Click the link to read the article on the USFS website (Julianne Nikirk):

January 5, 2024

Last summer, when a wildfire started near her hometown, McClane Moody saw groups of scruffy men running around in dirty yellow shirts, green pants and muddy boots. They were wildland firefighters working to control the blaze. Moody was intrigued. She wanted to help her community when it faced emergencies, too, but wasn’t exactly sure how. It never occurred to her that women also serve as wildland firefighters.  

This would all change when she came across a wildland firefighter training program specifically for women in the rolling mountains of Alpine, Arizona where she, herself, got a taste of the physical and mental challenges that come with being a wildland firefighter. And learned that she could do it.

“I didn’t even know this was a career field up until this past summer. I am definitely going to apply for a job in the field,” Moody said after completing the week-long intensive program that introduces wildland firefighting to women. 

With under 15% of wildland fire employees identifying as women, the Women in Wildfire Training Program aims to overcome barriers to equity that are still very much present in the industry. For participants, the intentional inclusion of women signals a “safe space” to learn and be among peers, encouraging people to explore a career in wildland fire management. In fact, many program participants, called cadets, would not have applied for the program if it was not geared specifically towards women.

“Representation matters. When you see yourself represented, you feel more welcome inherently and know you’ll learn how to overcome some of those obstacles together,” said Aubrey Hoskins, a recent program cadet.

The obstacles Hoskins refers to include hours of digging handline, pushing through exhaustion while managing stress and demonstrating personal responsibility – all skills needed for the job. The program forms women into firefighting crews to give them an “authentic experience” of working on a real wildfire incident. Even in this simulated emergency environment, by design, the mental and physical fortitude required is very real.

According to the training organizers, known as the cadre, this is all part of the “type two fun,” a reference to the entry-level firefighter (type 2) qualifications the cadets are seeking. After successfully completing the program, these women leave with certifications that allow them to apply for wildland firefighter jobs. They also connect with an ever-expanding network of like-minded people and strong support structures.

“It was great to learn together and not have gender be a barrier,” recalled Cheyenne Lopez, a program cadet. “Everyone was super open to making connections and building relationships. I hope to see these people again someday.”

And she very well may. Many of the people that organize the training were once standing in the cadets’ boots. Over several years the program has hosted 65 students, half of whom gained employment in the Forest Service wildland fire program immediately upon completion. Now these same firefighters are sharpening their own leadership skills while giving back to the women following in their footsteps.

Ashlynn Buschschulte, a former cadet, now Squad Boss Trainee and member of the training cadre, shared her reflections.  

“The transition from cadet to cadre has been an opportunity to find a leader in myself and that capability of being able to make sure what I’m doing is safe and effective for my crew. I have a better sense of responsibility for my crew. It’s made me more confident in my choices and the way I think about fighting fire,” she said.

While getting accepted into the program is competitive due to the limited number of cadet spots, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, which hosts the training, is working to keep up with the growing applicant pool. Placing new recruits in wildland fire jobs across the country is critical to addressing the nation’s wildfire crisis. And with the U.S. Forest Service employing more than 11,000 firefighters each year, the need is never-ending.

As Jasper Lanning, a training cadre member, explained, “To get people that are passionate and actually want to be involved in this line of work takes time to build those experiences and give them a taste of what they’re getting into.”

The hope is investments like this will pay off by building a more inclusive future in an industry dominated by men. For the women who seek the challenge of the Women in Wildfire program they come away ready to help their communities by doing one of the most difficult jobs – a calling that, regardless of gender, comes from deep inside. Colville National Forest, Employee Resources, Fire, Fire Prevention, Firefighters, employees, employment, women, women firefighters

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

In a rather predictable — but still maddening — move, the off-road-vehicle lobby is suing the Bureau of Land Management over the agency’s Labyrinth Canyon and Gemini Bridges travel plan for off-highway vehicle use.

The BlueRibbon Coaltion, Colorado Off-Road Trail Defenders, and Patrick McKay are challenging the “illegal and arbitrary” closure of 317 miles of motorized routes on about 468 square miles of public land north and west of Moab between the Green River and Highway 191. The off-road coalition was already shot down once by the Interior Board of Land Appeals; now they’re taking their gripes to federal court, using the same spurious arguments. 

