Well-organized and well-heeled, off-road vehicle users constitute a large and powerful group aiming to stake its claim to the West’s public lands.
Zakin skewered historian
Dear HCN, I have a great deal of respect for Susan Zakin as a writer and, for the most part, I was quite interested in her article, “Shake-up: Greens inside the Beltway” (HCN, 11/11/96). However, I was concerned by her disparaging comments about William Cronon, and the way she frames his book, Uncommon Ground, as…
Belonging to the West
-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.” * Eric Paddock I moved to the West because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the West -…
National groups were latecomers
Dear HCN, In his opinion piece on the demise of the New World Mine outside Yellowstone (HCN, 9/2/96), Rocky Barker writes: “Just as important was the fact that the grass roots led the fight. If national environmental groups had taken the lead as they did in the Northwest’s ancient forest campaign, my guess is that…
Coyote Angels
Bart Koehler, director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and a co-founder of Earth First!, always took time out from fighting for environmental issues to sing about them. Now he and his Coyote Angels band have released a CD featuring songs about the wild life of the West. Some, dedicated to green greats such as…
Don’t worry yet
Dear HCN, The tentative agreement that would forever end the prospect of mining gold adjacent to Yellowstone National Park will turn out to be a good deal for the West and the nation. Details of the agreement, which includes a $22.5 million company cleanup at the site and swapping $65 million in federal assets for…
Rein in those planes
Anyone who has had their solitude blasted by the sudden scream of low-flying military jets while hiking in the West will want a copy of the 24-page Citizen’s Guide to Opposing Military Airspace Expansion. While the military has downsized its airfleet almost by half since the demise of the Soviet Union, it continues to seek…
Roll on, Columbia
It’s easy to sum up the view of two new books on the Columbia River, the Nchi-Wana in a native tongue: It was wild, dammed, polluted and mutilated. Pulitzer Prize winner William Dietrich tells a fascinating tale in Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River as he leaves no aspect of the river untouched. Beginning with…
He’s boldly going outside
Dear HCN, I love optimists, I really do. I’m one myself. I’m especially fond of the quintessential pie-in-the-sky optimists like Dyan Zaslowsky, who recommends just saying “no” to whatever hot spot is being loved to death in your neighborhood (HCN, 9/16/96). Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether someone is starry-eyed, or just loves the sound…
Even in Quiet Places
It is a secret still, but already your tree is chosen. It has entered a forest for miles and hides deep in a valley by a river. No one else finds it; the sun passes over not noticing. But even while you are reading you happen to think of that tree, no matter where sentences…
Let’s increase the supply of outdoors
Dear HCN, Writer Dyan Zaslowsky suggests that we stay home and give parks a rest (HCN, 9/16/96), which ticks me off for two reasons: If you go more than three miles on almost any trail, you are going to be alone. So the issue of parks being elbow-to-elbow with people is silly. Crowding is usually…
Wear what you sow
South Dakotan Michael Melius sells jewelry you plant – -Seed Beads’ loaded with seeds of increasingly rare native grasses and wildflowers and strung on scraps of linen thread. It was the simplest packaging Melius could think of. “I had tried to sell seed mixes in packets with little success, I think, because that packaging implies…
Locally owned in Great Falls
-The toughest part of reporting for a newspaper is talking to people that you know are lying to you.” * Lauran Dundee, community weekly publisher The Great Times, a weekly newspaper with offices in downtown Great Falls, Mont., was born Sept. 18, 1996. “It’s based on the old-fashioned concept of what a paper should do,”…
The High Uintas need help
Salt Lake City environmentalist Dick Carter is at it again, this time founding a new nonprofit, the High Uintas Preservation Council. After the Utah Wilderness Association – the group that tried to forge a compromise in the state’s wilderness debate – closed shop last spring, Carter took a few months off to hike. But the…
No name for art
-The reason I draw the designs is to make the past and present come together. It’s like mixing colors.” * Jordan Harvier, age 13 Bruce Hucko’s new book, Where There is No Name for Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children, is like Harvier’s quote. It blends black-and-white photographs of young artists, interviews and colorful…
Judge tells EPA to hurry up in Idaho
Conservationists won a major court ruling this fall in their two-decade-long battle with the state of Idaho and the Environmental Protection Agency to implement and enforce the Clean Water Act. In a sharply worded opinion, federal district judge William Dwyer, of northern spotted owl fame, chided the EPA and the state for failing to develop…
Checks are in the mail
Home siding by Louisiana-Pacific Inc. sold as a cheap alternative to cedar turned out to be more expensive than expected. When it swelled, buckled, soaked up water, rotted and even grew a mushroomlike fungus in wet weather, customers began frantically calling the company about their Inner Seal siding (HCN, 8/21/95). Now, Louisiana-Pacific says it will…
Where’s the fish?
