An adult bobcat pauses on a bluff above the Green River at sunset in Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, Wyoming.
The declivitous view from the north rim of Black Canyon of the Gunnison is a remarkable 1,700 feet of vertical underfoot. The Gunnison River and time continue shaping everything in view, creating a spectacular chasm in the sagelands. The Gunnison’s confluence with the Colorado River is in the city of Grand Junction, Colorado.
Someone has to take the leap. American pelicans roam the Green River channels throughout Seedskadee in summer, finding healthy fish populations to scoop in their massive bills. Thick bodied, with a nine-foot wingspan, the American pelican is one of our largest waterbirds.
Hope in rainbows: after a night of cold, heavy monsoon rains dumped on Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, a double rainbow appeared over the Painted Wall, witnessed from an overlook on the south rim. After the Gunnison River leaves Black Canyon, it flows through the Gunnison Gorge Conservation Area and agricultural lands to its confluence with the Colorado River in the city of Grand Junction, Colorado.
A trio of river otters haul up on Green River shore ice with a fresh catch of an endemic American whitefish. Wyoming’s Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge has a healthy otter population estimated at more than thirty pairs of breeding adults, an indicator of good water quality and abundant fish stocks. Seedskadee river otters generally prey on crayfish and slower-moving fish like native white sucker—scat sampling at hollowed-log den sites revealed a strong preference for crayfish.
A small herd of pronghorn race across snow-covered sagebrush flats in Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, Wyoming. Pronghorn, the western hemisphere’s fastest land mammal, are neither goat nor antelope, but a singular 20 million-year-old species.
The upper Gila River flows from southwest New Mexico’s Mogollon (muggy-OWN) Mountains through autumn golds and oranges of cottonwood and sycamore in the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area. The undammed upper Gila holds stunning wildlife diversity and abundance, owed to the river running wild and free with a natural flood regime.
Henry Wilson Sr. fills a 325-gallon water tank in the family’s dedicated water truck almost daily—it takes about a half hour to fill the tank with a garden hose, but about two and a half hours with a typical queue of four or five trucks. Henry then hauls the water from Gouldings resort’s well to the Wilsons’ Monument Valley home, where it is distributed to tanks for the family garden, livestock, and home.
When a greater sage-grouse female raises her wings, signaling her readiness to mate, the male puffs up his chest and spreads his tail feathers as these noble, emblematic western birds do their part to continue the species. Sage-grouse, hard wired to thrive in open sagebrush lands—all they need is expanses of unbroken sage—are imperiled due to widespread habitat destruction. How we treat the land impacts rivers too.
Colorful collared lizards, commonly seen in Dominguez Canyons Wilderness on the edge of the Uncompahgre Plateau, range throughout the Southwest, feeding on insects and other lizards.
Floating through geologic time in the Grand Canyon’s inner gorge in a 32- to 37-foot J-Rig raft: five pontoons lashed together carry fifteen to twenty passengers and two guides.
Beavers on the flash flood–prone upper Gila build their lodges in riverbanks.
Morning light pierces an opening in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, to paint rock formations of the Doll House and the Colorado River in reflected gold during a Cataract Canyon rafting trip with Audubon Rockies.
Elders of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition—Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, Hopi Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe—held a ceremony that lasted through the night at the 2019 Utah Diné Bikéyah (DEE-nay bee-KAY-ah) Summer Gathering. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition describes their collaboration as “an historic consortium of sovereign tribal nations united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears cultural landscape.”
A brilliant male yellow warbler sings from restored willow along Colorado’s Fraser River while defending breeding territory in May. The willow along Fraser Flats was transplanted from nearby Ranch Creek as part of the Learning by Doing project.