John Fetcher’s ranching family leads the way in an effort to preserve open land through conservation easements in the rapidly growing Steamboat Springs area.
A losing battle
Dear HCN, I was disappointed and extremely saddened after reading “In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one” (HCN, 10/16/95). Disappointed that with so many other environmental problems facing this country, the Sierra Club Foundation has chosen to pick on a small rural cooperative to the tune of $2.5 million. It seems…
Former Elko resident tells why he moved
Dear HCN, I was delighted that Jon Christensen did an article on Elko County, Nev. (HCN, 10/30/95). I just wish he had done so while I was still living there. I worked as an engineer for one of the gold-mining companies in the area until I decided to leave after being informed that my political…
Our dictators are home grown
Dear HCN, I noticed in a recent article by Elizabeth Manning that the residents of Catron County, N.M., support Dick Manning and his anti-government proclamations (HCN, 10/30/95). As a resident of Catron County I can assure you that is not true. At least half, if not more, of the residents think he is a loud-mouth…
What’s historic? What’s worth preserving?
Dear HCN, Hooray for Tom Casey who wants to preserve the nuclear power plant structures west of Olympia, Wash., according to HCN’s Heard Around the West column Oct. 16. They are an honest representation of our cultural heritage, and, like charming 1800s brick buildings, their presence on the landscape tells us, over time, just where…
Ranchers win again
Ranchers win again Environmentalists in New Mexico plan to follow a trend set in Idaho and Oregon: taking the state to court after having bids for state grazing permits rejected. They charge that the land office is discriminating against them and violating state law by not managing state land for maximum profit. Forest Guardians and…
Lakotas want Crazy Horse off silver screen
Lakotas want Crazy Horse off silver screen As a Turner Network Television crew packed up its cameras after filming Crazy Horse in Hot Springs, S.D., members of the Lakota tribe picked up their pens to sign a petition against the latest TNT movie focusing on Native American history. Descendants of Crazy Horse and Lakota Sioux…
Dam project called a “bungle’ and a “porker’
A committee of the Catholic Diocese of Pueblo, Colo., surprised everyone, including Pueblo Bishop Arthur Tafoya, by blasting the proposed Animas-La Plata water project as an “environmental, economic and social bungle.” The Human Development Commission of the diocese also asked, “Who is responsible for the continuing agitation to support a project so badly conceived? We…
Watch out for guns
It was killing season again, and in Colorado it might have been safer to romp through the woods in blaze orange than to stay near a hunting camp. A 16-year-old girl in the Uncompahgre National Forest hopped off her four-wheeler while unloading her rifle Oct. 21, only to shoot her father in the leg. He…
Ganados never attacked anyone
Dear HCN, Ganados del Valle is not an organization which “attacks reputations’ and smears them in our valley’s “red brown mud” (HCN, 10/16/95). Over the past five years we have had several opportunities to tell the story of the history of the lawsuit brought by the attorney general of New Mexico against the Sierra Club…
Conservation group ropes in a working ranch
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. For years The Nature Conservancy has taken a direct route in its quest to protect native plants and animals: buying land and prohibiting most human activities on it. That strategy has paid big dividends in the West. In the 10 Western…
Trust in the Land
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. In the scramble to preserve Western open space, land trusts have taken the lead. “I see a lot of people looking at land trusts as a real bridge between environmentalists and landowners,” says Jean Hocker, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Land…
Local land-use plan sabotaged by state
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – At night the lights of Steamboat Springs rise up from the Yampa River Valley by the thousands, advancing east toward Mount Werner like a small army laying siege to the ski lifts. At the eastern edge of town they end abruptly, running up against the dark mass of Emerald Mountain. The…
Heard Around the West
Rep. James V. Hansen of Utah spent 24 happy years – he didn’t know how happy – in the U.S. Congress as a minority member. Then, a year ago, Republicans won the House, and Hansen became chairman of a subcommittee. With the appearance of power came trouble. His bill to sell Forest Service mountainsides to…
Agency leaders need to come out swinging
With a muffled thump, a small bomb ripped through Forest Service offices in Carson City, Nev., in late March, damaging walls and computer equipment. The damages were not just physical; for the men and women whose daily routines were shattered, the detonation had understandable psychological ramifications. There were political reverberations, too: Some public-land managers who…
Jury tackles a question of ethics in Montana
BILLINGS, Mont. – The three-day trial here last month of a man accused of shooting an endangered wolf ran like a morality play about the new American West and small-town Montana culture. This is a place where men enjoy their guns, hunting, beer and trucks, but as the accused, Chad McKittrick, soon discovered, there are…
Dear Friends
Hello, hello? We’re still not used to the sudden disappearance of staffers at the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service. Humans all over the West once answered our annoying and time-consuming questions; now recordings announce: “Sorry, due to a lack of budget appropriations, this office is closed.” Then a Denver Post story Nov. 16…
Voters say yes to elk, no to takings, jets
In state and local elections Nov. 7, environmental initiatives followed the law of the pocketbook: Measures that would have cost taxpayers money usually failed. Although fiscal conservatism spelled defeat for slow-growth initiatives in Colorado and Utah, it also contributed to a major victory for environmentalists in Washington state, where voters defeated Referendum 48 – the…
Utility found guilty of polluting a wilderness
Tourists noticed it first. A thin brown haze hung in the air like a nylon stocking obscuring the view of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area in northwest Colorado. Alerted by complaints, the Forest Service set up cameras at the Storm Peak Weather Lab on top of the Steamboat ski area. The cameras took pictures three…
Rare native fish found in Utah, then poisoned by mistake
A project launched by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to protect a recently discovered population of rare native trout killed almost every fish in the stream instead. The fish, located in Parley’s Creek close to Salt Lake City, were believed to be pure Bonneville cutthroat trout, one of only two varieties of trout native…
Traffic flow 1, trees 0
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – When the bulldozer smacked a 40-foot-tall cottonwood tree, the tree first wavered and wobbled. Then, a loud crack rang out, and the tree toppled, its bright green leaves crushed as they glistened in the sunlight. This scene was repeated more than a dozen times in mid-October, as the Albuquerque city government started…
Saving the ranch
Can private conservation stave off ski-town sprawl?
John Fetcher
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. John Fetcher started his working life as an engineer in Philadelphia before buying a ranch with his brother in the Elk River Valley in 1949. In the 1950s he and three partners began developing the Steamboat Ski Area, which they sold…
Rancher’s new cash crop will be scenery
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. Private conservation efforts in places such as the Elk River Valley may be able to preserve the look of the land. But if ranchers become tenants on property owned by wealthy people from somewhere else, what happens to the culture? “There’s…