Utah’s remote and little known Book Cliffs area seemed ripe for preservation under an innovative, locally grown initiative – until oilman Oscar Wyatt stepped in to challenge it.
Playing by the rules
When Steamboat Springs, Colo., snowmobiler Christian George was airlifted out of the backcountry in January after being lost for four days, he said he had survived with two cigarette lighters and a candy bar. Next time, he told the Denver Post, he’ll take more lighters. Jackson, Wyo., film producer Sava Malachowski adds a few more…
Mine your jewelry box
The Missoula, Mont., group Women’s Voices for the Earth has an alternative to a proposed gold mine on the Blackfoot River: Mine Your Jewelry Box, Not the Blackfoot. The group started collecting gold jewelry last May to support public education and lawsuits aimed at stopping the McDonald gold project (HCN, 12/22/97). So far, people have…
Outdoor Recreation: Promise and Peril in the New West
The Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado will hold its 19th annual summer conference, Outdoor Recreation: Promise and Peril in the New West, June 8-10. Panelists will talk about conflicts among visitors to public lands and the effect of outdoor recreation on Native American sacred sites. Speakers will include Agriculture Department Undersecretary…
California Water Map
It’s not quite Cadillac Desert, but the updated California Water Map goes a long way toward explaining the state’s complex network of water projects. The large color map, published by the Water Education Foundation, shows the location of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts and wild and scenic rivers around the state. The nonprofit educational foundation also publishes…
The Wayward West
Idaho has more wolves and one less wolf biologist. The Nez Perce tribe has fired Timm Kaminski, who led the tribe’s wolf reintroduction program for the last 18 months, AP reports (HCN, 3/3/97). At the end of last year, six breeding pairs were roaming central Idaho. The tribe isn’t saying why Kaminski was dismissed. Idaho…
The Western Ancient Forest Campaign
Join the directors of the Hells Canyon Preservation Council and the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance June 1 for a benefit float trip down the Snake River through Hells Canyon in wooden dories. Oars/Dories guides will pilot the five-day whitewater trip, prepare meals and donate all proceeds to the organizing groups. Contact the Hells Canyon Preservation Council…
Hells Canyon benefit float trip
Join the directors of the Hells Canyon Preservation Council and the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance June 1 for a benefit float trip down the Snake River through Hells Canyon in wooden dories. Oars/Dories guides will pilot the five-day whitewater trip, prepare meals and donate all proceeds to the organizing groups. Contact the Hells Canyon Preservation Council…
EPA to ASARCO: Time to pay
For the past two years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been investigating ASARCO Inc. for violations of federal environmental laws. Now the mining company is going to pay. On Jan. 23, the EPA announced that the company will pay $62 million in fines and cleanup costs for its projects around the nation, with the…
National Audubon Society biennial convention
The National Audubon Society will hold its biennial convention July 6-11 in Estes Park, Colo. The conference theme is “Celebrating Successes” and sessions will address topics such as sanctuary management and wildland preservation. There will also be several birding field trips, including a seven-day “Grand Tour of Western Colorado.” For more information, write to the…
A road to ruins?
New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici is trying to pave the way for a six-lane highway through the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque (HCN, 1/20/97). In March, Domenici attached a rider to an emergency appropriations bill that allows the city to extend the Paseo del Norte road through the 8.5-acre midsection of the national monument…
Getting it right: a policy agenda for local population activism
Getting it Right: A Policy Agenda for Local Population Activism is the topic of a provocative paper by Judith E. Jacobsen, a member of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. She advocates adding issues of natural resource consumption and unwanted pregnancies to community development agendas. Copies of the 56-page paper are $5 from University of…
All is not quiet on the Rocky Mountain Front
Last October, conservationists won a surprise victory for Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front when Lewis and Clark National Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora banned new oil and gas leases for the next 10 to 15 years (HCN,10/13/97). But the story wasn’t over. On Feb. 5, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., introduced a bill to permanently ban new oil…
Don’t blame the messenger
Dear HCN, Stephen Lyons’ finely crafted bull’s-eye prose on Idaho will no doubt draw the ire of people who love the state (HCN, 3/16/98). His frank assessment of the neighborhood is as welcome as an empty larder to starving children. Keep in mind that all of Mr. Lyons’ examples are quite current. Keep in mind…
Idaho’s racists give us a choice
Dear HCN, Stephen Lyons told us in the last issue that he left hate-filled Idaho for the more progressive state of Washington (HCN, 3/16/98). Since I made that same move last autumn, here’s my response to his essay: Dear Stephen, Welcome to Washington! You’ll find excellent coffee, happy diversity and easy access to recycling. Enjoy…
Panel says fish gotta swim
After a two-year study, a group of scientists says half of the Snake River’s endangered salmon and steelhead should be allowed to migrate to the ocean naturally instead of being transported in barges and trucks. The report, issued by an independent science panel created by Congress, questions whether shipping salmon around dams can save fish…
A postscript from anonymous
Dear HCN, Lynne Bama’s wild horse story is an excellent introduction to many of the philosophical and practical problems attendant to management of a large, sacred, feral domestic ungulate on the public lands (HCN, 3/2/98). Although ecologically responsible management of feral horses and burros under current laws and policies is theoretically possible, censuses and removals…
Funds are routinely looted
