Word: mountains
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...North America where falling water has no outlet to the ocean (it lies trapped, then evaporates back into the atmosphere). The thin, spreading crust of the valley floors is notoriously unstable, agitated. Hot springs steam up through faults and fissures. Whirling dust devils dance across the flats. The mountain ranges are new, still rising, alive; perched on top of this tectonic tumult, the structures of civilization seem to teeter. The schools and supermarkets are surrounded, as often as not, by fresh-dug earth, and what's not being built is being shored up or razed. Just off Highway...
Mapped here under the big bold sky is America's Geography of Conspiracy. If Disney were to create a theme park celebrating American paranoia (Suspicionland U.S.A.), it might want to base the design on central Nevada. Tumbleweed stretches of empty highway roller-coaster over mountain ranges and down into salt flats, past ghost towns, federal prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides...
Lohr, 43, a San Franciscan with blond hair and a soft, open manner, moved to Crested Butte from New Hampshire in 1986, when she became director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a high-altitude field station based in the ghost town of Gothic. The federal grazing land around the lab was leased by a "range pool" that included Trampe, now 50, who left college and started ranching in 1967 after his father dropped dead in the field. Trampe's elders in the range pool couldn't fathom the lab's scientists. "To a rancher, it's strange...
...with the natural ecological cycle, benefiting the land. She married a local plumber and became a board member of the High Country Citizens' Alliance, an influential environmental group, but grew impatient with trust-fund recreationists who wanted to force cattle out of the high meadows to make room for mountain bikes. Slowly, other enviros came to realize that cows weren't the enemy. A new alliance began to emerge...
...calls "crucial stepping-stones up the valley floor." The stepping-stones are gone now. In the early 1990s, half a dozen ranches in the midvalley were sold off and subdivided. Standing in his field, Trampe points north, where the land climbs toward Crested Butte, and concatenates the old names: "Mountain Lair. Delmont. Danni. Roaring Judy. Now they're all vacation properties...