Letters From The West

A new forest grows after harvest and fire. I watched the timber wars end in the American West in the 1990s. A series of court decisions...

Travis Barker acting like the rock star he is for Workday commercial I ignored the Kardashians until they reached into my life. On Nov....

Greg Carr meets with visitors and staff at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique Greg Carr’s life is a model for making the world a...

Looking out across the Great Rift from Laidlaw Park in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve More than 100 years ago Robert...

A greater sage grouse male displays its puffed up breast during mating ritual The recent Supreme Court decision that knocked down the...

Bob Inglis talks with Uof I student Matt Dunkle on a Snake River trip in 2017 How do you convince a Trump voter that climate change...

Shrouded in the Atlantic mist, I carved my paddle through the calm waters of the Kennebec River. I had joined a small armada of joyful...

It's hard to jump back into real life after a week on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The Middle Fork's 100 miles of roller-coaster...

By Rocky Barker In 2009 I reported on the Watergate connection of Walt Minnick who was then an Idaho Democratic Congressman. Minnick...

I paddle down the East Fork of the Owyhee River By Rocky Barker Copyright 2024 Bruce Babbitt had invited me to fly on his jet to Arco,...

Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson and Idaho Conservation League Director Rick Johnson were sitting in The Mayflower Hotel’s dining room in...

If ever a river proved the wisdom of wild trout management it is the South Fork of the Boise River . Here is a place only 60 miles from...

Sept. 7, 1988 at Old Faithful Giant wildfires, megafires, have burned across the United States and Canada the last several years as the...

The overriding law of the old American West was simple: First come first served. That meant the first person to divert from a river on to...

A visitor making their first trip to Yellowstone National Park will find a landscape as wonderous as I found when I first arrived to...

Yama Kaholoaa is a carpenter on the island of Molokai in Hawaii. Each summer he, his wife and their seven children moved into the lush...

I have finally gotten over my long journalism career. I retired in 2018 after 22 years as an environmental reporter-blogger-columnist for...

Blog by Rocky Barker Copyright 2023 I watched on television as a pro-Trump mob rushed into the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 as lawmakers sought to...

At the end of an icy road on the edge of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho four wolves and three very different groups