall contracts and the total rises to more than $7 billion.

Meanwhile, Federal Election Commission records show that company chairman Tim Barnard and his wife have contributed millions of dollars over the years to Republican candidates and causes — including more than $1 million to Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Experts say the contracts raise red flags, and Barnard’s competitors seem to agree: In May, another contractor sued the federal government after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) promised the lion’s share of new Texas and New Mexico wall construction contracts to Barnard and one other company. Now, Barnard is facing criticism both at home and on the border as it prepares to begin construction in one of the least-trafficked parts of the border.

THOUGH IT’S HEADQUARTERED in an undulating building on the northern outskirts of town, Barnard’s financial influence is evident all over Bozeman. The chairman’s name decorates a science building at Montana State University, a domestic violence shelter nearby, and an aquatics center to the south. The Barnards have also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Montana conservative groups and political campaigns.

The company’s revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2024, according to industry publication Engineering News-Record, making it one of the top 150 engineering firms in the country. It has received contracts from numerous federal agencies, including the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation. But more than 80% of the value of its federal awards comes from border wall contracts. Barnard received several under the first Trump administration, before and after its leadership donated $5,600 to Trump’s reelection campaign. FEC records show the Barnards have also donated to several Trump cabinet members, including J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Ryan Zinke.

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One award in particular generated controversy: Reporting by ProPublica found that an initial $142 million contract awarded to Barnard’s subsidiary BFBC in 2019 grew to more than $1 billion as the administration quietly modified it over and over. The firm was promised $33 million per mile of wall for one section of construction — about $13 million more than the government’s standard price.

Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed called for an investigation into the contract, calling it a “no-bid contract to an apparently politically-connected, private contractor,” and a Government Accountability Office report the following year advised the Army Corps to rethink its procurement strategy.

But neither the company nor the administration seem to have been deterred. In 2024, FEC records show the Barnards donated $1 million to a fundraising committee for Trump’s presidential campaign, and $3,300 to a Trump political action committee. Federal spending records indicate the company has since received $4.54 billion in awards from CBP — plus more than $260 million in Department of Defense (DoD) wall contracts to subsidiary BFBC. That’s in addition to $853 million in contracts to Barnard Spencer Joint Venture, Barnard’s collaboration with Arizona-based contractor Spencer Construction, which have grown by more than $75 million since they were first awarded in September.

Charles Tiefer, an emeritus law professor at the University of Baltimore who previously served as U.S. commissioner on wartime contracting, called the awards “an enormous transfer” to a private company. “Even the biggest detention facilities don’t rank with four and a half billion,” he said.

And he said the scale of the Barnards’ political contributions calls the fairness of competition into question. “If you tip a waiter fifteen bucks, that doesn’t raise any red flags,” he said. “But if you tip them 150 bucks or 300 bucks, then somebody watching may wonder what you’re getting special that you’re not supposed to be.”

Barnard representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Other contractors share Tiefer’s concern. On May 13, New York-based contractor Posillico Civil, Inc., sued the Trump administration, saying CBP had promised around 73% of the value of new Texas wall contracts to just two of 11 pre-approved contractors: Barnard and North Dakota-based firm Fisher Sand & Gravel.

Fisher is known for its controversial work to build a private border wall and financial ties to We Build the Wall, a scandal-ridden nonprofit whose board included Trump strategist Steve Bannon. The federal spending database lists nearly $15 billion in border construction contracts to the company over the years, including more than $13 billion under this administration.

Posillico’s lawsuit argued that the contracting process lacked “genuine competitive opportunities,” and alleged that CBP does not keep a price-comparison analysis or documentation of its methodology for awarding the contracts.

In a statement, CBP said the agency does maintain documentation for its decisions but declined to share it, citing the pending litigation. “Border Wall contracts awarded are based on the contractor’s qualifications to perform the work in a timely manner and at prices deemed fair and reasonable,” the statement said.

“What was so urgent that they couldn’t bid it to other contractors that are already on the pre-approved list?”

