A close look at the history of the West reveals that human beings have meddled with and sometimes changed the landscape for as long as they have lived on the continent.
A cover-up over fallout?
A cover-up over fallout? The federally funded National Cancer Institute has been sitting on some disturbing news: 10,000 to 72,000 people may develop thyroid cancer from exposure to clouds of radioactive fallout that traveled across the United States between 1951 and 1958. An institute study shows that children living thousands of miles from nuclear bomb…
Plum Creek hasn’t changed
Dear HCN, I’d like to comment on the article about Habitat Conservation Plans, in which biologist Lorin Hicks says that his company, Plum Creek Timber, began changing its timber management philosophy in 1990 and is working to become environmentally responsible (HCN, 8/4/97). I’m a logger/conservationist who lives near Plum Creek’s hometown, Columbia Falls, Mont., and…
Accident shakes Flaming Gorge Dam
A broken pipe in Utah’s Flaming Gorge Dam gave Bureau of Reclamation officials a scare June 21. Downstream, a blue-ribbon trout fishery got a shock, too. The control room at the dam was empty the evening one of its two bypass tubes burst, gushing water into the dam’s power plant, generator room and offices. An…
Unimpressed with jetboats
Dear HCN, I was encouraged by your article on “thrillcraft” since jetboats have increased dramatically in recent years on the Colorado River in the Moab area (HCN, 8/4/97). After numerous complaints from concerned citizens (mostly swimmers using local beaches), a meeting was held by the Grand County Council. The matter at hand was whether to…
A small victory for logging protesters
Opponents of Oregon’s timber industry are hoping a small court victory will energize their cause. On Aug. 5, five activists fended off federal trespassing charges stemming from protests at the Warner Creek fire sale in the Willamette National Forest (HCN, 9/2/96). For almost a year, hundreds of protesters blockaded a Forest Service road into the…
Cold weather crowds
Winter is becoming like summer in the greater Yellowstone area, at least if you’re talking about crowds. The past two decades have seen a rising tide of winter visitors, especially snowmobilers and skiers, and with them new concerns for agency managers. This flood of visitors threatens both the health of the wilderness areas and the…
Celebrate Mono Lake
As water returns to California’s Mono Basin, the nonprofit Mono Lake Committee is getting ready for a Restoration Days celebration, Aug. 29-Sept. 1. The four-day event is a chance for visitors to explore, discover, and help preserve the basin, says Kay Ogden, committee spokeswoman. The documentary film The Battle for Mono Lake. premieres Aug. 29,…
The Quivira Coalition
Southern New Mexico is best known as a battleground between environmentalists and wise users. Now, two conservationists and a rancher have founded a coalition to show a third way. The group is based in Santa Fe, but its example is Jim Winder’s Double Lightning Ranch near Nutt, N.M. The coalition’s first 16-page newsletter, The Quivira…
Dombeck shakes up agency
Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck announced Aug. 8 that he will move some of the agency’s top managers. In the coming months, two of the West’s most spotlighted regional foresters will shuffle off the map. Hal Salwasser, regional forester for Montana, northern Idaho and North Dakota since 1995, is headed to Berkeley, Calif., to run…
Bear myths
-Human sexual activity,” claims a Forest Service brochure titled Backpacking, “attracts bears.” “I’ve never found any studies on the topic,” counters Alaskan author Dave Smith in his new paperback book, Backcountry Bear Basics: The Definitive Guide to Avoiding Unpleasant Encounters. “If you think about it, we’re often told to make noise to avoid surprising bears;…
Bombs tested in Nevada
The Department of Energy is worried that its nuclear bombs won’t blow up. So on July 2, it performed the first in a series of underground detonations at its Nevada Test Site, a 1,350 square-mile area in Nye County, northwest of Las Vegas. The Department of Energy insists the tests are safe and necessary, but…
A Colville Valley homecoming
In the early 1800s, when Europeans first made their way into the Northwest, Washington’s Colville Valley turned into a melting pot. Canadian, Iroquois and Cree trappers joined the Salish, followed by Jesuit missionaries, Hawaiians and Scottish, Irish and French-Canadian fur traders in peaceful settlements along the Columbia River. To explore the blending of cultures in…
Bad blood over good sheep
-I’ve had it with the land-grant system. They don’t care about people. They care about money, power, profits and greed,” charges Lyle McNeal, founder of Utah State University’s Navajo Sheep Project, which brought traditional Churro sheep back from the brink of extinction (HCN, 5/1/95). Now, the Navajo Sheep Project is in the process of becoming…
Working ranches
The Sonoran Institute, a Tucson, Ariz.-based nonprofit, wants to help ranchers save agricultural lands. Its new illustrated handbook, Preserving Working Ranches in the West, says every four minutes, an acre of working land in Colorado is lost to development. Sonoran Institute spokesman Jon Shepard says ranchers in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley are finding economically viable…
