A new governor sparks debate with a controversial solution
Hal Herring
Posted inNovember 11, 2002: Behind the gate
How to make your own Yellowstone, Mexican style
A corporate behemoth races to restore a Coahuilan gem
Posted inNovember 5, 2001: Wyoming's powder keg
Wasting disease spreads in Colorado
Game farm shipped 400 exposed elk to 15 states
Posted inSeptember 10, 2001: The rise and fall of a desert stream
Cease-fire on the Tonto Forest
Forest Service bans ‘plinking’ on 81,000 acres in Arizona
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Babbit followed ‘the tyranny of the majority’
Dear HCN, I would like to respond to Glenn Koepke’s letter, “Don’t glorify Babbitt” (HCN, 3/12/01: Don’t glorify Babbitt). Mr. Koepke presents his arguments with enviable skill, and articulates what may be the majority position in the West regarding public-lands management – that the lands exist to be utilized in traditional ways, to produce timber, […]
Posted inDecember 18, 2000: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Gun controllers need to think again
Dear HCN, I am glad that Ali Macalady and her family are devoted to hunting. I share with her the belief that “there is something important about harvesting my own food,” and a love of early mornings spent waiting for game. But it is disappointing to read that an outdoorswoman such as Macalady considers it […]
Posted inDecember 18, 2000: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Cure or curse?
As Chronic Wasting Disease appears again, questions arise about the velvet antler trade
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Montana hunters blast game farms
Initiative 143 would kill canned huntingand hobble the elk industry
Posted inJuly 31, 2000: Out of the darkness
Killing Coyote
The human hordes are still at it, roaming the last of the Big Open with their guns and traps and poisons, trying to wipe out yet another of their fellow creatures. This time, the target is the resilient trickster himself, coyote. Doug Hawes-Davis frames his latest documentary film, Killing Coyote, with the Calcutta, a coyote-killing […]
Posted inJanuary 31, 2000: Searching for pasture
Montana burns game farm elk
On a cold and windy morning last Dec. 7, livestock officials began killing the elk on the Kesler Game Farm near Philipsburg, Mont. The herd had been under quarantine for chronic wasting disease for over a year when an elk that had just died on the ranch was found to be infected. Local game wardens […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Crow tribe lays claim to elk
The Crow Tribe has launched a plan to capture 550 wild elk on its reservation in the Bighorn Mountains of Montana. It’s the beginning of the tribe’s foray into game farming, but it is also sure to mark the beginning of a bitter battle over publicly owned wildlife. “It is a spooky proposal, that’s for […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Disease is wasting the West’s wild herds
Nobody knows where the disease came from, or if it has existed forever, confined to the lodgepole forests, shortgrass prairies and alfalfa fields of north-central Colorado and southeast Wyoming. It is not known how it passes among its victims. What is certain is that the whitetails, mule deer and elk that contract it inevitably die […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Give me a home where the engines roar
A recent editorial in the weekly Bitterroot Star of Stevensville, Mont., likened a racetrack proposed for the Bitterroot Valley to “a smelly dog, running from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of a home.” Promoters first went to the Ravalli County Commission, asking to build a racetrack at the county fairgrounds in Hamilton, Mont. The commissioners […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
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 […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
The Pacific Yew: Chasing a cancer cure with a chainsaw
Above 4,000 feet it rained every day of the summer of 1993. On the Fourth of July, a long night of rain and wind gave way at dawn to a fine sleet that lay on the ground like snow, and didn’t melt for nearly three days. We were somewhere east of Pierce, Idaho, on the […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
The Rocky Mountain Front faces new oil-and-gas threat
BABB, Mont. – Chief Mountain, a 9,000-foot outlying peak west of here, stands like a boundary marker on the Rocky Mountain Front, where glacier-carved peaks meet rolling plains. It also marks the political intersection of Glacier National Park’s eastern boundary with the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. A recent plan by the Blackfeet tribal business council to […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
On a Montana ranch, big game and big problems
DARBY, Mont. – It’s almost September, and dozens of “shooter bulls” have been turned into the shooting enclosure of Big Velvet Elk Ranch, just south of here, in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Ranch owner Len Wallace has booked 80 clients for the fall and every one of them is going to shoot a trophy elk, […]