Wildlife trapping – which has a long history in the West – today comes into fierce conflict with environmentalists, animal advocates, and residents upset by the risk traps pose to domestic dogs.
Hot Topics in Natural Resources
Grab a box lunch at the University of Colorado Law School this spring and hear about natural resource controversies in Colorado. Coalbed methane in the San Juan Basin is the subject April 16, and the legacy of acid mine drainage in the San Juan Mountains will be discussed on May 4. To register for “Hot…
Preserving Our Rural Landscape
Montanans worried about the effects of development and population growth on wildlife and its habitat have a reason to attend the Montana Audubon Annual Meeting: Held in Hamilton on April 23-25, the conference will focus on “Preserving Our Rural Landscape.” To learn more, contact the state office at P.O. Box 595, Helena, MT 59624 (406/443-3949).…
Dr. Jane Goodall
Primate expert and author Dr. Jane Goodall will speak on “Chimpanzees: So like us’ at the Snow King Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on April 27 at 7 p.m. Goodall, brought to Jackson by the nonprofit Murie Center, has researched primate behavior for decades and has made a series of discoveries that have changed the…
A River of Dreams and Realities
At the Arkansas River Basin Water Forum, A River of Dreams and Realities, in Caûon City, Colo., April 23-24, ranchers, Bureau of Reclamation managers, members of the U.S. Geological Survey and locals will try to find solutions for a resource too much in demand. For registration, contact Pat Clifford at CSU Cooperative Extension, 411 N.…
Desert Conference
Desert wildlands activists discuss grazing reform in the Great Basin April 29-May 2 at the 21st annual Desert Conference in southeastern Oregon. Todd Wilkinson, author of Science Under Siege, is a speaker and lots of field trips are available. Write the Oregon Natural Desert Association, 16 NW Kansas, Bend, OR 97701, or call 503/525-0193. This…
Earle A. Chiles Award
The High Desert Museum is calling for nominations for the 1999 Earle A. Chiles Award, given to honor thoughtful management of natural and cultural resources of the High Desert. Nominations are due May 31. For details, contact Binnie Rowe, 59800 S. Highway 97, Bend, OR 97702-7963, (541/382-4754), browe@highdesert.org This article appeared in the print edition…
Wyoming Wildlife Federation
The Wyoming Wildlife Federation’s 53rd annual meeting in Story, Wyo., May 15-16, features an awards banquet, guided tours, a Raffle Extravaganza and dancing to Cajun/Latin music. Call 800/786-5434 or write the federation at P.O. Box 106, Cheyenne, WY 82003. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wyoming Wildlife Federation.
No go for a gold mine
Despite its reputation, the 1872 Mining Law may no longer be a friend of the mining industry. On March 26, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture denied the plan of operations for a proposed open-pit gold mine in north-central Washington (HCN, 8/31/98), saying it failed to meet the requirements of the century-old…
Draining Lake Powell
Colorado College hosts a debate about one of the more contentious proposals today in the West – draining Lake Powell. Floyd Dominy, former Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, and Dave Wegner, who directed environmental studies in Glen Canyon, take up the question April 21 at 7 p.m. at the college’s Packard Hall in Colorado Springs. Contact…
The Wayward West
Black-tailed prairie dogs may have no place to go as bulldozers threaten their colonies on Colorado’s sprawling Front Range. The South Plains Land Trust tried to create a preserve in Baca County for refugee prairie dogs last year, but ranchers there succeeded in getting a law on the books that outlaws the altruistic gesture (HCN,…
Nothing is everything
THE SPACE CLOSEST TO OUR BODIES Imagine some tan grass and sage, monoliths and blow outs, flatness the feet cannot believe, distance the eye laughs at as it fumbles blindly with the ends of all time. Imagine everything here moves (even the cactus will come close to a sleeping man and the beetle will tunnel…
Now, salmon in the backyard
Where roads cross the flowing waters of Kelsey Creek, a six-mile-long stream contained entirely within the city of Bellevue, Wash., signs inform motorists: “This is a salmon stream.” Some residents are surprised. Kit Paulsen, who leads the city’s salmon education program, says, “A number of people have called to say they didn’t know there was…
Montana won’t bend for bison
The Montana Department of Livestock continues to play hardball with bison leaving Yellowstone National Park despite urging from federal agencies to let the animals roam. In mid-March, state workers removed protesters blocking a Forest Service road near West Yellowstone, Mont., and arrested six members of the group, Buffalo Field Campaign. That cleared the way for…
Web hosts faux greens
The practice of “green-scamming’ – stealing an environmental group’s name to further an opposing cause – may be acquiring a whole new meaning on the Internet. Members of the Pulp and Paper Workers Resource Council at the Potlatch Inc. mill in Lewiston, Idaho, got so mad at the Idaho Conservation League for opposing timber sales…
The new voice at BLM
Dallas lawyer Thomas A. Fry III talks and acts like a guy who’s in charge, but in reality, he’s “acting” director of the Bureau of Land Management. The 54-year-old Fry is the second acting director of the BLM in five years. Mike Dombeck supervised the BLM for three years as acting director before becoming chief…
Nuclear waste dump opens
Twenty-five years after it was first proposed, and a decade after its construction, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad, N.M., received its first truckload of nuclear debris. The world’s first geologically engineered nuclear waste dump opened early on March 26, right after a federal judge lifted a seven-year-old injunction that had kept the facility…
Is trapping doomed?
