While cash-strapped land managers praise the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, some recreationists and activists rail against it, and others point out that the program isn’t producing as much money as was hoped for.
Report card
The National Commission on Small Farms released a report card grading the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s effort to help family farmers. The agency received a “D” for failing to help independent farmers compete against large agribusiness. It earned its best grade, “B’,” for providing marketing assistance. For a copy of the Time to Act report…
Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness management plan
The Forest Service has extended the comment deadline for the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness management plan until March 1. The plan will manage 2.4 million acres of wilderness – the largest and one of the most heavily used in the country. Alternative 9 supports restoring wilderness conditions. To request a copy, call 208/756-5100.…
Canaries in the Utah desert
Twenty-seven years ago, Chip Ward and his wife, Linda, left the East Coast to explore the West. Impressed with the desert’s stark beauty, the Wards decided to settle permanently in rural Utah. Little did they know that Grantsville, the sleepy town they chose to call home, sits right in the middle of one of the…
Shaping the Sierra
Even though he is now a professor of planning and landscape architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, Timothy P. Duane manages to fold his childhood memories and love of the “Range of Light” into this hefty and complex book about one of the West’s rapidly developing mountain zones. Like many Westerners with an attachment to…
Women on the move
Women’s roles in the natural-resource professions have changed significantly over the years, and Women in Natural Resources journal has been there to document the progression. Founded by a network of Forest Service women 20 years ago, the approximately 40-page quarterly covers forestry, fisheries, wildlife, range, recreation, soils and related environmental and social sciences. The journal…
A simpler salmon plan
Amid the hefty government reports, long-winded debates, and lengthy articles that surround salmon recovery in the Northwest, there emerges a 49-page paperback book with a simple message: Help salmon survive. Down to the Sea, by Jay W. Nicholas, a passionate fisheries biologist, struggles to explain Oregon’s recovery proposal to a baby coho salmon. “This is…
Goring our own oxen
Dear HCN, I almost needed earplugs to read your cover story, “STOP: A national forest tries to rein in recreation” (HCN, 1/17/00); seems that some folks thought their oxen would never get gored, and are now caterwauling as if flesh wounds were fatalities. It’s kind of entertaining, and long overdue. Recreation has become, with our…
Don’t blame Naropa University
Dear HCN, It is with a saddened heart that I read the article about the lawsuit against Naropa University (HCN, 12/6/99). I am a recent graduate (1998), and Eagle Cruz taught Environmental Studies, which is the degree I received. I enrolled in every course Eagle taught, and he was one of my favorite professors. He…
At, not down!
Dear HCN, In the 12/20/99 “Hotline” column, HCN reported that “… at a Flathead forest meeting in Kalispell, conservationists were shouted down.” While it is true that we were shouted at, booed, hissed and told to prepare to shed blood, we were not shouted down. Testimony by conservationists in favor of the Clinton roadless initiative…
White River is like Targhee
Dear HCN, The revised White River Forest Plan does not sound that different from the revised Targhee Forest Plan, so it is not all that precedent-setting (HCN, 1/17/00). The Targhee Forest Plan closed 93 percent of the forest to motorized use of any kind, including all summer cross-country ORV use, eliminated nine livestock allotments, set…
Hazel Wolf: She made it
Hazel Wolf died in Port Angeles, Wash., on Jan. 24 at the age of 101. Wolf, a lifelong activist for social justice and the environment (HCN, 11/9/98: Wise words from a veteran activist), once told author Studs Terkel that she wanted to live to see the year 2000. “Then I’m going,” she said. Wolf, a…
‘Clear-cuts for kids’
Dear HCN, Karen Mockler’s article, “Counties grab for control of national forests’ (HCN, 12/20/99) alerted me to a pair of bills being debated in Congress. HR 2389, the “County Schools Funding Revitalization Act” already has passed the House of Representatives, and its companion piece with the brotherly name, “Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination…
‘Romantic piece of fluff’
Dear HCN, Your romantic piece of fluff about ranching in the San Luis Valley (HCN, 12/6/99) does a disservice to all of us who are trying to envision a positive future for the West. I have come to expect a much higher standard of journalism from you. We must, I repeat MUST, move away from…
The Wayward West
For the first time, the federal government concedes that workers at 14 nuclear weapons plants, including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (HCN, 9/1/97: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia), were exposed to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals. The Department of Energy report linked radiation exposure to the high rates of cancers…
How green is your politico?