While pre-approving a set of contractors is not uncommon, it’s not meant to remove competition between those companies, Tiefer said. But at least one of Barnard’s new CBP contracts — its largest — was awarded without competitive bidding.

In April, Barnard received a $1.6 billion contract to build 112.5 miles of “secondary wall” in eastern New Mexico. A CBP spokesperson said the contract was awarded without competition “due to various factors particular to that project.” In the spending database, the reason listed for the lack of competition is “urgency.”

Scott Amey, a lawyer who investigates federal contracts for the Project On Government Oversight, said the process merits scrutiny. “What was so urgent that they couldn’t bid it to other contractors that are already on the pre-approved list?” he said.

THE NEW CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS awarded to Barnard and its affiliates span the four U.S. states of the border, in some places building “secondary” walls or replacing stretches of existing barrier. 

a. 60 miles of new lighting and technology along existing wall near the California-Arizona border

b. Replacing 20 miles of existing wall across western Arizona’s Barry M. Goldwater Range

c. 6 miles of “barrier fencing” near Antelope Wells, New Mexico

d. More than 20 miles of new wall, 110 miles of a second wall, and 80 miles of new technology in New Mexico’s Luna, Doña Ana, and Hidalgo counties

e. More than 100 miles of wall construction in the Big Bend region of West Texas

f. 30 miles of wall near Del Rio, Texas

g. 10 miles of new wall in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley

Among the most controversial are the company’s two contracts in West Texas, where it’s been awarded nearly $2 billion to build just over a hundred miles of new, 30-foot steel bollard wall through the remote Big Bend region.

Though it’s the largest Border Patrol sector on the Mexican border, the Big Bend consistently sees some of the fewest crossings, thanks to its remote location and harsh terrain. So far this fiscal year, just 1.6% of all “apprehensions” on the southern border have occurred here. The region is also home to some of Texas’ most beloved public land, including Big Bend National Park, and its border counties are heavily reliant on river tourism. 

The Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of environmental and cultural regulations to fast-track construction through the Big Bend, and hundreds of private landowners could have their property seized by eminent domain. Plans to build the wall have faced near-universal bipartisan opposition locally — including from law enforcement. In March, five county sheriffs in the region issued a joint statement urging the federal government to reconsider the construction.

“Major permanent infrastructure, accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors would permanently alter one of the most remote and ecologically significant border landscapes in the United States,” they wrote.

Barnard also faced direct criticism from local officials after its subcontractors began using heavy machinery to clear a county road leading down the border without consulting with local officials.

“You’re not going to be able to improve a county road without commissioner court approval,” local county judge Curtis Evans told Marfa Public Radio. “I’m not pleased with them not contacting the county and going through cooperation and collaboration channels in order for everyone to be transparent.”

As word of Barnard’s work on the border spread, opposition emerged in Montana, too. In April, local artist and river guide Morgan Kemp organized a Bozeman screening of the 2019 documentary The River and the Wall, which explores the impacts of wall construction in Texas. Kemp, who is originally from El Paso, said she felt it was important for people to know it was a Montana firm building the wall there.

“If a company that’s local is going to travel all the way down to the other side of the country and border to build something like this and take away people’s lands and access, what would stop them from doing it locally?” she said.

She told HCN that around 30 people attended, many of whom were surprised by the beauty and tranquility of the border in the Big Bend region.

“Most people think Texas, they think tumbleweeds, flat plains, nothing super diverse going on. It’s like, no, this is such an ecological oasis that is so important and so special,” she said.

Following the screening, attendees wrote postcards to the Barnards, urging them to reconsider the contracts. “One of my favorite ones was somebody that clearly knows who the owner is, because they addressed them directly,” Kemp said. “They were like, ‘Mary and Tim, do not do this. No amount of money is worth it.’”

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 July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The wall’s wide reach.”

The post Billions in border wall contracts are going to a Montana firm run by a Trump donor appeared first on High Country News.

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 Managed retreat in Ruidoso could mean more public lands appeared first on High Country News.

Read Part 2: On Oregon’s McKenzie River, an unprecedented approach to restoration takes shape

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.”

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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.”

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