About 20 miles east of Lander, Wyo., cliffs rise from a sagebrush-laden basin between the Wind and the Sweetwater rivers. The erosion-carved rocks display unusually intact geological layers from 10 to 53 million years ago. Golden eagles and ferruginous hawks soar high above; greater sage grouse and pronghorn winter at the base. All this helped […]
Kimberly Hirai
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini […]
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Friday news roundup: Prosperous and in Congress
Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo, is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. And she’s by far the wealthiest congressperson in her state, according to a recent report by WyoFile, the Wyoming-based investigative reporting network. Her net worth–between $5.5 million and $24 million–cast her as the 29th richest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, according […]
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Renting a riverbed
A land ownership case is in deep water, bringing property rights, public domain and commerce into question. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in PPL Montana vs. Montana yesterday, in a fight over who owns title to riverbeds in the state. In 2010, the Montana Supreme Court ruled the state held title to land beneath […]
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Friday news roundup: speeding renewable projects on tribal lands
Recent efforts to speed the process of approving surface leases on tribal lands have moved slower than a Mojave Desert tortoise. But regulations proposed by the Interior Department Monday could help tribes more quickly gain Bureau of Indian Affairs approval for renewable energy, residential, or business leases on some of the 56 million acres of […]
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Landing a land transaction
A Wyoming congressional representative is trying to resurrect a federal land sale act to reduce the budget deficit and help the National Park Service end a long quest to capture a Grand Teton inholding. The Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (pronounced “flit-fah”) was enacted in July 2000 to allow federal agencies to sell off disposable […]
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Friday news roundup: Road rage and a wild lands successor
Several Utah counties and the state think the Bureau of Land Management is playing troll in a billy goat saga by limiting access to several hundred road segments that cross public lands. County and state officials want to wrest road control from the BLM, and hope U.S. District Court Magistrate Brooke Wells will grant them […]
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Big money bill could restrict bighorn management
Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson isn’t sheepish about legislative appendages. First it was a grazing rider that would allow the Bureau of Land Management to transfer permits without environmental review. His latest — also tacked to the House’s 2012 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations bill — could decide the fate of a wooly battle […]
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Friday news roundup: ESA sees another day
The U.S. Supreme Court just waived its chance to rule on a constitutional challenge to the Endangered Species Act, the sixth time it’s refused to hear cases that might limit the bedrock law. The fish, endemic to the state, is two to three inches in length and resides in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta’s […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
BLM experiments with camouflage to hide renewable power structures
On a late summer day, Bureau of Land Management visual resource specialist Sherry Roche lugged a 50-pound plywood panel from a white pickup onto the bare hillside of Hubbard Mesa near Rifle, Colo. Others lashed it to the ground with climbing rope, then stepped back to see if its specially engineered pattern of pixels faded […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Development near national parks impacts park ecology
Though many Western national parks are buffered by other public lands, housing development on their outskirts has been on the rise. Between the 1940s and 2000, the number of homes within 30 miles of national parks grew from 1.5 million to 6.6 million, according to a study which appeared in the Proceedings of the National […]
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Will Valles Caldera become a national park?
Around 3,000 elk, the second largest herd in New Mexico, spent the summer munching on Valles Caldera National Preserve grasslands before migrating to nearby Bandelier National Monument for the winter. A menagerie of other wildlife also stake claim to the collapsed volcano’s mountain forests: black bear, mountain lion, bobcat and 60 species of birds. A […]
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Friday news roundup: Pipeline of political posturing
Letters are flying as congressional lawmakers look to send a persuasive final word to the State Department on the Keystone XL Pipeline project in its final hour of debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., spoke for the first time against the project in an Oct. 5 missive, but 22 House Democrats signed a letter […]
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Weighing water
Updated 10-19-2011 For the past 20 years, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger was a chief arbiter of many California water disputes, parceling water to farmers, urbanites and sensitive fish species. Appointed in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush, Wanger made more than 90 decisions in regard to California’s water before stepping down Sept. […]
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Resource plans rescinded for sage grouse
Wildlife advocates won a round against energy development and grazing in Wyoming and Idaho last week, when Idaho Chief U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill overturned two Bureau of Land Management resource management plans in favor of the Hailey, Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project. The nonprofit conservation group argued the BLM was too hasty in development […]
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The business of banking
Early this August, 12 branches of a bank serving rural Washington state — the Colfax-based Bank of Whitman — shuttered their doors for good. The closure is just one more in a long series of bank failures stemming from the financial crisis. The vast majority of banks are community banks, making up 98 percent of […]
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Friday News Roundup: Bison and borders
A final answer to where wild bison can roam won’t surface until Montana develops a statewide conservation strategy for the mighty rangeland beasts. In the meantime, bison need a temporary home, and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks is discussing where to put them. They say that may be Fort Belknap and Fort […]
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Friday News Roundup: Wolf hunts and Wyoming refinery woes
Idaho and Montana’s wolf hunting seasons kicked off without much of a howl last week. This is the second year of hunting; the 2009-2010, was held after the Rocky Mountain gray wolf’s removal from the endangered species list. Idaho and Montana have wolf hunting seasons that last four and 10 months, respectively — part of […]
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Illegal trailblazing as negotiation tool?
If you build it, the federal land agencies will include it. That’s what Montana mountain biking enthusiast Ron Cron counted on when he embarked on a three-day, illegal trail-making frenzy in the Flathead National Forest in May 2009, complete with jumps and other technical features. Illegal trail building is ubiquitous on Western public lands, plaguing […]
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California desal plant irks enviros
Updated 8/26/2011, 4 p.m. The Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit group that works to protect oceans and beaches, just renewed its longstanding fight against a southern California desalination plant. The group has long contended the plant would kill marine animals on account of how it uptakes ocean water. But in June, the San Diego Superior Court […]