In New Mexico, some Indian reservations are jumping on a surprising new economic bandwagon, making use of their land and water rights to build golf courses and resorts to attract golf-playing tourists.
Dogs to sniff out grizzly numbers
WASHINGTON The mystery of how many grizzly bears inhabit Washington’s rugged North Cascade Mountains may soon be solved with some help from man’s best friend. David Wasser, a zoology professor at the University of Washington, is using four dogs to sniff out bear scat; Wasser says they can smell it from up to a half-mile…
Fiery anthropocentrism
Dear HCN, Steve Pyne’s fine article on Ed Pulaski, and the Forest Service’s corporate culture about forest fires, is a great read (HCN, 4/23/01: The Big Blowup). But Steve, like so many others, fails to see the main point about humans vs. fires. Fires happen. It’s not our fault. The idea that finding “a Pulaski”…
‘Squaw’ and mindless parroting of bad science
Dear HCN, I have been amused for the past 30 years each time someone takes umbrage at the use of the word squaw while making the assertion that it is a vulgar term invented by white man to demean Native American women. We did encourage and abet the destruction of the early inhabitants by means…
The Latest Bounce
Vermont Sen. James Jeffords’ defection from the Republican Party was costly for Western Republicans. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah lost his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico stepped down as budget chairman; and Sen. John McCain of Arizona lost his top seat on the Commerce Committee. Western Democrats now…
Anatomy of the West
Dear HCN, Ah! Political correctness … and all its ironies. When I was younger, I’d get outraged at some of this nonsense. In my grandmother’s day, to have an outlaw or American Indian blood in the family was a shame and kept secret. But attitudes change, as well as word usage. Gay. Totally different word,…
Jackson Hole takes aim at helicopter tours
WYOMING There’s a fierce dogfight in progress over the airspace in Teton County, Wyo. Vortex Aviation Services, headed by Gary Kauffman, is gearing up to begin commercial helicopter tours over the county’s scenic areas this summer (HCN, 8/14/00: Whirlybirds will fly over Jackson). The plan has environmentalists and other concerned citizens declaring war. “We don’t…
Lake Coeur d’Alene at stake
IDAHO Locked in a custody battle over the southern third of Lake Coeur d’Alene, the Coeur d’Alene tribe and the State of Idaho are arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Idaho says the entire lake falls under its aegis. The tribe, however, claims partial ownership under the 19th century treaty that established its reservation. “It’s…
Will the Grand Staircase suffer shrinkage?
UTAH After years of griping about national monuments, Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, wants to create one. The ranking member of the House Resources Committee is hoping to preserve 50 acres of Jurassic-era dinosaur tracks unearthed last year in St. George, Utah. The tracks show uniquely sharp detail of knuckles, tail drags and skin texture. But…
A high country whodunit
When gasoline-inspired flames devoured the massive, splendid Two Elk restaurant atop Vail Mountain in October 1998, many people automatically blamed environmental activists. After all, a federal judge had just allowed the Vail ski area, already the nation’s largest and busiest, to expand into an area where evidence of the rare Canada lynx had been found…
Intrepid explorer with a cause
Many recent college graduates shoulder their backpacks for a genteel trip to Europe. Not Soren Jespersen. The Northern Arizona University alum hoisted his for a five-month 2,200-mile solo trek around the Four Corners region to raise money for the Center for Humanitarian Outreach and Intercultural Exchange or CHOICE. The Utah-based group, directed by Soren’s dad,…
A sand-brown world
… and the tourists in the curio shop not knowing what to say for once in their lives, but feeling the ground rolling beneath them, experience something most of them won’t see in a lifetime, up on the shelf the kachina dolls, those little gods of beneficence who’ve stood there so long they’re mad about…
Battling for the Bear River
When newspaper photographer Dan Miller covered a protest against a highway project near Logan, Utah, he saw a demonstrator brandishing a sign with the timeworn slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally.” The sentiment hit home. “I realized I needed to be thinking backyard, neighborhood, community,” he says. That meant turning his attention toward the Bear River…
Erring on waste
Dear HCN, As a Christmas subscriber, I have both praise and criticism for three recent articles about nuclear waste in the West. In the Dec. 18, 2000, issue, Oakley Brooks authored a short but commendable piece called “Agency gets rebuked,” in which he unearthed a rather obscure report critical of the Department of Energy’s long-term…
Tortoises take on tanks
CALIFORNIA In the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, a 15-year-long battle over 131,000 acres of desert may be coming to a head. The proposed expansion of the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin could harm two high-profile local residents, the threatened desert tortoise and the endangered Lane Mountain milkvetch. The expansion area, now managed…
Cooperation and other shibboleths
Dear HCN, I don’t know how many times I’ve read or heard that the solution to the differences between environmentalists and ranchers is “cooperation.” Lovely word, cooperation. Unfortunately, it seems to mean different things to different people. To the rancher, it’s “leave us alone to do our thing.” To most environmentalists, it means reducing the…
Energy plan eyes the Rockies
Land managers and environmentalists wait for the details
Takings legislation cracks Oregon’s green foundation
Rural landowners say government is regulating them to death
Heard around the West
James Watt is positively basking in nostalgia these days. For those who don’t recall his bumpy years in Washington, D.C., Watt was the former Interior Department secretary under President Reagan, who pushed for energetic energy development on all public lands. When The Denver Post caught up with Watt recently, he was delighted to talk about…
An energy plan as solid as natural gas
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Surely, there was a time when the much-heralded proposals issued in these parts actually meant something. One must not romanticize the past, and in the immortal words of racing columnist Col. Stingo, “memory grows furtive.” Furtive or not, there is a memory of receiving, one chilly November afternoon in 1973, the much-heralded…
West braces for Big Buildup II
In the boom times of the 1950s, Western city leaders embarked on the Big Buildup. It was an intensive resource-development campaign that wrote a critical part of the story of the modern West across the grand tableau of the Colorado Plateau – the Four Corners area, the high redrock desert, the canyon country, including the…
California monument welcomes cattle
Does the wildlife-rich Carrizo Plain need grazing to thrive?
Tribal Links
Why are New Mexico’s Indian tribes embracing the ultimate white man’s game?
Environmentalism meets a fierce friend
Ten years ago, Tom Knudson awakened the West by revealing what had happened in California’s Sierra Nevada – John Muir’s “Range of Light” and the mountains that inspired the formation of the Sierra Club. Knudson’s 1991 series in the Sacramento Bee showed a Sierra under siege from five horsemen of a coming apocalypse: logging, grazing…
Dear Friends
Back from Berkeley They stayed for graduation and one last sushi dinner, but then Ed and Betsy Marston, publisher and editor of this paper, high-tailed it east from Berkeley, Calif., to Paonia, Colo., and the rural life. But while their four-month teaching stint at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley,…