Of course, these groups have every right to challenge federal agencies’ decisions; environmentalists do it all the time. But what’s maddening about these motorized-access groups is their intransigence — even arrogance — and stubborn unwillingness to compromise. They promise to “Fight for Every Inch” of motorized access to public lands, not for any real reason but as an end in itself, damn the consequences to the environment, the public, and wildlife. 

The kerfuffle over the Labyrinth/Gemini plan is a perfect example. 

Over the last couple of decades, vehicle traffic — and the impacts — have burgeoned on some 1,100 miles of motorized routes in the management plan’s area. The type of traffic has changed, too, shifting from the relatively slow-going and quiet jeeps and SUVs to the dune-buggyesque side-by-sides that have become increasingly popular in recent years. They go faster, are noisier, and kick up more dust than other vehicles. They also carry more people into the backcountry than a motorcycle or old-school ATV, thus multiplying the adverse effects. 

For years, river runners, public lands advocates, and local residents and elected officials have been pushing the agency to get a handle on the traffic on the 300,000-acre slickrock expanse. Last year, the BLM came up with four alternatives, ranging from keeping the status quo to closing up to 437 miles of trails. Yes, the strictest alternative would have closed less than half of the routes to vehicles, leaving almost 700 miles open to some form of motorized travel. In other words it was a compromise that favored the motorized crowd.

But even that went too far for the BLM, which ultimately shut down just 317 miles of motorized routes, while limiting motorized travel (to motorcycles or smaller ATVs, for example) on 98 miles. In other words, you can still burn gasoline and spew exhaust on more than 800 miles of routes on this one relatively small swath of public land. Meanwhile motorized travel remains mostly unrestricted on more than 10,000 miles of roads, two-tracks, and old trails in southeastern Utah.

That’s not enough for the BlueRibbon Coalition and friends, however; it’s never enough for them. They are ideologically opposed to decommissioning even the most insignificant road spur, and they and their allies in local and state government will squander millions of taxpayer dollars to fight the closures. Their reasoning? Because OHV recreation is, in the words of the lawsuit, “a way of life in the American West.” 

Really? I mean, it’s the same trope rolled out whenever someone tries to get a coal plant to stop belching pollution all over folks or a mine to stop defiling the streams. In those instances it may have some validity: The move could affect the miners’ or the coal plant workers’ livelihoods, and therefore their way of life. But these folks will still be able to ride their noisy machines around on hundreds of miles of roads. Believe me: Nothing about this plan will affect their way of life.

I highly doubt the motorized coalition will prevail; even the most conservative judges are unlikely to fall for their faulty legal reasoning. And so, the plan likely will remain in place, as it should. It’s a compromise, and an admittedly crappy one for those of us who would like to see a lot fewer vehicles — and people — trampling the landscape. After all, it still leaves the sprawling road network mostly intact. But maybe it’s the best we can expect, and at least it does something. And it will make it just a little easier for the quiet users, the bighorn sheep, the coyotes, and the silence to find a bit of refuge from the incessant whirr of combustible engines and the humans driving them.

Thomas S. Bremer, Rhodes College

Abraham Lincoln has an almost saintly place in U.S. history: the “Great Emancipator” whose leadership during the Civil War preserved the Union and abolished slavery.

Often overlooked among his achievements is legislation he signed June 30, 1864, during the thick of the war – but only marginally related to the conflict. The Yosemite Valley Grant Act preserved the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove in California as a park “held for public use, resort, and recreation … for all time.”

It was the first time the federal government had set aside land for its scenic value, and it created a model for U.S. national parks, which are themselves hallowed sites in American culture. Originally granted to the state of California, Yosemite formally became the third U.S. national park in 1890, joining a system of picturesque lands that hold spiritual and patriotic significance for millions of Americans.

At the same time, however, the establishment of national parks had severe consequences for Native American peoples across the continent. My research on the religious history of U.S. national parks illustrates how religious justifications for establishing parks contributed to the persecution of Indigenous tribes, a reality that the National Park Service has begun to redress in recent decades.

US civil religion

With more than 300 million annual visitors, the U.S. National Park System is a much-valued treasure. It encompasses stupendous scenery, opportunities for encounters with wildlife, outdoor recreation and commemoration of important places and events.

