Madelyn Beck
I’m the Mountain West News Bureau reporter at Boise State Public Radio. That means I work with reporters and NPR stations around the region to cover Mountain West issues like public lands, influential court cases and the environment, among many other things.
I grew up on a ranch in Montana, but I’ve reported everywhere from North Dakota to Alaska to Washington, D.C. My last few positions included covering energy resources in Wyoming and reporting on agriculture/rural life in Illinois.
My pre-journalism jobs include (but are not limited to): ranch hand for Icelandic horses, hotel laundress, large caliber brass shell sorter/inventory, salmon processor in Alaska and waitress for a murder mystery dinner theater.
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National Park Service locations report how many people visit, how much tourists spend and how many jobs that creates every year. In 2021, those visitors spent more than $20 billion.
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National unemployment rates continue to go down, but county job numbers in the Mountain West are extremely mixed. For example, Idaho was the only state where every county had an increase in jobs between July 2019 and July 2022. And Nevada was one of very few where every county reported job losses.
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The world of wildland firefighting has a lot of wonky lingo. But one key phrase is “fuel moisture” — and no, we’re not talking about oil and gas.
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The heat wave baking the West continues to increase wildfire dangers as we head into fall. On Tuesday, the National Interagency Fire Center increased its National Preparedness Level to 4, out of a possible 5.
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Several states are fighting to limit abortion access. But limited access will increase already high costs of traveling to seek abortions for many in the Mountain West.
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It’s called Bisticeratops froeseorum, part of a growing, diverse group of horned dinosaurs that lived in the Four Corners region. The paleontologists who identified it say knowing about these diverse dinosaur species and how they lived – or died – in the ensuing mass-extinction is an important lesson to modern-day humans.
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A Colorado state senator has changed parties from Republican to Democrat over false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Kevin Priola’s changing affiliation is just one of the many instances the "big lie" keeps cropping up in the Mountain West.
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A federal program is giving about $30,000 to individual rural communities to help them develop outdoor recreation economies.
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People have always feared the unknown. And that fear transforms some animals into monsters in our minds — like sharks in the ocean, or rattlesnakes in the West.
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A Pew Research Center analysis found that one in six journalists are now part of a union, and more than twice that want to join one. However, it also found that smaller publications, like those in the rural Mountain West, are less likely to unionize. Of those with fewer than 10 people, only 4% have a union.