The proposal to drain Lake Powell is exhilarating because of the debate it will inspire: A careful study of the history of the Colorado River Basin and Glen Canyon Dam reveals that the hated dam may have had some good consequences, while those who remember and still mourn for drowned Glen Canyon find new allies in the fight to destroy the dam and restore the canyon.
The Wayward West
Patrick Shipsey wanted to take a stand against the folly of Oregon’s “open range” law. It allows ranchers to let their cattle roam and forces property owners to build fences if they want to keep them out (HCN, 11/25/96). Shipsey killed 11 of his neighbor’s cows after they wandered onto his property once too often.…
More ATVers than aliens
You can search for alien life forms near Roswell, N.M., and not see them, but you can’t miss all-terrain vehicles. For the past 20 years, motor-bikers have carved tracks all around 3,530-acre Haystack Mountain. But unfettered roaming may end soon. The Roswell District of the Bureau of Land Management has finished a draft management plan…
A chance to go wild
Utah has no rivers protected under the 1968 federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, but that might change. This month, the Forest Service released a draft report on recommendations for possible wild and scenic designation within the Uinta National Forest. This forest alone has 92 small sections of rivers eligible for designation, but the agency…
Serious trouble for snow geese
The skies over Midwestern states will be dotted white this fall by snow geese moving south for the winter. But many biologists have concluded that the birds are too prolific for their own good. The goose population has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, up from 750,000 in 1969 to almost 3 million today. As…
Drawing from life
“Weather is the perfect natural phenomenon for the scrutiny of the journal-keeper. It’s always happening, you don’t have to go far to check on it, and you need no sophisticated equipment to study it… Draw the various clouds and cloud formations you see, paying particular attention to their volumes in space, their lights and shadows…”…
Plumas lake poisoned despite civil disobedience
The California Department of Fish and Game poisoned Lake Davis despite a last-minute barrage of legal assaults and pre-dawn civil disobedience hours before the Oct. 15 treatment occurred. A week after pumping Nusyn-Noxfish and powdered rotenone into the lake north of Lake Tahoe, state officials had collected 15 tons of dead fish, including an 18-pound…
Continental Divide Trail
You don’t have to leave your home to experience the Continental Divide Trail. Exploring the trail is now as easy as typing www.gorp.com/cdts/ and hitting return. The Continental Divide Trail Society has created a Web page for hikers to exchange information, inquire about weather conditions and find hiking partners via the Forum, the site’s on-line…
Banning the buzz
The National Park Service is developing rules to allow local park officials to restrict, and perhaps ban, personal sit-down or stand-up watercraft. Park Service program manager Dennis Burnett says although the fast watercraft make up only 7 percent of all boaters, they cause more than half of all boating accidents. They also dump about a…
Dollars, Sense and Salmon
The Idaho Statesman is offering reprints of its landmark editorial series that argues for breaching four dams on the Lower Snake River to help save salmon populations. The series, titled Dollars, Sense and Salmon, ran three days last July, and helped push the dams issue to the forefront of Pacific Northwest political debate. Copies cost…
League of Women Voters
Colorado phones will ring soon, and the Colorado League of Women Voters will begin to survey the public about their knowledge of the causes of water pollution. The League has received a $150,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to educate people about how to prevent household-generated contaminants such as motor oil and lawn chemicals…
The Endangered Species Act
The Endangered Species Act will be among the topics covered at the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and Colorado CattleWomen’s midwinter conference Dec. 4-5 in Colorado Springs, Colo. More than 250 ranchers and biologists are expected to attend this panel discussion on how the act can be modified to engage the agriculture industry in endangered species’ recovery.…
Quincy bill revealed as a bad idea
Dear HCN, Finally, the press has opened the glossy wrapper on the Quincy package and peeked inside. Your article, “The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace” (HCN, 9/29/97), exposed some of the problems with the Quincy Library Group legislation pending in the Senate (S. 1028). While we are eager to see people…
Why should locals speak louder?