A new television ad campaign in Washington state lets voters know which candidates up for re-election next fall have minded their green p’s and q’s. The $2 million project got under way in mid-January, and it features the nationally syndicated Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” who uses humor and science to teach the public how…
Amend the Northwest Forest Plan
One million acres of old-growth forests in the Northwest could be opened to logging. The Clinton administration proposes to amend the Northwest Forest Plan to loosen requirements for surveys of rare plants and animals prior to timber sales. Request the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Study at 503/808-2197 or view it on the Web at www.or.blm.gov/nwfpnepa.…
Land of the fee
Recreation fees promised a jackpot for money-starved federal agencies. So far, they’re a drop in the bucket, and they lock some people out.
Fees around the West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests, Colorado A fee to see the top of Colorado’s Mount Evans sparked rage from some motorists when they discovered that they were the only visitors paying. The Forest Service changed its approach, charging drivers $6 per carload at the…
Working class can’t foot the bill
For some, it’s a choice between recreation and a new pair of school shoes
‘Fee demo is not the full answer’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Jeff Bailey has been the Inyo National Forest supervisor since May 1998: “Congress needs to realize we need more dollars out here. Fee demo is not the full answer. It’s one of the very small tools, and it’s a very small component of what…
‘You can’t sell a sunset’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Scott Silver is the founder of Wild Wilderness, an anti-fee organization based in Bend,Ore.: “The Forest Service is looking at industrial strength recreation as their new business and us as their customers. More and more, the Forest Service is putting itself in between (the…
‘I think recreation should be subsidized’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Gary Guenther, a former Inyo Wilderness ranger and volunteer with Missoula-based Wilderness Watch: “I think the pressure should be on Congress. The agency is between a rock and a hard place on this issue. I think it’s interesting when the environmental community and the…
‘We want the public lands to be in the backyard of the little guy’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Chris Wood is senior policy advisor to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck: “I’ve been on a fee demonstration area on a national forest and absolutely befuddled by how I was supposed to get a permit to use an area on a Saturday. I literally…
Fee fighters refuse to pay
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Sun Valley, Idaho, resident Diana Fassino returned from a hike last July 31 to find a ticket on the window of her car. She’d been walking in Adams Gulch on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, an area popular with equestrians and mountain bikers, and…
Dear Friends
In a union town It was probably the wrong place to hold the annual High Country Foundation budget meeting, if only because it led to so many bad jokes about balancing the budget at the craps table. Nevertheless, approximately 25 board members and staff of this organization converged on the San Remo Hotel, just off…
From missile silo to theme park
Tourists can explore the home of a Minuteman
Heard around the West
There’s something about “the big ditch” that’s got the U.S. Postal Service buffaloed. Last year, the federal agency honored Arizona’s Grand Canyon with a stamp that placed the giant gorge in the wrong state – Colorado. That led to the shredding of 100 million stamps. This year, a new 60-cent stamp reverses an image of…
Mumma resigns – wildlife division shaken up
Nine years ago, Northern Regional Forester John Mumma stood tearfully before a House subcommittee and said he had been betrayed by the Forest Service (HCN, 10/7/91). Because he didn’t meet timber quotas in the 13 national forests under his care, he said, powerful industry and political interests had conspired to force him out of his…
‘Hunting’ for elk in the salt pits of the upper Yellowstone
This October, on a slant-sunny day, I rode with friends just outside Yellowstone Park’s southeastern corner, where an old hunting practice called salt baiting still occurs. For 30 years, commercial big-game outfitters in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness have strewn salt in the meadows of the upper Yellowstone River and along the park boundary. They do it…