5.7, 5.7, 5.7 …
The rallying cry “5.7 million acres’ has become well known in Utah as the amount of wilderness pushed by a coalition of environmental groups. But because the proposal for wilderness preservation on Bureau of Land Management land was created 10 years ago, says Kevin Walker, a staffer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a fresh…
Don’t blame women
Northwest Environment Watch in Seattle, Wash., isn’t very big at 1,400 members and five staffers, but its reach is ambitious. In less than four years it has published five reports, including The Car in the City, Stuff, and the latest and perhaps most provocative, Misplaced Blame: The Real Roots of Population Growth, by Alan Durning,…
If a town is more dead than alive, it’s the Old West
ANACONDA, Mont. – The gravestones stand in ranks on the hills above this old smelter town, providing hard statistics. By the 1890s, when Anaconda was only a few years old, people of European descent were already dying here. McGinty, Deslauriers, Nitschke, Dadasovich and other names of the dead indicate epic journeys. One stone, for the…
The West that was, and the West that can be
On Jan. 24, 1855, Henry David Thoreau sat down to his journal to reflect on all the ways his homeland had changed since the first English colonists had arrived on the shores of Massachusetts two centuries earlier. For several days, Thoreau had been reading the accounts of some of the earliest settlers. Compared to the…
Jell-O and suicides
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to an essay, “If a town is more dead than alive, it’s the Old West.” Various statistics describe different aspects of the West today. For instance, Salt Lake City leads the nation in per capita Jell-O consumption, while Nevada leads in…
Dear friends
The contrary West We won’t regale you with old saws about weather, such as the one that goes, “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a minute – it’ll change.” But we’d like to, because here and in some places like eastern Idaho, where it’s been so damp there are fears of a…
At war with a bunch of mice: Confessions of an ex-pacifist
Six years ago I bought a cabin in the mountains of eastern California. Though my fortunes rise and fall, almost every night I’ve thanked the millions of stars that I could look to the high crests and hear birdsong in the Jeffrey pines. A year ago my illusion of haven fell apart. One of my…
Heard around the West
The Aspen Daily News isn’t shy about its willingness to dish the dirt. Its motto? “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.” Bren Simon, the wife of shopping-mall developer and Indiana Pacers owner Melvin Simon, may have recollected those words once the free paper began printing juicy stories about the couple’s illegal…
Navajo tribe embarks on a long-term cleanup
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – Since taking office in 1995, Navajo Nation President Albert Hale says, he got upset every time he flew in or out of the airport here. Beside the airstrip was an illegal trash dump that has been growing for at least 50 years. Hale vowed to clean up the dump, and did.…
At Tahoe forum, a tribe wins a deal
LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – Washoe tribal chairman Brian Wallace says he feels “bittersweet” when he looks at what has happened to Lake Tahoe. The tribe’s name for itself – “Wa Shi Shiw” – means “the people from here.” But the Washoe haven’t felt at home at Lake Tahoe for a long time. During the California…
A timber town yells for help
Town officials in Forks, Wash., have been pressing state and federal governments to make good on promises to bail out timber towns. They say money promised under President Clinton’s 1993 Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative, which helped timber-dependent towns with federal funds, hasn’t reached the communities that need it most. Now, Forks has convinced the state,…
Babbitt brings in new brass
In one fell swoop, the president and the Interior secretary have ushered in a new Interior Department. New directors of the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Surface Mining and National Park Service were sworn into office Aug. 4, after easily surviving Senate confirmation hearings. All four face major challenges…
The West may not be literary, but it’s littered with reading matter
Along with watching birds on my long bicycle trips between several Western states and California, I developed a fascination with roadside signs. Among the most common were the hand-painted advertisements posted in many a rural driveway. People were selling rabbits, nightcrawlers, boxer pups, Fuller brushes, RV repairs, stud service, plants, dolls, mattresses – you name…
How the writer learned that he is not very spiritual
My wife and I had just finished hiking Brims Mesa outside of Sedona, Ariz., when we spotted a woman at the trailhead wearing a purple velvet, or velour, dress that hung loosely to her bare ankles. In her right hand she held a hawk feather, and around her neck dangled a leather “medicine bag.” She…
On being wrong
Years ago, I wrote a little essay that appeared in The Sun. The title of the essay was “Being Wrong.” I wrote about all the mistakes I had made in my life. I said I was tired of looking back and feeling embarrassed and angry with myself for having been so wrong in the past.…