But the parks’ significance goes beyond this. The national parks, historic sites, battlefields and other sites of the National Park Service are sacred places in U.S. civil religion: the symbols, practices and traditions that make the idea of a nation into something sacred, seemingly blessed by a higher power.

First brought attention by sociologist Robert Bellah, civil religion flourishes alongside conventional religious traditions, like Christianity or Buddhism, with its own sacred figures, sites and rituals. In the U.S., these include George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S. flag and Pledge of Allegiance, and national holidays such as Independence Day.

I have observed that many of the most sacred places of the nation’s civil religion are found in sites cared for by the National Park Service, from Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Statue of Liberty in New York to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

In addition, the National Park System is a testament to Manifest Destiny, a prominent feature of U.S. civil religion. This 19th-century notion held that Americans had divine blessing to expand the borders of the nation. As historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book about Manifest Destiny, it became “a catchword for the idea of a providentially or historically sanctioned right to continental expansionism.”

This westward expansion came at the expense of Native Americans and other groups that previously inhabited the territory. For many Protestant Christian Americans, the superlative scenery of natural sites like Yosemite and Yellowstone affirmed their belief that God intended for them to conquer and settle the American West in the decades following the Civil War – as I write about in my forthcoming book.

Products of Manifest Destiny

The earliest national parks were established as products of Manifest Destiny, amid the national push to bring land from the Mississippi to the Pacific into the United States, which many white Americans viewed as a mission to expand settled Christian society.

Beginning with Yellowstone in 1872, followed by Sequoia, Yosemite and Mount Rainier, the early parks created in the 19th century had symbolic significance for U.S. civil religion. In many Americans’ eyes, the sites’ beauty affirmed their belief that the U.S. was exceptional and divinely favored.

Westward expansion had severe consequences for American Indian nations, and the earliest national parks played a role in forcing their removal, as historian Mark David Spence has documented. Transforming lands into national parks for visitors’ enjoyment meant dispossessing communities whose ancestors had valued those places for generations.

Following the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, a band of Shoshone people who had been there for generations – the Tukudika, or Sheep Eater – were relocated to a reservation in Wyoming. A similar situation involved the Nitsitapii, or Blackfeet people, whose treaty rights were abrogated with the establishment of Glacier National Park in 1910.

In contrast, the Yosemite Indians of California, who were mainly a band of Miwok people known as the Ahwahneechee, remained in Yosemite long after it became a national park. By 1969, though, they had been eliminated from the park through decades of onerous regulations, economic pressures and attrition.

A new era

Over the past few decades, the National Park Service has made progress in acknowledging Native American connections to parklands, beginning to address the history of Manifest Destiny and Indigenous peoples’ exclusion.

The agency is a key contributor to the Interior Department’s recent initiative to facilitate tribal co-management of federal lands. Though much still needs to be done, national park managers are increasingly consulting and cooperating with tribal authorities on a range of issues.

Deb Haaland, the first Native American in U.S. history to hold a cabinet position, initiated a process to review and replace derogatory names on federal lands – one of her earliest actions as secretary of the interior. For example, she specifically identified the term “squaw” – a slur often directed at Indigenous women – as offensive, declaring that “racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands.” Within a year of her directive, 24 places in the National Park System had new names.

Other issues on which the park service is collaborating with tribal communities include adopting Native American strategies of using deliberate fires to maintain healthy, thriving ecosystems. These Indigenous traditions have become a regular part of fire prevention and management efforts throughout the park system.

Tribes have also cooperated with a variety of national parks to restore bison herds. Historically, these animals were central for many tribes not only as a source of food and materials for tools, clothing and blankets but also in traditional spirituality. The Interior Department’s 2020 Bison Conservation Initiative and partnerships with the InterTribal Buffalo Council have helped begin to restore herds on Native American lands with bison from national parks, including Yellowstone, Badlands and Grand Canyon.

Perhaps the most noticeable initiative, from visitors’ perspective, are the stories of Native American culture and history in displays, ranger talks, roadside exhibits and the National Park Service website, amplifying Native voices in the parks. These programs have begun the process of reconciliation and healing – working to make a more inclusive and democratic civil religion.

