Despite a court order, a grand jury’s “secret” report on the Rocky Flats bomb factory in Colorado is out of the closet. Anti-nuke activists have had copies for years, and the full report has been posted on the World Wide Web at www.downwinders.org/rocky_fl.htm. Nevertheless, few have been privy to what the so-called runaway grand jury […]
R.e. Baird
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
The mouse that roared “Preble”
Naturalist E.A. Preble, who bagged a nondescript mouse on the bank of an irrigation ditch near Loveland, Colo., in 1895, might be surprised at the ruckus he’s caused. The meadow jumping mouse named for him – a subspecies restricted to the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range – is now at the center of a controversy […]
Posted inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
The heart of a ranch was a coyote
Dear HCN: Sid Goodloe’s reliance upon wild turkeys to keep grasshoppers down and to fluff the forest floor (HCN, 4/15/96) to help it burn reminds me of a similar situation involving coyotes on a mountain ranch near Chiloquin, Ore. Through befriending a coyote they later named Don Coyote, the Dayton Hyde family was led to […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Congress fights to restore a filthy past
What follows sounds like a nightmare. But it’s not. It’s true. If you have a weak stomach, don’t read it. I grew up in an area of Kansas City, Kan., called Armourdale, which was bordered on the east by two meat-packing companies, on the west by two soap factories, on the north by the Santa […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 1995: The West's fisheries spin out of control
Out of a Hispanic valley: kosher beef
For the Valdez family, ranching in Conejos County – a poor, rural, largely Hispanic and Catholic area of southern Colorado – hasn’t changed much since their ancestors settled there five generations ago. Except that Olive and Demetrio Valdez are now reading a book on Judaism that explains the Kashrut, the Jewish rules governing a kosher […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Was cleanup a “taking’?
It’s a case with bizarre implications: A Boulder, Colo., company that owns land on which the disastrous Summitville Mine was built is suing the state for allowing the disaster to happen and the federal government for spending millions to clean it up. Filed in Rio Grande County District Court, the landowners’ suit claims the state […]