Officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) don’t wear masks because their job is risky, writes Benjamin James Waddell. He points out that statistically, teachers have much riskier, life-threatening jobs: “ICE agents wear masks to instill fear while shielding themselves from the public they are supposedly protecting."

It’s just by chance that any bison survived a ruthless slaughter of the 1880s, but over the last 50 years, a few thousand buffalo have painstakingly been brought back by federal and state agencies and Western tribes. But in Montana, write two Montana state legislators, Governor Greg Pianoforte is doing everything he can to pressure the Bureau of Land Management to reverse earlier, positive bison decisions.

The West is in a world of hurt this spring, warns writer Jonathan Thompson. We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record.

In western Oregon, the Bureau of Land Management proposes a new Resource Management Plan without a single public meeting and with one goal: To quadruple the logging volume on Western Oregon BLM forests, returning these public lands to the “robust” levels of the 1960s and 1970s.The plan would open nearly 2 million acres to clearcutting with no protections for remaining old-growth, writes Pepper Trail, and the public only has 30 days to provide comment.

Denver never stops seeking more water, but Durango, a town of 19,000 people across the Rockies in southern Colorado, is taking a wait‑and‑see approach, writes Dave Marston.There is a solution — hooking into a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse — but so far, the town hasn’t acted. The city continues to rely mainly on the Florida River, with backup from the Animas River.When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers fail or get clogged with debris, the city could run out of water within weeks, Marston warns.

This year, in what it calls a “study,” Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources is killing off mountain lions to try to increase mule deer herds, writes Ted Williams. Hired trappers are allowed to dispatch lions using any method, including banned traps and neck snares.But Williams points out that it's drought and a harsh winter that’s cut into deer herds: Killing lions isn’t supported by science and will do nothing to help deer.

Utah Republican Congresswoman Celeste Maloy wants to discard a collaborative plan for managing the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument. This end run against a plan that was inclusive and two years in the making, writes Stephen Trimble, would leave much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.It would also set a precedent here and across the nation that could upend public lands protection for years, Trimble adds. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.

Not waiting for an invitation from biologists who would trap, transport and then release them, Canadian wolves in 2008 trotted across the border into the state of Washington — all because they liked the territory.Writer Mitch Friedman tells the story of how that spontaneous recolonization has been a firm success, thanks to the state and an environmental nonprofit paying for deterrence. The most successful tactic has been paying range riders to block wolves from a rancher’s cattle.But Friedman says the story isn’t over: Facing a tight budget, Washington halved its wolf funding in 2025, and there are now fewer riders and angrier ranchers.

State representatives from Wyoming and Montana are pushing to enshrine corner crossing into law and effectively open up millions of acres of public land across the country. With courts offering only partial clarity and some state leaders insisting corner crossing is still illegal, the writers, Karlee Provenza and Joshua Seckinger, are calling for state legislation to explicitly protect public access.They warn that without such action, the West will become divided into exclusive landscapes for the rich and diminished opportunities for everyone else, undermining longstanding traditions of hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation for working families.

Slim Woodruff has an ax to grind when it comes to bottled water that has been treated with a myriad of flavors, mined from halfway across the world, or that boasts of being “pure” and “natural.”"A character in the book True Grit proclaimed that he once drank water from a muddy hoof print and was glad to get it. While I might not go that far,” Woodruff writes, "I have drunk from a lot of questionable sources, and I’m still here to tell the tale. You might want to try the tap.”