I am a freelance magazine writer and contributing editor to High Country News. My work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian magazine, Men’s Journal, Saveur, Orion and other national magazines. I’m also proud to have had my stories appear in local newspapers including the Navajo Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Sacramento Bee.
Much of my work focuses on the environment in the West, with an emphasis on the politics of water in an era of extreme scarcity. I also get to occasionally bust free from water, and have written about potato cartels, cowboy-art auctions and the farm-equipment demolition derby in Lind, Washington. I am fortunate to have been assigned stories that have taken me from Alaska to Mexico and Belize, but the best part of the job is the smart people I get to meet, from the ships’ pilots who guide vessels through the stormy North Pacific to marine biologists who spend their workdays underwater in the Florida Keys.
In 2006, I received the James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism, sponsored by Stanford’s Knight Fellowships program and the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Many of my water stories are included in Water in the 21st-Century West and River Basins of the American West (Oregon State University Press, 2009), and I edited A People’s History of Wilderness (High Country News, 2004).
Contact: (510) 845-4525 or sunmountain[at]prodigy[dot]net.