The day after Christmas 1997 is a day that Liz Kehr shudders to remember. Kehr and her husband, Kevin Feist, live in the Flathead Valley in northwestern Montana, snug against Glacier National Park. It’s a place where publicly owned land stretches for miles in all directions, though in the past 10 years the valley has…
Trapping in the United States
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Long before Europeans came to the North American continent, natives were using traps to catch animals and fish. Eskimos used whalebone nooses to snare waterfowl, the Hopis used dead-fall rock slabs to kill fox and Aleutian Indians used barbed spikes to catch bears. According…
A Wyoming trapper seeks pelts, and beauty
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. You can hear the pleasure in his voice. “Look at those beauties. Hello, ladies, hello, you beautiful things,” says Tom Lucas. Five bighorn ewes wander away from us, only slightly alarmed at two humans in their territory. “I just love seeing wildlife.” Tom Lucas…
In the ’90s, trapping still has a role
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The heyday of the mountain man lasted only a few decades, ending in the 1830s, when both the market and the supply of beaver fizzled out. But the tradition lives on. In towns around the West, and even in the Midwest, “mountain men” celebrate…
Dear Friends
Report from the trash patrol A Saturday morning spent cleaning up two miles of State Highway 133 created a variety of reactions among the participants. Some of us came away satisfied. All of us came away hot and dirty. But Betsy Offermann came away determined: “The next time I see someone litter, I’m going to…
Gold mine capsizes in Westwater Canyon
Kayakers and rafters are planning celebratory boat trips down Westwater Canyon on the Colorado River this spring. As they float past the redrock walls, they can look around and see, well … othing. Their joy stems from the recent removal of mine claims situated on 960 acres in the canyon, within a wilderness study area.…
Heard around the West
The fun of fast and fearless driving is fizzling out in Montana. On May 28, the state’s dubious distinction as the only state in the nation without a daytime speed limit will come to an end. Montana Gov. Marc Racicot signed legislation making the daytime limit 75 mph on interstate highways and 70 mph on…
Saint Contrary: John Wesley Powell
If the American West were to adopt a secular, flawed, feet-of-clay patron saint, John Wesley Powell, whose March 24th birthday just passed, would be the man. Powell, who was born in 1834 and died in 1902, epitomized grit and courage, qualities the West likes to honor. He lost an arm at Shiloh commanding a battery…
Charting the course of the San Pedro
In the hot, dry grasslands of southeastern Arizona, the San Pedro River is an oasis. Unlike many other desert rivers, the shallow San Pedro is free-flowing, and its banks are soil – not concrete. Cottonwood and willow forests line the northward-flowing river, from its origins in Sonora, Mexico, to its confluence with the Gila River,…
Strangling the Last Best River
Montana statesman Mike Mansfield, summing up the highlights of his career in the U.S. Senate, claimed to be most proud that he “had saved the Yellowstone River from the Corps of Engineers.” But while the Yellowstone is still the longest undammed river in the Lower 48, it is now a long way from “saved.” A…
A history of how a grassroots rebellion won a water war
I made the mistake of reading Peter Carrels’ Uphill Against Water not long after I’d read David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, his account of the fall of the Soviet Union, and at times had trouble remembering whether I was in South Dakota or in the old U.S.S.R. Of course, in South Dakota, political opponents were not…