In our corner of the desert Southwest, it’s been spring since the fall.

The spell of October’s chinchweed marked the unexpected start of a second spring that I didn’t think would last beyond Halloween. Pectis papposa naturally comes to light weeks after summer monsoons, but I had never seen the tiny yellow flowers spill so magically across the Mojave. Especially so late in the year. Their bright display was a struck match to my exposed cornea, hypnotizing me into oblivion. It was disorienting — experiencing so much life even as the Northern Hemisphere began to tilt away from the sun.

Fall was supposed to be a time of shedding sunny summer habits, harvesting and hunkering down for cold, snowy nights. But the second wind of spring meant those cozy habits could die hard: We baked in the sun like chuckwallas, planted penstemons and searched for fairies in the buds of our bladderpod.

Howling storms hit the desert one after another, flooding nearby communities with wildfire debris and turning our dirt road into a date shake. Hints that second spring was transforming into forever spring came queerly as the days grew shorter but stayed warm. Some Joshua trees bloomed around Thanksgiving, and botanists worried they might not be serviced by the yucca moth, their only pollinator. But it wasn’t until the winter solstice that all hell broke loose: The flowerfields of Anza Borrego Desert State Park gushed with color three months early. My husband and I skirted the Salton Sea to see them and were lulled by tens of thousands of devil’s lanterns as we walked toward the looming phantom of a mountain. Giant white evening primrose flowers (Oenothera deltoides) lit the way and led us deeper into a beautiful nightmare.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync? What’s the difference between strolling through an unusual bloom with chronic climate dread and attending Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball while LGBTQ+ rights are torched? Bright lights, whether flowers or strobes, can ignite us in dark times. But they can also be distractions: Did the deep state seed the clouds to cause the blooms and sidetrack us while they built concentration camps and mined our mountains to arm war criminals? Slow down, Sherlock; it’s OK to occasionally photosynthesize and expose our showy sex organs in the breeze as we monkey-wrench dystopia. We might lose ourselves if we don’t.

In true spring, after winter’s big rains, Anza Borrego’s flowerfields are often filled with Northbound songbirds, bees and the flap of over a billion painted lady butterflies. But that afternoon, during one of the darkest days of the year, there was an eerie silence that stopped my husband and I in our tracks. I knew then our reality had become a modern Southwestern Gothic. All the components of terror were there in our tale: supernatural plants, a chronically ill narrator (“Greetings …”), a generational curse called climate change, a vampire (more on that later) and, of course, a lone raven quorking by the road.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync?

I’d been thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray, perhaps one of the queerest Gothics, which some view today as an allegory for climate colonialism. Oscar Wilde’s main character, handsome Dorian Gray, descends into reckless hedonism throughout the book. One day, he wishes for a portrait of himself to “bear the burden of his passions and his sins” while he remains forever young. As the portrait’s face becomes hideous over time, he locks it away in a secret room. At one point, after a loved one dies, Dorian even declares, “If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.” This denialism is prevalent in our 21st century and at the heart of why some authors are increasingly drawn to the Gothic as they write about climate change. “The Anthropocene remains a prophesy, a promise of future violence, and thus a ghostly, haunting presence,” the editors of Dark Scenes of Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene wrote.

Things only got creepier as forever spring was interrupted by summer-like heat spikes that broke California records in March. We followed more blooms during one heat wave, dropping to the floor of Death Valley, where we found sprawling gravel ghosts (Atrichoseris platyphylla) and caltha-leaf phacelias (Phacelia calthifolia). BEWARE THE PURPLE FLOWERS, a small visitor center sign declaimed like a soothsayer, warning of dermatitis. We slept naked without sheets under the “Worm Moon” before it eclipsed in bloody streaks, sweating the whole night through. In that silvery light, I could see the haunting bodies of flowers outside our tent. We humans often report ghosts of people, sometimes animals, but rarely other lifeforms. Especially extinct ones. Imagine crushed endangered buckwheat haunting Cybertrucks. Or a ghost eubacteria, like prochlorococcus, appearing at the foot of an oil company CEO’s bed on Christmas Eve.

