One in six Westerners now lives in a trailer, but this traditionally affordable housing can become an expensive trap, as tougher zoning pushes trailers into crowded parks with ever-increasing rents and regulations.
Prairie dogs get a cease-fire
Prairie dog shooting means big business for many small towns across the Great Plains states. So when the U.S. Forest Service recently closed the 70,000-acre Conata Basin in South Dakota’s Buffalo Gap National Grasslands to shooters, many prairie dog shooters and businesses across the plains grew wary. Shooters “make up about 70 percent of my…
Global economics swing the West
Dear HCN, Your article, “A timber town rallies for roads’ (HCN, 7/6/98), notes that protesters in Cascade, Idaho, say the proposed moratorium – which would place a temporary end to road-building in roadless public forests in the Interior West – would put the squeeze on local timber supplies and lead to mill closures. On July…
Not so hog wild in Colorado
When D&D hog farm moved its South Dakota-based operation to northeast Colorado, Sue Jarrett thought she was getting a good neighbor. What she got instead, she says, were overpowering smells and polluted water. “The odor is so sickening that at times it drives you back in your house,” says Jarrett, who was born and raised…
Wyoming likes what it’s got
Dear HCN, I just got finished reading the article on Wyoming in your July 6 edition. I would like to point out that Paul Krza fails to mention an important fact about economic development in Wyoming – many people really don’t want it. Wyomingites hate the New West. They would rather have the big empty…
Mining the crown jewels
-We’ve put our blood and sweat into this for 50 years,” says 81-year-old A.J. Jackson, an owner of the Rainbow Talc Mine in Southern California’s Death Valley. Jackson is talking about the mine he ran sporadically between 1952 and 1972. Now, Jackson and his partners want to dig again. The only problem: Rainbow Talc now…
Wyoming reporter was biased
Dear HCN, Paul Krza’s July 6 article on Wyoming errs in many ways – including his failure to ever talk to any Wyoming Heritage Society representative regarding our lasting commitment to Wyoming’s economy. For the record, the Wyoming Heritage Society: * Supports economic diversification. (Mr. Krza alleges we have not supported economic changes or causal…
Tribe wins a third of a lake
A big chunk of Lake Coeur d’Alene, the crown jewel of the Idaho Panhandle tourism industry, is once again owned by the people that share its name. In late July, a federal court ruled that the 1,450-member Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe owns the lake bed and banks of the southern third of the lake, as…
It still rhymes with scourge
Dear HCN, In your 8/3/98 issue, Robert Nold takes me to task over my 6/22/98 essay, “It Rhymes With Scourge.” Robert admits that donkeytail spurge has “escaped from Boulder-area gardens and established itself in some areas,” but is not a “fast-moving, aggressive invader.” Boulder Mountain Parks would disagree; it lists donkeytail spurge as an invasive…
Grand planning at the canyon
Some major environmental groups are taking the Forest Service to task for not thinking bigger and greener when it comes to planning a new town just outside Grand Canyon. In July, the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona released a supplement to its 1997 draft Tusayan Growth Environmental Impact Statement with a preferred alternative: 900 lodging…
Birds bridge borders
Development erects “No Vacancy” signs for migratory birds, forcing olive-sided flycatchers, yellow-billed cuckoos, and loggerhead shrikes to fly farther every year as they seek safe havens to rest and eat. Their familiar breeding spots are also disappearing, says Terry Rich of Partners in Flight, a group created to address declines in populations that breed in…
Pat Schroeder: Tougher than Teflon
Colorado can be proud of sending Democrat Patricia Schroeder to the House of Representatives in 1972. There, she battled the Old Boy network with wit and, more important, grit. Two years ago she retired, and now she’s published a book, 24 Years of House Work … and the Place is Still a Mess: My Life…
You can eat the scenery
Conservation and economic development each require the other in the northern Rocky Mountains, says The New Challenge: People, Commerce and the Environment in the Yellowstone to Yukon Region, a Wilderness Society report written by two staff members of the Sonoran Institute. Communities in the corridor between Yellowstone and the Yukon have shared a decline in…
More than pretty parks
The secret’s out. Some Bureau of Land Management land can rival the scenery of more famous – and more crowded – national parks. The BLM, in cooperation with more than 20 conservation and recreation groups, has just published Beyond the National Parks, a guide to Western public lands, which covers all the Western states, including…
Litigating Regulatory Takings Claims
Does the government have the right to regulate private property to protect our air and water? This is just one question that will be discussed at a conference Sept. 24-25 in San Francisco, Calif. “Litigating Regulatory Takings Claims’ will feature over 30 speakers and is expected to draw a diverse audience of federal, state and…
Crash kills a conservation deal
Dollars have downed a landmark bid to hold together one of Arizona’s most scenic ranches. This spring, Arizona State Parks offered rancher Bob Sharp and his sisters $9 million to preserve the family’s ranch in the lush San Rafael Valley south of Tucson (HCN, 3/2/98). A conservation easement would have given the state the development…
Wild Rockies Rendezvous
Alliance for the Wild Rockies will bring conservationists to a wildlife refuge for the Wild Rockies Rendezvous, Sept. 18-20 in Corvallis, Mont., to hear Peter Kostmayer of Zero Population Growth, celebrate the bull trout listing and watch a slideshow on the Yellowstone fires. Contact Jamie Lennox at P.O. Box 8731, Missoula, MT 59807 (406/721-5420) or…
Big mines leave a big mess
South Dakota has told a gold- and silver-mining company that it can’t just walk away from its operation in the Black Hills, leaving the environmental damage behind. In May, the state obtained an emergency restraining order preventing the company, Brohm Mining, from abandoning treatment of collection ponds containing sulphuric acid and cyanide. Owners of the…
Water at the Confluence of Science, Law and Public Policy
Water at the Confluence of Science, Law and Public Policy, a symposium sponsored by the Tucson Chapter of the Arizona Hydrological Society, convenes Sept. 23-26 at the Holiday Inn-City Center in Tucson, Ariz. The event includes field trips and discussions on topics including water quality, mining and NAFTA. For details, contact Suzanne Kirk, Dames &…
Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts
For land conservationists at home in plenary sessions and on field trips, the Mesa County Land Conservancy will host the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts fall meeting Sept. 24-26 in Palisade, Colo. Call the coalition at 970/259-3415. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts.