Thomas S. Bremer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, American Religious History, Rhodes College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I am most thankful today for all the folks (particularly my children) that have and are helping me to work through a most difficult year of losses. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Full sequence of the annular solar eclipse at Shiprock, New Mexico.
This was a dream composition of mine. So much time, energy, and money went into making it happen. I'm forever grateful to the Navajo for letting me shoot it from sacred ground. An experience I'll never forget. pic.twitter.com/NlmVnQeUFG

— Alex Spahn 🌋🌪️☄️ (@spahn711) October 19, 2023

Click the link to read the article on The Kansas Reflector website (Max McCoy):

Often have I stood on the plains of western Kansas and heard the voices of the past come to me on the incessant wind, whispers of lives that were spent between the great bowl of the sky and the unforgiving earth. They aren’t real voices, of course, but a product of my mind, a kind of auditory hallucination informed by history and sharpened by the vastness of the prairie.

Nowhere have I had this sensation stronger than at Fort Larned National Historic Site, along the old Santa Fe Trail in Pawnee County.

I’ve never stayed long at the fort because those voices give me the chills. The fort is a fine national historic site with excellent interpretive material, but my autonomous nervous system goes on alert. On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend, I can’t help but think of the role the fort played in the pageant of brutality that was the West. It is a story of bad faith and broken treaties.

I don’t presume to speak for the actors in these events, whether they were First Peoples or white soldiers, nor do I condone the brutality practiced by either side, but the facts remind me of how uncomfortable it is sometimes to be an American.

And discomfort is useful in studying the past if we are to learn from it.

Stanley’s dispatches

The national historic site, six miles west of the city of Larned, has nine restored sandstone buildings, including barracks and arsenal, and is among the best-preserved forts of the period.  At its peak, Fort Larned housed about 500 troops and provided administrative and material support to the Medicine Lodge Treaty of October 1867.

The fort’s link to the Medicine Lodge Treaty (which was actually three treaties) was made clear by a correspondent for the Missouri Democrat, a young reporter named Henry Morton Stanley who would later be remembered for uttering, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” He was dispatched to the fort and points south along with the seven-member Indian Peace Commission, and from the dispatches he left I suspect he may have heard voices, too.

“Generations after generations have been swept away,” Stanley wrote in one story, “mingling their dust with the common mother, and leaving to their successors their traditions and usages, as well as their darkness and barbarism. The Indians of the present day hunt the buffalo and the antelope over this lone and level land, as freely as their ancestors, except where the white man has erected a fort.”

Stanley’s remarks about “darkness and barbarism” are a reflection of the bias of his time, but he could have said the same about the military and government officials in whose company he traveled. In 1864, the U.S. Army (over the objections and refusal of some officers and men to participate) had massacred 160 women and children at a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory. Before the slaughter, Chief Black Kettle had been flying an American flag from his tipi.

“After Sand Creek the Indians were at war everywhere, mostly on the Platte,” Stanley told his readers. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock, a hero of Gettysburg, attempted to force the plains nations into submission. On Hancock’s orders, George Armstrong Custer burned a Cheyenne-Lakota village west of Fort Larned.

A series of fights followed, including one in which an entire detachment of cavalry was killed near present-day Goodland. By the end of the summer of 1867, Hancock was transferred to another command and a new plan came from Washington — diplomacy, because the fighting in the west was growing too expensive.

The Medicine Lodge treaties that followed were held at a sacred spot for the Kiowa and Cheyenne, on the Medicine Lodge River near the mouth of Elm Creek, about 100 miles south of Larned. The fort supplied the provisions for the council, including food for all of the former combatants.

It may have been one of the largest assemblies of First Peoples on the plains, with contemporary estimates ranging up to 15,000 individuals. The nations represented included the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche and Apache. Probably the most famous — and most feared by the whites — among the native people was Satanta, a Kiowa chief known for both his fighting skills and his soaring oratory.

The Indian Peace Commission was escorted to Medicine Lodge by 500 troops of the Seventh Cavalry, but George Armstrong Custer wasn’t among them — he had been court-martialed for being absent without leave and for ordering the shooting of deserters. His punishment was a year’s suspension without pay.

“We hope now that a better time has come,” Satanta said through an interpreter, according to a 1938 magazine piece recounting the event. “If all would talk and then do as they talk, the sun of peace would forever shine. We have warred against the white man, but never because it gave us pleasure. Before the day of apprehension came, no white man came to our village and went away hungry.”

Satanta said he was ready for peace.

