Word: sagebrush
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Locally they are known as "scraphogs," and a few wear T shirts with a cartoon of a wild boar grinding a bomb in its teeth. Just after dawn each day, about 40 gather at the hillside, pick up pails and sift through the dirt and sagebrush for rusted metal and twisted steel. They occasionally dig up the nozzle of a Polaris missile or the casing of a 1,000-lb. bomb. Under the pitiless Nevada sun, each averages 1,000 lbs. of scrap metal a day. "It's rough work," says Billy Marshall of Hawthorne, Nev. "When I started, young...
Where once only sagebrush and tumbleweed dotted dull gray desert, a modern hotel ($94 a night), a 4,300-ft. airport runway, a two-story redwood shopping center and strings of small wooden houses now adorn the hills. A sophisticated sewage-treatment plant draws raves from visiting experts, and wildlife officials marvel at the increase in birds that breed in the long-barren acres...
...fell during December alone, exceeding the previous record by 5 ft. "I've never seen a winter this hard on deer," says Joe Gerrans, a Colorado wildlife supervisor. The snows came unusually early, so the herds had only a brief time for winter foraging. Now much of the sagebrush and other shrubs is covered by a layer of snow so thick and crusty that the hungry animals are roaming toward settled areas for food. They often wander plowed roads and railroad tracks: 400 antelope were struck and killed by trains in one week in Carbon County, Wyo. Where prey...
...could doubt the wisdom of the choice. The dentist from Des Moines, Wash., may have been in failing health, but it was clear from the moment he set foot in the University of Utah Medical Center that Barney Clark was a dauntless spirit. "A rugged old Rocky Mountain sagebrush. Tough. Eager for life." That was how Dr. Chase Peterson, a university vice president, described the man who was to make medical history. Those qualities, together with his obviously urgent need, convinced the university selection committee that Clark should be the world's first human to receive a permanent artificial...
...introduction to this sagebrush valedictory, Novelist Thomas McGuane catalogues the hallmarks of the fading West: "The dead windmills lost behind the high wire of a missile range, the stove-up old cowboy at the unemployment of fice, the interstate that plunges through the homesteads . . ." Threatened by land development and automated meat production, folks less durable than cowpunchers would have ridden into the sunset long ago. Yet they hang on, as evidenced by Vanishing Breed (New York Graphic Society; 144 pages; $29.95). More than 100 evocative photographs catch ranch hands and horses in landscapes where the Old West...