Dear HCN, Regarding the Quincy Library Group’s involvement in the management of national forests, the American national forests belong to all Americans, and the opinions of those who live in or near a national forest should have no more influence than that of any other American (HCN, 9/29/97). Maybe things need to be left alone.…
Quincy bill unifies opposition
Dear HCN, The recent article (HCN, 9/29/97) on the Quincy Library Group bill (S.1028) once again implies that this is a divisive issue caused by friction between the national environmental groups and the grass roots. That’s just not accurate. The vast majority of the environmental community is opposed to S.1028. Rather than dividing, this legislation…
Good comparison, but …
Dear HCN, Thanks for the meaningful comparison of land areas in the Quincy Library Group article (HCN, 10/13/97). I am tired of HCN writers’ comparisons of land areas in the West to small states in the East. They only serve to remind us that there are some dinky states which are similar in size to…
This Earthship crashed in Santa Fe
Dear HCN, Michael Reynolds, the Taos, N.M., acclaimed visionary of the concept of using discarded tires and aluminum cans to create environmentally responsible homes called Earthships (HCN, 9/1/97), may be sailing a sinking ship. And he may be taking naive people with him. I moved from the East Coast three years ago and signed an…
The public domain should be free
Dear HCN, There is something fundamentally wrong when citizens are required to pay a fee to walk on land they already own (HCN, 10/13/97). Whatever happened to the concept of public domain? The bureaucrats have taken the easy low road by going after recreational users instead of doing the right thing and lobbying politicians and…
Taxpayers subsidize cheap vacations
In one of the most beautiful – and affluent – parts of central Idaho, 182 cabins on the Sawtooth National Forest have for decades been the best real estate bargain around. Many of the cabins are in stunning locations like Petit Lake, a remote body of water at the northern tier of the 2.1 million-acre…
Down with user fees
Dear HCN, One thing you failed to mention in your feature article on user fees was the Park Service’s perpetual con game about being short of money (HCN, 10/13/97). To get their point across, they defer road maintenance and close campgrounds, items highly visible to the public. What the public does not see is any…
Bison killing goes inside
Rangers in Yellowstone National Park have permission from park brass to shoot bull bison headed out of the park this winter. It is the first time in decades that rangers may, as a matter of policy, kill wildlife they are charged with protecting. Park managers say the change is intended to control disease, rather than…
Another wild opportunity
The Bureau of Land Management has pushed 180,000 acres of Colorado outback a step closer to becoming wilderness study areas. The agency recently labeled the areas “roadless’ after completing new surveys. The surveys were prompted by the Colorado Environmental Coalition, which said the areas should have been included in the BLM’s 1980 survey of potential…
On a Montana ranch, big game and big problems
DARBY, Mont. – It’s almost September, and dozens of “shooter bulls” have been turned into the shooting enclosure of Big Velvet Elk Ranch, just south of here, in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Ranch owner Len Wallace has booked 80 clients for the fall and every one of them is going to shoot a trophy elk,…
Cows get marching orders
Tucson environmentalists beat stream-loving bovines
Rail merger brings delays, derailments
Last year’s merger between the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads was supposed to create a 35,000-mile transportation system with greatly improved service west of the Mississippi River (HCN, 8/5/96). But shippers are complaining that they’re losing millions of dollars because of bad service from UP, now the nation’s largest railroad. Service is so bad…
Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s two feature stories: “A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain” and “Reclaiming a lost canyon.” The proposal to drain Lake Powell is exhilarating. Not because it is necessarily a good idea. That remains to be seen. The proposal is exhilarating because it means democracy…
A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain
“We’ve done our best and worst and a lot of inattentive average work in settling this our Western place.” – Colorado Justice Greg Hobbs, at Bishop’s Lodge 1997 “It would be quite a remote period before (the Upper Colorado Basin) would be developed – 50 or 100 or possibly 200 years.” – Delph Carpenter, testifying…
Reclaiming a lost canyon
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – The first time Phil Pennington saw Glen Canyon was in June of 1961, from the window of a search plane. A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Pennington and a handful of university hiking club members had come to southern Utah to backpack in the canyonlands. A few…
Dear friends
El Nino 1, Denver 0 The Denver area’s horrendous weekend of Oct. 24-26 began with blowing snow and didn’t quit until some 21 inches had fallen. The storm spared the western half of Colorado and most ski areas, but 10 people in the eastern part of the state, as well as livestock, died in the…
Heard around the West
If your product is ostrich and emu and you call your Missoula, Mont., business the Alternative Meat Market, it just makes sense to try to send some un-beef steaks directly to the White House, right? Right, though marketer Kim Mecca first found herself trapped in switchboard limbo. Finally she connected with White House chief usher…
Y2Y: A vast concept gets a hearing
WATERTON, Canada – The irony wasn’t lost on anyone attending the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) conference in Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park Oct. 2-5. As some 300 environmentalists, wildlife biologists, federal, state and provincial employees and Native North Americans met, mountain goats scavenged for garbage in the heart of town and three grizzly bears munched on…