The 1938 piece may be apocryphal, as I cannot readily find another source for it. There is nothing similar in Stanley’s dispatches. But it matches the spirit of what Satanta likely believed. In an earlier speech, before the peace council, Stanley had reported that the chief was done with fighting. “There are no longer any buffaloes around here,” Satanta said, “nor anything we can kill to live on; but I am striving for peace now.

From the plains to the reservations

From Oct. 21 to 29, 1867, three separate treaties were signed at Medicine Lodge that collectively reduced the area set aside for the plains nations by 60,000 square miles. In exchange, the First Peoples nations were given reservations in the southwestern corner of Oklahoma and allowances for food, clothing and other provisions.

The Indian Peace Commission would continue through 1868, negotiating other treaties with northern plains nations, and in time would deliver a report to a Congress that was still struggling to define its relationship to America’s indigenous peoples. It took until July 1868 for the Senate to ratify the treaties, and some details that were understood during the October meetings were dropped in legislation, including a promise there would be sufficient buffalo on the new reservations.

Also, the U.S. government misunderstood the collective nature of political power among the plains tribes. While a chief might affix a signature to a treaty, it was not understood as necessarily binding all members of his nation to the document. While the treaties called for three-quarters of the males of a tribe to ratify them, that does not appear to have happened.

Not long after the peace commission’s gifts of beads, buttons, knives, cloth and pistols had been taken home, discontent was again brewing among the plains nations. Reservation life, restricted geographically and tied to government allotments of food and supplies, was an unsatisfactory substitute for the nomadic culture the plains nations had previously known.

Brutal raids into the old hunting grounds of western Kansas resumed.

By 1871, Satanta was attacking wagon trains in Texas, was eventually captured, and became among the first Native American leaders to be tried in a U.S. court. After serving a couple of years in prison, he was released but violated his parole by being present at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. He was captured and sentenced to life in prison at Huntsville, Texas. He died at age 62 of a fall from a high window of the prison’s hospital on Oct. 11, 1878.

Another broken treaty

The peace commission was the U.S. government’s last attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the First Peoples, according to the National Archives. While the goal was peace, the result was the opposite. In its final report, the commission recommended that the Bureau of Indian Affairs should be transferred from the Interior Department to the Department of War.

By 1868, Custer had served his punishment and had been summoned to active duty to participate in a new campaign against the plains nations. In November he attacked a Southern Cheyenne camp on the banks of the Washita River in Oklahoma, and killed 50, including Chief Black Kettle, who had been at Sand Creek and was a signatory at Medicine Lodge. Fifty-three women and children were taken prisoner by the Seventh Cavalry.

In 1874, Custer led an Army expedition to the Black Hills, in which gold was found. Faced with an influx of fortune hunters onto land that had been given to the Sioux, the government violated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a deal that had been brokered by the same Indian Peace Commission that had been at Medicine Lodge. Settlers poured in, and the northern plains nations resisted.

Custer would meet his end at the Battle of the Greasy Grass in the Little Bighorn Valley of Montana Territory. On June 25, 1867, he led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry against a village he had badly underestimated the size of. Custer and 267 of his command would be killed by the combined forces of thousands of Lakota, Dakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors.

‘An ignorant and dependent race’

Despite winning the biggest battle against a celebrated enemy, the plains nations could not withstand increased pressure from the U.S. military and white settlement. The decades-long conflict ended Dec. 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, Dakota Territory, where 300 Lakota people were massacred by the U.S. Army in a campaign to suppress the Ghost Dance religion. Based on the visions of a Paiute holy man called Wovoka, followers believed the buffalo and the ghosts of ancestors would return to earth — and the whites would be swallowed up — by ritual dancing.

While the fighting had ended with Wounded Knee, the battle over the Medicine Lodge and other treaties continued in the courts. From the reservation in Oklahoma, Kiowa leader Lone Wolf sued Secretary of the Interior E.A. Hitchcock in a case which boiled down to a single question: Could Congress unilaterally break treaties? The answer from the Supreme Court, in 1903, was a unanimous yes.

“These Indian tribes are wards of the nations,” the decision said, consisting of weak and helpless communities wholly dependent on the federal government. The court presumed that Congress would be guided in its treatment of “an ignorant and dependent race” by Christian values.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock was the rule of law for most of the Twentieth Century. It granted Congress plenary power over the plains nations, meaning that its power was absolute, with no review or limitations. Although reversed in large part by United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians in 1980, the shadow of Lone Wolf continues to leave a foul taste in our collective mouths, a bad decision that has been compared by historians to the Dred Scott decision.

