Author - The Durango Herald

Following the Colorado River from Moab to Mexico

With the two largest reservoirs in the nation perilously low, and the Colorado River Basin experiencing the worst drought in centuries, we decided to follow the river by bus from Grand Lake ...

DATE: Jul 8, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Celebrating half a century of the Endangered Species Act

Fifty years ago, a bipartisan Congress did the right thing by a vote of 482 to 12. Congress passed, and President Richard Nixon signed, one of the most important pieces of environmental legi...

DATE: Jun 10, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

A Dinosaur Murder Mystery at Jurassic National Monument

Over 15,000 dinosaur bones, the densest deposit of Jurassic dinosaur fossils ever located, have come from multi-colored soils in Utah. How they got there, who was eating whom and what killed...

DATE: May 14, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Singing birds, flowing waters: Arizona’s San Pedro riparian NCA

After a wet snowy winter, maybe it is time to head south to Arizona, soak up some sun and listen to migratory bird songs. We think of the Bureau of Land Management as owning thousands of acr...

DATE: Apr 9, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Posey’s War in Bears Ears: Telling the Truth a Century Later

By the 1920s, most of the American West had been settled. There were Ford automobiles, telephones, mercantile stores and small town newspapers. But there was also injustice, racism and well-...

DATE: Mar 14, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Healing wounds at Sand Creek

As winter winds blow snow across Eastern Colorado’s High Plains where I grew up, I think again about Sand Creek and the November 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho who thought they were s...

DATE: Feb 8, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Buffalo Jones and bison that don’t belong at the Grand Canyon

As winter snows cover the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, there’s a herd of animals living there well adapted to the cold, but they do not belong in canyon country. In 1800, as many as 37 million ...

DATE: Jan 7, 2023 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Balloons rise above red rocks: The Bluff, Utah, Balloon Festival

Every Western small town crows about its festivals, but only Bluff, Utah, has balloons that launch beneath red rock cliffs on cool January mornings. Balloons gracefully glide upward with a l...

DATE: Dec 10, 2022 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Steens Mountain, Oregon: Buckaroos, Basques and glacial gorges

Way out west where ranchers’ mailboxes are 50-gallon drums set on their side, I drove northwest of Winnemucca on a straight-line course to Denio, Nevada. As I crossed into Oregon the only tr...

DATE: Nov 12, 2022 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels

Touring the Grand Circle: A report from national parks in the Southwest

This fall, I have a sabbatical from teaching history at Fort Lewis College to research and write about public lands. Sixty years ago, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall proposed a “Gra...

DATE: Oct 8, 2022 | CATEGORY: Gulliford's Travels