Waking up to sunwashed flowerfields was the Dr. Jekyll to the night’s Mr. Hyde. We moseyed through desolate washes and canyons to find yet more uncanny blooms. Following a wash within a maze of an alluvial fan, we came to a lovely vista. The hills below us rolled, and 3-foot-tall sunflowers danced on every crease. We got low on the sand beside the flowers for a bug’s-eye view, looking up like the sphinx moth caterpillars that were munching their leaves. Joy and whimsy were so back.

But then we discovered a horrific murder scene: a sunflower strangled by bright orange vines. A small-tooth dodder plant had leapt out of the ground, pierced the desert gold with its “teeth” and was extracting its resources like a pumpjack. This slow violence on a 94-degree winter day was the key that unlocked Dorian’s secret room for me. Inside hung the ghastly portrait of the parasitic human greed that had caused this bizarre and worrisome Western winter. What happens when the haunted castle we were taught to fear is actually a superbloom?

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This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A beautiful nightmare.”

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Over the course of his long life, media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner bought vast stretches of land in Colorado, New Mexico, Montana and Nebraska and managed them for conservation. That work is expected to continue, even after Turner’s death on May 6 at age 87.

One of the Turner family’s largest properties, the 363,000-acre Armendaris Ranch in south-central New Mexico, is shielded from development by the nation’s second-largest permanent conservation easement. According to a statement on Turner Enterprises’ website, the rest of the roughly 2 million-acre ranchland empire will “continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation.”

“Turner Ranches, the Turner Foundation and his other nonprofits intend to do stewardship and restoration on those lands,” said Jonathan Hayden, executive director of New Mexico Land Conservancy, which holds the conservation easement on the Armendaris Ranch. Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

Who owns the West?

Turner, who bought his first ranch in 1987, spent the following decades acquiring 12 more in six Western states. He focused on buying properties that were suitable for raising bison, intending to use the animals to restore the land to its original state as well as supply meat for his restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill. By all accounts, his land purchases were about more than easements, a tool some wealthy landowners use to avoid taxes. Turner said publicly and on his website that his properties would continue to pay taxes to contribute to local communities. He also viewed his land as a way to bring back some species that are at-risk in the West and across the nation.

He made headlines with vast properties like the Vermejo Ranch in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, which he bought from the oil company Pennzoil. For years, his ranch managers worked to restore the overgrazed and overused 558,000-acre expanse, ultimately bringing back more than 1,200 bison and reviving riparian areas along 30 miles of streams and more than a dozen lakeshores.

In 1997, Turner created the Turner Endangered Species Fund, which reintroduced Mexican wolves at his Ladder Ranch in New Mexico and black-footed ferrets on the Bad River Ranch in South Dakota as well as on Vermejo. He also brought westslope cutthroat trout to his Flying D Ranch in southwest Montana.

The Armendaris is focused on “sustaining wildlife species in a time of unprecedented drought,” Hayden said. Operators there have restored populations of imperiled desert bighorn sheep, reintroduced the endangered Bolson tortoise and the aplomado falcon, and protected habitat for more than a million seasonal and migratory bats in the famous Jornada Bat Caves.

Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

The ranch “was both a keystone project and a catalyst that demonstrates how integral private land conservation can be to preserving broader ecoregions,” Hayden said, noting that other landowners have followed Turner’s lead. Since the completion of the Armendaris easement, the New Mexico Land Conservancy has facilitated two conservation leases totaling 120,000 acres on state public lands and another five on private land.

Ted Turner makes a deal

But Turner’s ranches also concentrated on economic output, raising upward of 45,000 bison, as well as hosting sustainable timber harvest and high-end guided hunting, fishing and ecotourism, according to Turner’s websites. In 2021, he created the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture with the goal of “conserving ecosystems, agriculture, and rural communities,” especially on his 80,000-acre McGinley Ranch, which straddles the Nebraska-South Dakota border.