“The young Plains culture of the Kiowas withered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind,” wrote N. Scott Momaday in his 1969 book, “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” Momaday is a Kiowa author and a descendant of Lone Wolf, and his novel is about his ancestors’ path to the reservation. “There came a day like destiny; in every direction, as far as the eye could see, carrion lay out in the land.”

It is time for Kansas to adopt Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a state holiday. About a dozen states have already done so, including Oklahoma. Both the cities of Wichita and Lawrence celebrate it, although the Kansas Legislature was unmoved after hearings in 2019 and 2021. But considering our state’s pivotal role in the war against the plains nations, and the many contributions of Kansans of indigenous heritage, it would be a small but corrective move toward celebrating a culture we nearly destroyed.

Listen to the voices on the wind.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Please enjoy Joni Mitchell performing “Both Sides Now”.

Joni in 1970 🔥pic.twitter.com/Dol7IxoO8A

— Old Canada Series (@oldcanadaseries) September 24, 2023

Click the link to read the obit on The Los Angeles Times website (Stephen Thomas Erlewine). Here’s an excerpt:

[Jerry Jeff] Walker introduced Buffett to the music community in Miami, then did the same for him in Key West. Buffett said discovering the Florida Keys “changed my life.” Settling into Key West, he worked as second mate on a fishing charter while playing barrooms at night. Buffett soaked up stories from dope dealers, smugglers, hippies and hustlers who all acted as a collective muse for the singer-songwriter, planting the seeds for a singular music career and business empire based on living a white-sand-and-margarita-filled version of the American dream…

A storyteller who specialized in tales of beach bums, burnouts and small-time hustlers, Buffett chronicled coastal life with a light touch and an affectionate sense of humor. Developing a sun-bleached spin on country-rock that he’d wryly dub “gulf and western,” he first drifted into the mainstream with the easy-rolling “Come Monday” in 1974 but it was 1977’s “Margaritaville,” his lone Top 10 hit, that provided the foundation for the rest of his career…

Born in Pascagoula, Miss., on Christmas Day 1946, James William Buffett had wanderlust in his blood. His grandfather James Delaney Buffett captained a steamship, and his father served in the Army Corps of Engineers before raising his family in the gulf town of Mobile, Ala. Enamored of his grandfather’s stories of the sea, Buffett spent his childhood buried in books; his love of the sea and books remained lifelong. His love of music arrived later, when he learned how to play guitar while attending Auburn University. He hoped the instrument would help him meet girls…

“Margaritaville” entered the National Recording Registry in 2023. When asked by Rolling Stone in 2019 how he’d like to be remembered, he replied, “‘He had a good time and made a lot of people happy’ would be good.”

Click the link to read the obit on The New York Times website (Jim Farber). Here’s an excerpt:

Robbie Robertson, the chief composer and lead guitarist for the Band, whose work offered a rustic vision of America that seemed at once mythic and authentic, in the process helping to inspire the genre that came to be known as Americana, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80…

The songs that Mr. Robertson, a Canadian, wrote for the Band used enigmatic lyrics to evoke a hard and colorful America of yore, a feat coming from someone not born in the United States. With uncommon conviction, they conjured a wild place, often centered in the South, peopled by rough-hewed characters, from the defeated Confederate soldier in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to the tough union worker of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” to the shady creatures in “Life Is a Carnival.” The music he matched to his passionate yarns mined the roots of every essential American genre, including folk, country, blues and gospel. Yet when his history-minded compositions first appeared on albums by the Band in the late 1960s, they felt vital as well as vintage.

Marveling over where life had taken him, Mr. Robertson once told Classic Rock magazine: “People used to say to me, ‘You’re just a dreamer. You’re gonna end up working down the street, just like me.’ Part of that was crushing, and the other part is, ‘Oh yeah? I’m on a mission. I’m moving on. And if you look for me, there’s only going to be dust.’”

