Eleven Mexican gray wolves were released to the wilds of the Arizona-New Mexico border March 29 (HCN, 2/16/98); now one wolf is dead – shot and killed by a camper who said it attacked his family’s dog, reports the Albuquerque Journal. The wolf program faces a lawsuit filed by a coalition of New Mexico ranchers, […]
Dustin Solberg
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Foreign forests keep mills alive
Even as the United States cuts fewer trees on its public lands and exports fewer raw logs, some mills stay as busy as ever. How? By milling imported logs. In Oregon, some mills are relying on imports of plantation-grown radiata pine from Chile and New Zealand to replace the dwindling supply of domestic trees. Cascade […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Timber town opts for water over logs
The vast old-growth forests of the Cascade Range built the tiny town of Detroit, Ore., and kept three local sawmills bustling. Every year, residents counted on timber from the Willamette National Forest to fuel the economy much as they waited for spring snowmelt to fill the local reservoir. The Forest Service, and the spring snowmelt, […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
GAO knocks Forest Service again
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. The General Accounting Office once again told the U.S. Forest Service what it was doing wrong. It took 12 pages. For more than a decade, the investigative arm of Congress has issued dozens of reports telling the Forest Service how to do […]
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
The Wayward West
Idaho has more wolves and one less wolf biologist. The Nez Perce tribe has fired Timm Kaminski, who led the tribe’s wolf reintroduction program for the last 18 months, AP reports (HCN, 3/3/97). At the end of last year, six breeding pairs were roaming central Idaho. The tribe isn’t saying why Kaminski was dismissed. Idaho […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
The Wayward West
Idaho is not a hotbed of white supremacists and neo-Nazis (HCN, 3/16/98), says Idaho Gov. Phil Batt. His campaign to restore the state’s image has taken him to the slopes of Sun Valley, where the 70-year-old onion farmer told 2,600 members of the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an all-black group, that Idaho has been tarnished […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Locals protest Vail expansion
A long-debated expansion at Colorado’s Vail ski resort gained a go-ahead from the Forest Service, but some locals aren’t so sure they need more ski runs – or the trophy homes they say are sure to follow. Critics charge Vail Associates is using the ski area expansion to make way for profitable base area development. […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Cove-Mallard warms up for another summer
No sooner had the courts given the Forest Service a go-ahead to resume logging in Idaho’s Cove-Mallard than activists took to the woods to begin a sixth straight year of protest. Nez Perce National Forest officials responded by arresting two activists perched in 40-foot-high tripods. The June 18 arrests came one week after U.S. Magistrate […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Tailings pile makes waves
Tailings pile makes waves Uranium mine tailings piled on the banks of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, will stay put if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and Atlas Minerals Co. get their way. In a draft environmental impact statement released in January, the federal agency says reclaiming the tailings mountain on site – as the […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
One less voice
One less voice The Utah Wilderness Association will go into hibernation March 29 after 17 years of fighting for wilderness preservation. Staff departures and money woes led to the decision by the group’s board of directors. One of UWA’s founders, Dick Carter, says his resignation, plus those of George Nickas and Gary Macfarlane over the […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
A lie this big
It’s hard to believe, but the director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department was caught fishing without a license. Last June a game warden stopped for a routine license check at a stream near Rawlins, Wyo., and found director John Talbott didn’t have a $9 license with him. Talbott told the warden his license […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
DIA’s skies aren’t friendly
It’s not easy to talk with John Henderson at his Elbert County home. Though he lives 30 miles from the Denver International Airport, he counts 150 jets passing over his home on most days. “It’s like standing next to a vacuum cleaner,” Henderson says, when a 747 thunders just 3,000 feet over his house after […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
For seven days, it will flood
For one week this spring, the Colorado River will rage through the Grand Canyon much as it did before Glen Canyon Dam tamed its flow. The remedy for the canyon’s eroding beaches and silted backwaters was recommended in the 1995 Glen Canyon Dam Environmental Impact Statement. “The ecosystem of the Grand Canyon is based on […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
BuRec gets a new leader
The Bureau of Reclamation, slimmer now after former chief Dan Beard cut 1,500 from its workforce and $107 million from a $911 million budget, has a new boss. “I don’t have any agendas,” says Commissioner Eluid Martinez, who worked as New Mexico’s state engineer for four years. “I just want to do a good job […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Subterranean terror
SUBTERRANEAN TERROR “I thought if only I could get out, I’m going to get a whole new perspective on my life, because I’ve faced death square in the face.” * Dennis Workman, who was trapped in a mine for 56 hours This January, a young Utah man plunged 600 feet down a mine shaft on […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Colorado ski area dumps all over trout stream
WINTER PARK, Colo. – When a snow-grooming machine swept downhill at Colorado’s Winter Park ski area in late January, it did more than groom a wider ski run. It packed a section of Little Vasquez Creek with snow, possibly wiping out the stream’s population of cutthroat trout. Winter Park and the Forest Service are at […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Wolf from Canada killed by U.S. red tape
The release of 26 British Columbia wolves into Idaho and Yellowstone National Park seemed a howling success until biologists were forced to kill a wolf after it bit a biologist’s thumb to the bone. The alpha male bit John Weaver during a stopover in Missoula, Mont., the day before the animal was to be released […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
The Northwest’s new economy
THE NORTHWEST’S NEW ECONOMY When the Pacific Northwest’s timber and aerospace industries started declining, some people predicted the region would become the next Appalachia. Instead, the region is thriving, says University of Montana economist Tom Power, whose conclusion is endorsed by 34 other Northwest economists. Growth in earnings, employment and population in Idaho, Montana, Oregon […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Environmentalists say agency uses them as scapegoats
For hundreds of years, rural Hispanics have gathered firewood from the forests of northern New Mexico. After all, it was once their land, given to them in Spanish land grants as far back as the late 17th century. Even after the Forest Service took control of the land grants in the early 1900s, local families […]