“He understood from a practical standpoint that commerce and conservation have to go hand in hand,” said Lesli Alison, CEO of Western Landowners Alliance. “If commerce is pitted against conservation, nature will lose every time.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

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As the worst snowpack in half a century kindles potential for a devastating wildfire season on Colorado’s 24 million federal acres, Colorado has lost more federal land management workers than any other state.  

A new analysis of federal workforce data by two policy-watchdog groups — Prospect Partners and Hawk Eye Strategies, consulting firms made up of former government employees, including advisors in the Biden administration— shows that Colorado ranks at the top of states for public lands agency job cuts last year. Colorado lost 1,753 positions from agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management amounting to a 26% loss in the public lands workforce in 2025. 

The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts of nearly 300,000 federal jobs by the Department of Government Efficiency included 6,000 public lands jobs at 10 federal agencies in six Western states. 

“We are heading into a summer of heightened risk with unprecedented low federal capacity,” said Bernie Kluger, a coauthor of the analysis with Prospect Partners and a former senior consultant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration, in a statement. “At a moment when federal agencies should be surging in capacity to protect Colorado communities from drought and fire, the Trump administration’s cuts instead eliminated the scientists who forecast the risk of these disasters.”

About 60 Forest Service jobs were cut from the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, the busiest forest in the country with more than 8 million annual visitors who stir an economic impact of more than $1.6 billion in Colorado’s high country communities.

Scott Fitzwilliams supervised the White River National Forest for 15 years before resigning last year as visitation soared and he was forced to slash his workforce. 

A year later he still can’t make any sense of the cuts. 

“There was no rhyme or reason that I could see. They did not have any kind of strategic approach to the downsizing. If they tell you differently, they are lying,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “It just seemed random. When you think of the type of visitation we get and the needs of our forests, it’s just disheartening to think about how fewer people are out there doing this critical work.”

More than a third of those job losses in Colorado last year were newly hired or probationary employees on the frontlines of the agencies, including workers in visitor services, field operations and emergency operations. Another third of the job losses came from the reassignment of Interior Department staff from regional offices to the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

And now the Forest Service, as part of a “sweeping restructuring” will be moving its headquarters from D.C. to Salt Lake City in a move that will close all 10 of its regional offices across the country, including the Region 2 headquarters in Lakewood, where the Federal Center employs more than 6,000 workers in 28 federal agencies. The Forest Service also is consolidating all of its research centers into a single operation in Fort Collins. 

“We need these foresters and oil and gas specialists on the ground here in Colorado,” Fitzwilliams said. “I really do worry about the work getting done. I’m not sure they have a plan. It’s like their war plan: ‘Let’s bomb these people and figure out what happens later.’”

An under-the-public-radar federal rule change is shrinking pay for migrant farmworkers at the same time a highly debated new state law is going to cut into their overtime pay. 

The U.S. Department of Labor has changed the way wages are calculated for H-2A seasonal workers and is allowing employers to pay $2 to $3 less per hour to those workers who receive housing as part of their work contracts. The federal government requires that housing for H-2A workers.

This change championed by the Trump administration will affect the estimated 3,500 H-2A workers who toil in Colorado’s fields and orchards each year. 

The Department of Labor isn’t calling this a wage decrease or a pay deduction. The new rule refers to it as a “downward compensation adjustment.” It doesn’t show up as a deduction on paychecks. The paychecks are simply smaller.

“We can’t call it a pay deduction. It’s a housing adjustment to the wage,” said Liz Talbott, who handles the accounting for H-2A workers at Talbott Farms in Palisade.

Whatever the term used to describe the change, this new federal rule means that H-2A farmworkers in Colorado who earned $17.84 per hour last year, will get $15.16 this year. 