Maps from Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources show more than a thousand miles of the state’s streams contain no fish. But they’re wrong. This distinction is important because state law requires that loggers and developers leave protective corridors of vegetation for erosion control next to fish-bearing streams. But biologists fear the mapping mistakes have…
Predators also have rights
Dear HCN, As a Colorado urban dweller for 21 years and a Colorado resident again in my future, I feel more than qualified to respond to Ellen Miller’s essay, “Should city slickers dictate to trappers?” (HCN, 10/28/96). I was born and raised in the hellhole of the Midwest, Muscatine, Iowa, population 23,000, but apparently I…
County trashes waste plan
Elmore County, Idaho, residents voted overwhelmingly this past election to allow the continued shipment of out-of-state nuclear wastes to a site 200 miles to the east of them. But they are putting their foot down on a plan to place the state’s largest landfill in their backyard. The planning and zoning commission decided to deny…
Heard around the West
Did you think intellectual activity at the Forest Service is strangled with red tape? Then you’ve never heard them on the subject of wilderness golf. Forest Service employee Wendy Keeler recently sent an e-mail about her encounter with a group of families in the midst of a friendly golf tournament in the middle of a…
Stripmining history and culture for dollars
Who owns Crazy Horse? Were the great Oglala warrior still alive, there would be no question: Crazy Horse, who helped Sitting Bull orchestrate Custer’s last stand, was not the owning kind. But 120 years after his death, the Minnesota Court of Appeals has affirmed a New York brewery’s right to market “Original Crazy Horse Malt…
Dear friends
Let the waters flow As the days grow shorter and darkness comes earlier, we look for signs that winter isn’t really closing in. Octogenarian David Brower helped us out the other day with a cheery phone call at dusk from California. He had surprising news: The club’s board had just voted unanimously to support emptying…
Agency ordered to study trout – again
The beleaguered bull trout has been given another chance to make the endangered species list. U.S. District Judge Robert Jones ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review its 1994 decision that the fish doesn’t warrant immediate protection because other species have more pressing needs. Jones called parts of the Fish and Wildlife Service…
Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
If off-road vehicle enthusiasts ever build a museum, a statue of former Idaho Gov. John Evans should stand out front, a scowl on his face, and his now-famous saying – “You’re politically insignificant” – on the statue’s pedestal. Evans made that remark in 1984 to Clark Collins, an electrician and avid dirt biker who wanted…
Forest Service building is torched by night raiders
A Forest Service ranger station in Oregon has become the latest target in the wave of violence directed at federal installations around the West. The Oakridge Ranger Station, about an hour’s drive southeast of Eugene, burst into flames early on the morning of Oct. 30. By the time firefighters had arrived, the 25,000-square-foot building had…
This machine makes trails …
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Parked in the back lot of the Forest Service office in Delta, Colo., is a skinny little bulldozer that looks almost like a toy. Designed to build trails, the Swepco 450 is tricky to maneuver since 8,000 pounds of steel balance on tracks only…
…while ‘Rambo Cat’ obliterates them
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The Forest Service’s Alan Vandiver is boss of some 800 miles of roads in the Hebgen Lake District in Montana, just outside Yellowstone National Park. That’s a lot of road, but it’s 130 miles less than it used to be, thanks to a road-ripping…
Whiskey Peak: Great air, deteriorating ground
WHISKEY PEAK, Wyo. – Two hang-glider pilots ran into the air off the top of Whiskey Peak one day last summer and began circling over treetops. Just 20 minutes later they were soaring at 16,000 feet. “You just catch a thermal and blow downwind,” said Kevin Christopherson, who set two world distance records from the…
Can Madison Avenue tread lightly in the West?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Two men bludgeon a parked Land Rover with sledgehammers. They’re swinging as hard as they can, yet they barely make a dent. This is what Kirk Kirssin of Tread Lightly! considers a responsible television ad. Land Rover didn’t have to show a truck blazing…
A little bug causes a big stink in Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CORAL PINK SAND DUNES STATE PARK, Utah – -This might be a little rough,” says Rob Quist with a grin, as he guns the engine of his four-wheel drive truck. Suddenly, we are lurching toward a 50-foot-tall sand dune, wheels spinning in the soft…
Locals learn the value of a good view
STANLEY, Idaho – A proposal for two subdivisions on private land within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, one of the nation’s scenic treasures, has stirred up long-held resentments between landowners and the Forest Service. A local outfitter’s plan to build 10 homes on a five-acre parcel has prompted a cease-and-desist order from the Forest Service.…
Trying to think the good thoughts about ATVs
An elk hunter dislikes ORVs despite their convenience because they make the country too small.