Dear HCN, Jon Margolis often has interesting insights, but his article titled “The Land and Water Fund waits to be tapped” naively misses the bigger picture (HCN, 2/16/98). It is true that the Land and Water Trust Fund is not managed like a trust fund dedicated to conserving land and water. But the misuse of…
Scat Spot, scat
Man’s best friend is helping the Wolf Education and Research Center in Boise, Idaho. Hounds with a hankering for fetching are being retrained to sniff out bear, lynx, wolverine and even rhino scat, resulting in less need for tagging and radio-tracking (HCN, 2/16/98). A trained dog can survey a livestock depredation site for scat, which…
Guns came first
Dear HCN, This is regarding your “Heard around the West” article about the closure of the Tucson Rod & Gun Club rifle range in Sabino Canyon (HCN, 3/16/98). I am a loyal HCN reader and also an avid hunter and shooter. During the late “70s through the mid-’80s, I spent many hours at the Sabino…
Grizzlies on staff
If the old adage, “Once you’ve studied something long enough, you become it,” holds true, the Glacier Institute has a grizzly bear, a glacier and a wildflower or two on staff. For 15 years, the nonprofit educational organization has recruited wildlife experts and artists to take students of all ages traipsing about Glacier National Park…
The rural West should grow up
Dear HCN, After reading Ed Marston’s column, “Show me the science,” (HCN, 3/16/98), I feel compelled to respond to your criticism of modern Western environmentalists wherein you called them “enemies of rural life and rural economies.” Why do you, and so many others, think that Western rural lifestyles and economies must be based upon traditional…
All that glitters…
A citizens’ group in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., is trying to drum up opposition to a proposed open-pit gold mine a few miles from town. Royal Gold Inc. has been conducting exploratory drilling on Forest Service land, and a full-scale operation may begin once the price of gold increases. Resident Bill McNeill, who founded the new…
Suckling refuses to listen
Dear HCN, Kieran Suckling is afraid to talk to ranchers with environmentally enhancing grazing practices. His belief is that all ranchers are destructive. He states: “Show me a national forest grazing allotment in Arizona or New Mexico that isn’t trashed, and I’ll sit down and talk about sustainable grazing. It doesn’t exist” (HCN, 3/30/98). Mr.…
Partial measurements
Nothing is more elegant and simple than a Parshall Flume. The concrete or sheet metal devices, when properly built, measure how much water flows through a ditch. While water courts adjudicate, it is Parshall Flumes that actually measure out the water. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to do an accurate job. According to Colorado State University, only…
Wyoming: The last tough place
There’s a Wyoming hunter I know who lucked out one year. He’s a big man, well over six feet, who commands a room without even opening his mouth. He’s also a mule man. I’ve never seen him ride anything else. He likes wild country where grizzlies outnumber men and that’s where he likes to hunt…
Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
VERNAL, Utah – Dinosaurs live on in northeastern Utah. A life-size plaster Tyrannosaurus rex, advertising nearby Dinosaur National Monument, stands poised to pounce on visitors as they enter the town of Vernal. The wide main street is lined with hotels, restaurants and gift shops – the Dinosaur Inn, Dine-a-ville, the Dinosaur Quarry. Thousands of visitors…
The birth, life, and coming death of a Wyoming dam
WAPITI, Wyo. – After the thunderstorm had passed, the sheer face of the mountain reappeared, looking strange in the evening light. I got out the field glasses and saw streams of muddy water, some of them nearly a hundred feet high, cascading down the ranks of cliffs north of us. Soon we heard a roaring…
Dear Friends
Questions and visitors Gregory Reis of Lee Vining, Calif., writes that he was in a plane flying near New Mexico’s Aztec Ruins National Monument when he saw mysterious “rectangular cleared areas all over the place.” What might they be? he asked us. Intern JT Thomas called around until he found Rich Simmons, a staffer with…
Training and bombing range expansions at a glance
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to a news article,”Military wants to grow its Western empire.” Arizona Military wants increased training at Yuma Proving Ground; long-range renewal of the 2.6 million acre Barry Goldwater Range. California Proposed expansion of National Training Center at Fort Irwin, including military…
Feds propose weak organic food rules
For Colorado rancher Mel Coleman, a lot hangs on a definition. His family began raising cattle on the open range in 1875 and has never used chemicals. A century later, Coleman discovered that people would pay more for his beef if he added the word “natural” to the labels. In the years that followed, Coleman…
A few fish may move a mountain of tailings
Thank the squawfish, say community activists in Moab, Utah. In the latest round of a long controversy, the endangered fish may be the lever that moves 10 million tons of radioactive uranium tailings away from the banks of the Colorado River. Last spring, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ruled that Atlas Minerals could leave the…
Military wants to grow its Western empire
Imagine a giant spider – a creepy crawler 10 times bigger than King Kong – that could spin a web across the West’s great open spaces, linking every military training range in eight states. That’s how some citizens and environmentalists view a bevy of proposals by the U.S. Department of Defense to enhance combat readiness…
Be careful what you wish for the wolves
Half a century ago, Yellowstone’s last native wolf died with its leg clamped in the jaws of a trap. As a nation, we encouraged the extermination of wolves. But time passed and attitudes changed. Three years ago, wolves were returned to Yellowstone and central Idaho, initiating history’s most popular and successful reintroduction of an endangered…
Heard Around the West
During the day, Polly Letofsky, 35, takes reservations at a ski lodge in Vail, Colo., but several nights a week she turns into Fitness Woman, snowshoeing up Vail Mountain as she trains for her dream of walking around the world. She figures that ambitious jaunt, totaling 7,000 miles across four continents, will require three years…