Click the link to read the article on The New York Times website (Livia Albeck-Ripka and Orlando Mayorquin). Here’s an excerpt:

Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal range on songs like “Take It to the Limit” helped catapult the rock band to international fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77. Mr. Meisner, the band’s original bass player, helped form the Eagles in 1971 along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. He was with the band when they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On the Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”

“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, became among the band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for record of the year in 1978…

He left the band in September 1977 but was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, published by the Hall of Fame for the event, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later became “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of excess and seduction that had begun spinning seriously out of control.” The Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s and had four consecutive No. 1 albums and five No. 1 singles, according to the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone sold upward of 26 million copies. Before joining the Eagles, Mr. Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, another Los Angeles country-rock band, formed in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.

Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Joe Coscarelli and Ben Sisario). Here’s an excerpt:

Sinead O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter best known for her powerful, evocative voice, as showcased on her biggest hit, a breathtaking rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and for her political provocations onstage and off, has died. She was 56…Recognizable by her shaved head and by wide eyes that could appear pained or full of rage, Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, beginning with the alternative hit “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1987. She went on to sell millions of albums worldwide, breaking out with “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1990. That album, featuring “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a No. 1 hit and MTV staple, won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance — although Ms. O’Connor boycotted the ceremony over what she called the show’s excessive commercialism…

At 15, at a wedding, she sang “Evergreen” — the love theme from “A Star Is Born,” made famous by Barbra Streisand — and was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer who had an affiliation with the superstar Irish band U2. She left boarding school at 16 and began her career.

Last night we released a major study mapping radioactive fallout from U.S. Nuclear Weapon Tests, beginning with the July 16, 1945 Trinity Test. Amazing collab between @PrincetonSPIA SGS and @shift7, in partnership with @CIRESnews and @EarthGenome. https://t.co/U54G9CTzS4 pic.twitter.com/XuMmfogmtB

— Sébastien Philippe (@seb6philippe) July 21, 2023

I remember my grandmother cautioning me against drinking rainwater here in Denver during that time.

Click the link to read the article on the Denver North Star website (Allen Cowgill):

At a recent small ceremony on the side of West 46th Avenue next to Rocky Mountain Lake Park, Mayor Michael Hancock unveiled a sign marking 125 new miles of bikeways for the Denver bike network.

The sign marks a major milestone for the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI), with an aggressive buildout of bikeways throughout Denver, though some residents feel the new bikeways don’t go far enough for comfort and safety.

The goal of 125 new miles of bike lanes was set in 2018 by the mayor with the goal of bringing high-comfort bike facilities within a quarter mile of where more Denverites live “to connect riders of all abilities to the places they want to go.”

At the event, Hancock said that “this is not a victory lap, we are proud of the milestone we have reached, but we’ve got to keep going.”

When asked about Denver being a growing city and the importance of providing numerous options for people traveling, the mayor said, “It’s the only option. The old single-mode transportation system in Denver no longer applies. We have grown exponentially over the last decade.”

“We have to be a more multimodal city, and we have to have the infrastructure that supports it,” Hancock continued. “The various types of bike lanes we have … are extremely important for folks to feel safe in riding bikes and using different modes around the city whether they are on scooters (or bikes), we have to continue to invest in transit. We don’t have any other option.”

DOTI actually exceeded the mayor’s goal, building out 137 miles of bikeways since 2018. Though technically the original goal was for bike lanes, it has since been expanded to include neighborhood bikeways, or bike facilities that are not actual bike lanes, but routes that share the road with drivers on low-volume streets.

They use sharrows, traffic circles, diverters, and paint and post bulb-outs to calm traffic for people who bike, and have been a popular option for planners in north Denver. Of those new bikeway miles, 24 miles were painted bike lanes, 45 miles were buffered bike lanes (bike lanes with a painted space between the bike lane and vehicle travel lane), 23 miles were protected bike lanes, 34 miles were neighborhood bike lanes, and 11 miles were shared-use paths and trails.

“As we continue to build out our bike and multimodal network, we are creating a more sustainable alternative to driving that’s safer, enjoyable and better for our health and our environment,” DOTI Executive Director Adam Phipps said.

Layton Hill, a resident of the Highland neighborhood in North Denver, has lived in Denver for 10 years and has noticed a change in the types of people riding bikes in Denver.

“I used to see a lot more people out primarily for fitness, and now my most common bike trip is to daycare, and I’m seeing lots and lots of other families with children on their bicycles going about their day,” Hill said.

