Kylie Mohr

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The thermometer read 121 degrees Fahrenheit when 71-year-old Steve Curry collapsed outside a restroom in Death Valley National Park last summer. Curry, who’d reportedly been hiking on a nearby trail in Golden Canyon, was just trying to make it back to his car. The National Park Service and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office quickly responded to the scene.

Summer has only just officially begun, and the world is already sweltering. This week, two counties in northwestern Maine were under their first-ever excessive-heat warning—part of a record-breaking “heat dome” that has settled on the eastern part of the country. Washington, D.C., might hit its first triple-digit high since 2016. Globally, the temperatures this spring have been even more shocking. Last week, the Sonoran Desert hit 125 degrees, the highest recorded temperature in Mexican history.

This article was originally published by High Country News.
In the summer of 2022, several researchers with USDA Wildlife Services held their breath as a drone pilot flew a large drone, equipped with a camera, toward a wolf standing in a pasture in southwestern Oregon. The team members, watching from a distance, expected the wolf to freeze or run away the minute the whirring rotors approached it. But to their disbelief, it did neither.

This article was originally published by High Country News.Chunks of carbon-rich frozen soil, or permafrost, undergird much of the Arctic tundra. This perpetually frozen layer sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes storing it for tens of thousands of years beneath the boggy ground.The frozen soil is insulated by a cool wet blanket of plant litter, moss, and peat. But if that blanket is incinerated by a tundra wildfire, the permafrost becomes vulnerable to thawing.

This article was originally published by High Country News.Two Septembers ago, the residents of Grotto, Washington, woke to the Bolt Creek Fire ripping through the mountains above their homes. “This doesn’t happen here,” Patricia Vasquez remembers saying at the time, shocked.

This article was originally published by High Country News.It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live.