The Gallup McKinley County Schools District had something to celebrate at the school board meeting May 24 after the Lady Bengals won their state championship game three days before.

The board took the opportunity to congratulate the girls’ win with handshakes and plaques.

When it was his turn to congratulate them, Superintendent Mike Hyatt commented that Gallup had not seen a championship in a while, and that some people might not expect it from their school because they don’t have the tallest athletes.

“[The girls] really fought every single game,” Hyatt said. “I watched them play against some girls who were my height and they took care of them quite easily.”

Board...

PART FOUR: Water within sight, but out of reach

 

The Colorado, Little Colorado, and San Juan rivers wend through red mesas, creating ribbons of green river valleys that run up against the Navajo Nation’s boundaries and occasionally cut through pieces of tribal lands. Water is both right at hand, and unavailable to tribal members.

Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, which means “the people”, have made their homes for centuries in the high desert of what’s now the Navajo Nation by shaping their lives around when and where water became available in a homeland they call Dinétah. For more than a century, they’ve watched water run by, downstream to cities and other...

Week ending Friday, May 14, 2021


Royal Breeding

Western monarch butterflies from the Pacific Northwest to California may not be going extinct as earlier feared, but are instead changing their breeding habitats and adapting to climate change. A Washington State University expert says last winter’s count of the colorful insects revealed a sharp drop, especially across much of Southern California, where the number plunged from about 300,000 three years ago to just 1,914 in 2020. But entomologist David James says large populations were observed by citizen scientists in metropolitan Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, where they had seldom been seen wintering...

Week ending Friday, May 21, 2021


Psychedelic Frenzy

Some of the billions of Brood X cicadas that are emerging from the soil in the eastern United States for the first time in 17 years are infected with a fungus that eats away at their abdomens as it increases their sex drive. The Massospora cicadina fungus lies dormant until the 17-year periodical cicadas begin to stir. It’s laced with the same chemical as in psychedelic mushrooms and causes the males to emit the mating sounds of both males and females. This attracts more potential partners and spreads the fungus. Since the fungus effectively castrates the males as it eats away at their bodies, it acts as a natural population...