Who will be the president?
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – Navajo Nation presidents have been playing musical chairs for the past six months, and it’s not over yet. After President Albert Hale resigned last February to avoid charges that he’d accepted gifts or loans from companies doing business with the tribe, his replacement was Vice President Thomas Atcitty. Atcitty lasted only…
Lynx as “endangered’
Who cares about the big bad cats? The Predator Project encourages comment on a proposed listing of the lynx as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. September hearings will be held in Idaho, Oregon, Maine and Wisconsin. Send comments by Sept. 30 to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Lynx), 100 North Park, Suite 320,…
The Wayward West
Western Republicans are tightening the noose on an inland Northwest ecosystem study. Riders on the appropriations bill in the House and Senate would give the 4-year-old Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project 4 months to live (HCN, 6/23/97). “We made an endangered species list for bureaucratic boondoggles and (the project) just got listed,” Idaho Rep.…
Battle Mountain Gold Mine
Opponents of the proposed Battle Mountain Gold Mine in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington state want to send Congress a message in a bottle. Because local water would be polluted by the mine, critics say, they’ve created the Okanogan Highlands Bottling Co. to give others a taste of what might be lost. A bonus: customers…
Grab your place in paradise
The pearly gates to Montana’s Paradise Valley will soon open. The Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Age religious sect headquartered there, wants to sell 3,000 acres of a 10,000-acre Montana ranch that spokesman Christopher Kelley calls “a kind of Mecca.” He says the sale will generate cash for “satellite churches’ growing around the world.…
Bicycling and wilderness: It’s not a simple matter
Dear HCN, I wanted to correct what I perceived to be the inaccuracy of your Wayward West blurb about the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s decision not to join the Utah Wilderness Coalition (HCN, 7/6/98). First, you got the group’s name wrong, calling it the International Mountain Biking Association. While that may seem like a small…
Heard around the West
“I’m having a ball,” says Ruth Thomas of Spokane, Wash. She may be 72 and arthritic, but that doesn’t stop Thomas from pursuing a dream. After the former middle-school science teacher sold her house and furniture and bought a bike, she began an odyssey across the United States, visiting the smallest town in every state…
Living out the trailer dream
In the West, one in six people lives in a trailer
Forest Service pulls anchor ban out of thin air
My skin still tingles when I recall our helplessness as the sound of thunder and flash of lightning struck our senses simultaneously. My rock-climbing partner and I had just reached the summit of a long, remote climb in California’s High Sierras, when a fast-moving thunderstorm broke over us. I yelled to my partner to start…
The trailer evolves
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. PRE-1910 Early car campers raise their tents off the ground with simple platforms on wheels, creating the first tent trailers. Since few cars top 15 mph, most people leave the tents standing as they pull their trailers home. 1913 A carriage company in Los…
In wilderness, don’t phone home
A man recently fell and broke his leg while hiking in the wilderness area above Boulder, Colo. While I wondered aloud how anyone could meet this fate in such a well-worn area, it was his rescue that piqued my attention. The lost hiker carried a cell phone and a hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS), a…
An American dream gets evicted
EDWARDS, Colo. – A luxury condominium complex is going up here – not an unusual phenomenon in one of the fastest-growing counties in the state of Colorado. But this development is affecting me. I hear voices as I drive by the construction site. Voices from this place’s past. They are not the voices of Ute…
The high end of home economics: Aspen’s trophy home phenomenon
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. ASPEN, Colo. – In 1989, the Denver-based Good Deed Land Co. bought a 10-acre mining claim on Aspen Mountain and offered it for resale at $10 per square inch. An additional $12.50 garnered a T-shirt stating “Aspen Landowner.” Nearly a decade later, a house…
Dear Friends
Summer visitors Rick and Lucy Daley stopped in on their way to the Desert Museum in Tucson, Ariz., where he will be the new director. Rick is former director of the Denver Botanic Gardens, while Lucy was director of international students for the University of Colorado, Denver College of Business. Artist Phil Undercuffler came by…
Salmon plan can’t stand alone
Two years ago, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber boasted that his state could do a better job of managing coho salmon than the Endangered Species Act. The Oregon Plan, he said, was an innovative approach to endangered species management on state and private land – a collaborative, mostly voluntary approach that could replace top-down federal regulations.…