By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House A water mining project that’s been a quarter-century in the making took a major step forward last week, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recommended approval of a plan for diverting groundwater from three counties in eastern Nevada to Sin City. In its final environmental impact statement (FEIS), the […]
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Wheels of change
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Many people who’ve hiked or run on mixed-use trails have experienced that moment when, lost in your mind, a mountain biker comes tearing down the slope from behind, scaring the spit out of you. I’m not fond of that particular sensation but, while I’ve been on umpteen trails […]
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Seeing the (overcrowded) forest for the trees
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I was wandering around Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) last week, absorbing the cooling sight of snowfields and the 30-degree temperature drop earned by more than doubling my elevation from Boulder. On my way along Trail Ridge Road, I stopped at the Farview Curve overlook on the west […]
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Putting the West on a low-carb(on) diet
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House The day after the University of Colorado Law School’s annual summer conference — “A Low Carbon Energy Blueprint for the American West” — had ended, I was walking in downtown Fort Collins, when something above the foothills caught my eye. The dense white puff looked like a blooming […]
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Water to the people
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I hadn’t realized until I got an (en masse) email from Senator Mark Udall recently, that we’re celebrating water in Colorado this year. He and Sen. Michael Bennet introduced a resolution in May recognizing 2012 as the “Year of Water.” The declaration piggybacks on governor Hickenlooper’s “Colorado Water 2012” initiative which, […]
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Debate over what makes a road rages on in Utah
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House This spring, to fulfill a friend’s birthday wish, we traveled from Colorado into Utah, dropped south off of I-70 near Green River on Utah Highway 24, and drove about 30 miles before leaving the pavement. Our destination was the West Rim trailhead in the Horseshoe Canyon Unit of Canyonlands National Park. […]
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Little grousing on the prairie
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I’m embarrassed to say that, in the decade I’ve lived on the Colorado Front Range, I’d never been to the Pawnee National Grasslands; that is, until last week. With mountains in my rear-view, I drove east from Fort Collins. Before long, I crossed the border into Weld County (called […]
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Calling all citizen scientists
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House When I was a kid, my three sisters and I were compelled to go on what we called “forced marches” all over the country, from Death Valley (which we dubbed near-to-Death Valley) to Cape Cod National Seashore, where the August sand was so hot that our Jellies—you remember, […]
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Rethinking recreation in grizzly country
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House In far north-central Glacier National Park (GNP), on the U.S.-Canadian border, is a spot called Goat Haunt. It’s a remote area on the U.S. side, accessed by most people via a ferry across Upper Waterton Lake from Canada. Several years ago I was walking from there toward the […]
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Wildlife on working lands get a leg up
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Rural landowners in the West, and in several states back East, just got a big incentive to protect seven vulnerable species on their property. Working Lands for Wildlife, a new partnership between the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was announced last week. The money […]
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Crowd control and wilderness redux at Yosemite’s Half Dome
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Every year, from sunup ‘til sundown, from Memorial Day into October, there’s a traffic jam of sorts high above the Yosemite Valley floor. The trek to the top of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park’s iconic peak, is a destination hike for people from all over the world. The trail, which ascends […]
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Risks remain from uranium mining near the Grand Canyon
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House When the 20-year withdrawal of nearly one million acres of public land from uranium development near the Grand Canyon was finalized last month, reaction was mixed. Conservationists, who’d been warning of contamination of surface and groundwater flowing into the Colorado River from mining activity, mostly exhaled in relief. (Never mind the […]
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Air quality and energy development
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House It used to be that oil and gas development happened somewhere ‘out there’ in rural areas that most of us living in the highly-populated areas of the Rockies didn’t think much about. But now that tapping domestic fuel sources is being supported on all political levels, that development is encroaching on cities […]
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Home, home on … a significant portion of its range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House There’s potentially change in the works for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the public can weigh in on it through February 7. The proposed draft rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA)—the two federal […]
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Tribes could turn the tables on water control
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House It seems like every week there’s another article about the future of western water—how much we’ll have, where it will come from, and who will get it. Since it’s key to our sustainability and growth, it’s something we ought to be talking about. But there’s a key element that […]
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Open season on Smokey the Bear and Woodsy Owl
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of time spent exploring the outdoors — being a Junior Ranger at the Cape Cod National Seashore, hours-long games of Kick the Can with every kid in the neighborhood, tracking frogs and catching fireflies in mason jars with holes poked in the […]
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Changing the way renewables are funded
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House In the months since Solyndra’s collapse, there have been many inquiries into who knew what and when, and why this particular company was chosen to receive $528 million in loan guarantees. Did the White House hand-pick Solyndra as a quid pro quo for campaign contributions? Did the Department of Energy […]
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In the rush for uranium, cooler heads prevail — for now
Updated 11/7/2011 By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Greens got what seemed like a rare bit of good news when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) last week released their Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Northern Arizona Proposed Withdrawal. The report looks at the potential impacts of removing federal lands near the Grand Canyon […]
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Oh, give them a home …
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Imagine the nerve of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) suggesting that wild bison be managed with the use of wildlife management areas (WMA). That was the message they got last week at a meeting in Shelby, Mont., where local ranchers told an FWP representative that bison were […]
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Down with the “National Insecurity and Federal Lands Destruction Act”
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Updated afternoon of 10/5/11 to reflect recent changes to the bill. I was cruising along the shoreline of Upper Waterton Lake a few years back, crossing from Canada to Goat Haunt, Montana. It was around the time of the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and, as we crossed the international […]