#riveroflostsouls

Pipe, with Huerfanito Peak in the background. San Juan Basin, New Mexico, August 2017. 

This isn’t just another dry year, it’s climate change coming home to roost

Back in June, as the 416 Fire raged outside of Durango, Colorado, I wrote an essay about how the conflagration illustrated the way that climate change was affecting life in places that once seemed invulnerable, like the tiny town of Silverton, elevation 9,318 feet.

As is often the case with articles on this topic, it drew the trolls into the comment section. “A drought in the desert Southwest?…

Homeland, Dryland: 2018 is shaping up to be one of driest water years in Four Corners Country

For his entire adult life, my grandfather, Herb Billings, was a farmer in the Animas Valley north of Durango, Colorado. He knew when it was time to put out the tomatoes he had started indoors not by looking at the calendar, but by keeping an eye each spring on a particular northerly facing slope of a nearby mountain. When the snow was all melted from the slope, the threat of a killing freeze had…

River of Lost Souls Excerpt: The Farm

Excerpt from River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster, by Jonathan P Thompson, published by Torrey House Press, 2018. Order your copy now. 

I don’t know that I really understood the turmoil of the timesin which I was growing up, since I had nothing to compare it to. But moments stick in my mind still, like when an arsonist burned down almost an…

San Juan Snowpack, March 1 update

In January, I posted here about the dire snowpack situation in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. At the time, the snow water equivalent at two SNOTEL stations — – Red Mountain Pass and Molas Lake — was extremely low. Still, weather was moving in even as I wrote about the dry spell, and it looked like there might be a chance that the snowpack would get much closer to the historic…

River of Lost Souls: Weekly excerpt #1

… The capitalists formed the Gold King Mining & Milling Company, and went to work developing the claim, combining it with the nearby Harrison Mine. By the summer of 1895, Nelson’s one hundred feet of workings had grown to five hundred feet; in 1896 the Harrison mill at Gladstone reportedly pounded out more than $10,000 from Gold King ore. In 1897 the company built a mile-long tramway reaching…