Hill said the new bike lanes aren’t perfect, but they do make it easier for him to get around. Most of the time, the streets are comfortable for him, but 10% of the time, there will be a driver that will get too close to him while he has his daughter on the back of his bike.

“They have made it better to get around,” Hill said. “I would like to see more truly prioritized lanes for people not in cars. I think having more diverters in place on just the few streets that are designated as bike lanes would be good. It would still allow neighbors to access their houses of course, and small businesses to receive deliveries. Everyone retains access to their curb, but it would just make those streets just a little bit less highly trafficked, and make them a little more comfortable for people not in cars.”

The diverters that Hill referenced are modal filters that allow bikes and pedestrians to go through an intersection, but force drivers of cars to turn, limiting the amount of vehicle traffic on the street.

Currently in North Denver there are only two diverters: West 35th Avenue and Irving Street, and West 41st Avenue and Pecos Street. The protected bike lanes that have been installed in places like West 23rd Avenue and West 17th Avenue have been impactful in generating increased bike and scooter traffic. Recent research from Ride Report, an organization that has been working with the city to collect data, shows that the West 17th Avenue protected bike lane had a nearly eightfold increase in shared bike and scooter ridership between 2019 and 2023 after the protected bike lanes and new painted bike lanes were installed.

Over 57,000 trips using shared bikes and scooters have been taken on West 17th Avenue alone since the new bike lanes were completed.

Allen Cowgill is the City Council District 1 Appointee for the Denver DOTI Advisory Board.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry for Juneteenth:

Juneteenth (officially Juneteenth National Independence Day) is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. Deriving its name from combining June and nineteenth, it is celebrated on the anniversary of the order by Major General Gordon Granger proclaiming freedom for enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865 (two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued).^[7] Originating in Galveston, Juneteenth has since been observed annually in various parts of the United States, often broadly celebrating African-American culture. The day was first recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

The first Juneteenth, this month 1865: pic.twitter.com/s9XVbhm0pH

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) June 17, 2023

Supreme Court Upholds Native American Adoption Lawhttps://t.co/CBBAegoHfX pic.twitter.com/9WldDZ2rTZ

— Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez 2019-2023 (@NNPrezNez) June 15, 2023

Click the link to read the obit on The New York Times website (William Grimes). Here’s an excerpt:

Tina Turner, the earthshaking singer whose rasping vocals, sexual magnetism and explosive energy made her an unforgettable live performer and one of the most successful recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, near Zurich. She was 83…Ms. Turner embarked on her half-century career in the late 1950s, while still attending high school, when she began singing with Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm. At first she was only an occasional performer, but she soon became the group’s star attraction — and Mr. Turner’s wife. With her potent, bluesy voice and her frenetic dancing style, she made an instant impression. Their ensemble, soon renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, became one of the premier touring soul acts in Black venues on the so-called chitlin’ circuit. After the Rolling Stones invited the group to open for them, first on a British tour in 1966 and then on an American tour in 1969, white listeners in both countries began paying attention…Ms. Turner, who insisted on adding rock songs by the Beatles and the Stones to her repertoire, reached an enormous new audience, giving the Ike and Tina Turner Revue its first Top 10 hit with her version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” in 1971 and a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a group…

But her solo album “Private Dancer,” released in 1984, returned her to the spotlight — and lifted her into the pop stratosphere. Working with younger songwriters, and backed by a smooth, synthesized sound that provided a lustrous wrapping for her raw, urgent vocals, she delivered three mammoth hits: the title song, written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits; “Better Be Good to Me”; and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Referring to its “innovative fusion of old-fashioned soul singing and new wave synth-pop,” Stephen Holden, in a review for The New York Times, called the album “a landmark not only in the career of the 45-year-old singer, who has been recording since the late 1950s, but in the evolution of pop-soul music itself.”

[…]

The album went on to sell five million copies and ignite a touring career that established Ms. Turner as a worldwide phenomenon. In 1988 she appeared before about 180,000 people at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, breaking a record for the largest paying audience for a solo artist. After her “Twenty Four Seven” tour in 2000 sold more than $100 million in tickets, Guinness World Records announced that she had sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history.

In case you were looking for a sign to lock your car doors – this is it pic.twitter.com/oN9MhOowtG

— Colorado Parks and Wildlife (@COParksWildlife) May 12, 2023