As Yellowstone National Park celebrates its 125th birthday, it continues to struggle with the surrounding states over wildlife management and other questions, including whether “natural regulation” is letting the park’s elk herds overgraze their ranges.
Jackson Hole tries “unnatural’ elk management
-Three, four, five. There are a lot of them!” says the driver of the minivan with Georgia plates parked beside the highway. Behind us, a screen of spruces hides the famous peaks of Grand Teton National Park. In front of us, on a sagebrush plain golden with June flowers, are the rich brown coats and…
Heavy metals move
Heavy metals accumulated from 100 years of mining in Idaho’s Silver Valley (HCN, 11/25/96) are spreading into Washington state, and environmentalists and state officials there want a say in how to stop it. “Just having Idaho control the cleanup doesn’t hold any promise,” said Michele Nanni of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. Last year,…
The Wayward West
They wanted to understand the real West, so they came to watch explosives blow up at an open pit copper mine and to fly over logged forests. Their conclusion: Environmentalists grossly exaggerate the land’s plight; the West is in pretty good shape. The group included about 20 House Republicans, including the three highest-ranking, Speaker Newt…
Bring back the wild buffalo
Dear HCN, Thank you for publishing Dan Flores’ well-written cover essay, “The West that was, and the West that can be” (HCN, 8/18/97). But I must protest one huge glaring error: Mr. Flores says there are only 250,000 bison left, down from multiple millions. Wrong! There is not one bison truly alive today. Every single…
Wolves take heavy toll in Montana
In the Tobacco Valley of northwest Montana, wolves killed at least 30 sheep in six weeks. One rancher lost 28 animals on a single night in June, prompting the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife to shell out its largest-ever wolf-kill reimbursement – $4,000. This was one of the worst wolf attacks on livestock in the West,…
Putting wildlands back together
Dear HCN, As one of the founders and the current president of The Wildlands Project, I must respond to your article, “Foreman finds hope amid ecological rubble” (HCN, 8/4/97). At the end of the article you comment that Dave failed to describe how our reserve designs were to be implemented. You also asked about the…
Maps may save lives
Participants in an Oregon mapping project want to keep history from repeating itself. When five people were killed by landslides that hit their homes or cars in 1996, many observers blamed logging of steep slopes above the houses and highways. They said the Oregon Department of Forestry should have prevented the situation (HCN, 12/23/96). Defending…
Rid-a-Bird works too well
Rid-a-Bird, a two-man company in Wilton, Iowa, has been killing unwanted birds for over 40 years with the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval. But two dead raptors in Washington have called into question the company’s method of pest control. Rid-a-Bird’s product lures birds to a perch containing fenthion, a fatal nerve poison which paralyzes them. The…
New facts about old fish
They have weathered volcanic eruptions and landslides, seen woolly mammoths come and go and outlived the dinosaurs. Now the Pacific Northwest’s white sturgeon are enduring the scrutiny of scientists who want to understand more about North America’s largest fish. The scientists working for Washington and Oregon have been tagging white sturgeon in the Columbia River…
Agencies dunk endangered songbird
ROOSEVELT LAKE, Ariz. – A tall stand of Asian salt-cedars next to a man-made reservoir is the last place anyone would expect to find colonies of one of America’s most endangered bird species. But that’s exactly where several southwestern willow flycatchers were flitting on a warm mid-June afternoon. Less than six inches tall and pale…
Feds take on a sneaky species
Two years ago, Pat Mehlhop waded through a willow thicket on the shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico, carrying a 20-foot-long pole with a mirror attached to one end. The ecologist with the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program was in search of what has become a rarity along the state’s waterways: the…
Is nature running too wild in Yellowstone?
It’s June 5, and spring is hitting hard in Montana’s Paradise Valley. The Yellowstone River is over its banks. Water the color of creamed coffee washes around streamside cottonwoods and drowns fence posts. Storm clouds over the snow-heavy high country mean there’s more on the way. I’m riding shotgun with Richard Keigley, an ecologist with…
One scientist’s forbidden fruit
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “This is the tree that started this mess,” says Richard Keigley, kneeling for a closer look at the trunk of a scraggly juniper. The tree stands on a hillside above Mammoth, just inside the northern gate of Yellowstone National Park. Its base is as…
Politics tangles with science
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As bison pushed their way out of Yellowstone National Park last winter, Republican lawmakers from the surrounding states of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana blasted the Park Service for allowing the herd to get out of control. When the Park Service responded by citing a…
Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature story. In June 1986, Max Peterson, then chief of the Forest Service, went to Yellowstone National Park. In the course of his speech, he mentioned how nice it was to be in Montana. Unfortunately, he was standing in Wyoming. The press hooted. We shouldn’t have. It’s a…
Dear friends
“Depressing … diligent” Last spring we asked you to “give us a piece of your mind” by filling out our ninth annual reader survey. We asked for it and you delivered: 1,820 replies (10 percent of the paper’s readers) telling us what you liked, what you thought stepped over the line, what other newspapers and…
The buffalo underground: Now it can be told
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. – Shortly after last New Year’s Day, Vickie Dyar’s cat started acting strangely. When the gift-store owner stepped into the frigid air to investigate, she saw deep tracks leading through the deep snow toward a small barn near the house. As Dyar walked toward the barn, a bison, its magnificent black head…
Will Wyoming warm to wolves?
The second week of April is a brutal time to drive through Wyoming; windblown blizzards coat everything with ice. But that’s what 70 people in Cheyenne did last spring to view my photographic safari about the return of wolves to Wyoming and Montana. I was prepared for more than brutal weather. While antagonism toward wolves…
Wet summer a bust for firefighters
MISSOULA, Mont. – Across the West it’s been a good year for rain and a bad one for firefighters. Heavy snows, spring rains and little dry lightning have made this fire season a bust so far. In the Northern Rockies area, the Forest Service says 1,052 fires had burned less than 10,000 acres by Aug.…
Heard around the West
Cows continue to get heat for everything from spreading E. coli bacteria to stomping on salmon eggs. But ranchers protest that no one ever talks about the good things cows do. Heard around the West just read about one good thing in the Salem, Ore., Capital Press. It seems cows tend to push objects with…
For sale: a Colorado water district – maybe
COLLBRAN, Colo. – At first, it seemed simple: The federal government would sell its small irrigation projects to the local water conservancy districts that use them. The idea sprang from Vice President Al Gore’s mandate to reduce federal bureaucracy. But officials in three Western states are learning that purchases can turn nasty when they go…
Keep America green: Hire an illegal alien
From 1975 to 1987, I inspected tree planting in the Klamath National Forest on the Oregon-California border. So I had to laugh a while ago at a quote in a newspaper story about illegal aliens apprehended while planting trees in the Boise National Forest here in Idaho. “The Forest Service does not knowingly hire contractors…
Bigger might be better for Utah’s parks
Lockhart Basin isn’t part of southern Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, but activists and park managers are saying it should be. Just outside the park’s eastern boundaries, the basin will soon be home to a drilling rig from Legacy Energy Corp., which has a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to explore for oil. Opponents…