The change could have dropped wages even further except that Colorado’s minimum wage requirement prevented the housing adjustment from taking a bigger bite out of paychecks. The hourly wage for Colorado farmworkers can’t go below $15.16. In some states without that minimum wage protection, H-2A farmworkers will receive as little as $9 per hour.

The new rule does not require employers to pay less, so some are opting to ignore the Department of Labor rule and to keep wages at the same level as last year.

“We are not changing it,” said Gwen Cameron, who employs 11 H-2A workers in the field crew at her Rancho Durazno orchards in Palisade. “We can still be profitable.”

She said she knows of other farms, including Honey Rock Landing in Dominguez Canyon between Delta and Grand Junction, and Topp Fruits in the North Fork Valley, that have also opted to keep wages at the 2025 level. 

News of lower wages delivered just before farmworkers headed north 

At Talbott Farms near Palisade where 95% of the workers are employed with H-2A visas, co-owner Bruce Talbott said they will make use of the new “formulation.” He said labor makes up 85% of his cost to produce peaches.

“I think this is good for the industry and good for the workers,” Bruce Talbott said. “These guys feel like they have won the lottery when they come here. They are treated well. They are still quite happy. These guys have no expenses except for food. They send 95% of their wages home.” 

He said this season some of those workers will be living in a newly completed 24-unit bunkhouse at Talbotts that can hold 48 workers.

Tuxedo Corn in Montrose County has long prided itself on fair treatment of its workers and is a participant in the national Fair Food Program. It has also opted to pay the lower wage.

“It gives me no pleasure to do that,” said David Harold, who co-owns Tuxedo with his father, John Harold. “We are adjusting everything we can to be legal but reduce our costs.”

Harold insists the new federal rule does not mean he is charging his workers for housing that Tuxedo has long provided at no charge. 

“I am not charging for housing,” Harold said. “I am paying the lower rate allowed because I provide housing.”

Harold said he advised his H-2A workers at the end of last year’s season that there might be cutbacks in paychecks this year.

Some migrant farmworkers had no idea about the lower pay until they showed up at the American Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, said Iriana Medina Roy, the executive director of La Plaza, a resource center for migrant workers in Palisade. 

H-2A rules require migrant workers to travel to Monterrey to sign their work contracts and board buses that take them to jobs across the United States. Some reportedly opted to return home when they learned of the lower pay. 

“The workers are not happy. But work is work,” Medina Roy said. “For me, it seems not just. It is not fair.”

Cameron said there is still a lot of confusion among workers about the wage adjustment that is part of a byzantine set of tiered pay changes called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.  

The primary purpose of the Adverse Effect Wage Rate is to prevent the employment of foreign workers from negatively impacting the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers.

Calculating wages to fit within that framework includes having to establish pay levels based on different tiers of skill levels and on the fact that domestic workers generally do not receive housing benefits as migrant workers do.

Liz Talbott said she tried to let workers know about the change coming in their paychecks, but for the first group of 50 Talbott’s workers who came to the Monterrey consulate in January and February, there was little information from the Department of Labor to pass on to workers. Growers say they are still sorting through the perplexing rules — an effort that has been slowed and complicated by the recent government shutdown.

“We didn’t receive a lot of guidance so we didn’t have a lot of information for our workers,” she said.

She said she hopes to be able to provide better information for 45 H-2A workers who will come to Talbott Farms in June. 

Bruce Talbott said the bigger concern for his H-2A workers now is the new state legislation, Senate Bill 121, that will increase the point at which agricultural workers are eligible for overtime pay to 56 hours per week from 48 starting on Jan. 1, 2027.

Legislation passed in 2021 that went into effect last year had set the overtime threshold at 48 hours for most workers who are classified as highly seasonal. During peak weeks of work that threshold can go up to 56 hours for some small growers. Workers must be paid time and a half over that threshold. 

Senate Bill 121 squeaked by on a vote of 33-32 after some of the most contentious debates on the House Floor this session centered on worker protections and help for struggling farmers. The bill is currently on Gov. Jared Polis’ desk awaiting his signature.