Overpumping has drained Idaho’s Snake River aquifer until rivers like the Big Lost run dry.
Enjoyment enough to kill
My first view of the High Sierra, first view looking down into Yosemite, the death song of Yosemite Creek, and its flight over the vast cliff, each one of these is of itself enough for a great life-long landscape fortune – a most memorable of days – enjoyment enough to kill if that were possible…
Governor overrules voters
Voters in Arizona may have trounced a takings initiative last election but Republican Gov. Fife Symington isn’t listening. In his state-of-the-state address, Symington promised to issue an executive order ensuring compensation for any property owner whose land use becomes limited by government regulations. “Every executive agency in state government will be ordered to respect private-property…
Wheel Your Way through Winter
WHEEL YOUR WAY THROUGH WINTER There is more to winter driving than turning on the heater full blast, buckling up and stepping on the gas. According to a 15-minute instructional video out of Wyoming, the most important winter driving factor is your choice of tires. People from warm climates often come to the inland West…
Sue stays put
Two years ago, 28 FBI agents and National Guardsmen raided the Black Hills Geological Institute in South Dakota, seized a dinosaur named Sue, and carted her off to a basement in Rapid City (HCN, 9/21/92). Last October, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision that ruled the agents had acted correctly in confiscating…
Trimming pork the green way
Hoping to force the Republican Congress to keep its word and cut the budget, environmentalists and liberal Democrats have targeted dozens of federally subsidized programs. The 40-page Green Scissors Report, written by Friends of the Earth and the National Taxpayers Union, aims to trim $33 billion in federal pork. Colorado’s long-delayed and controversial Animas-LaPlata dam…
Trumpeter swans play through
Trumpeter swans have set up housekeeping in Utah for the first time in recorded history, with three of the swans settling in at a golf course near St. George. State wildlife officials discovered the swans after golfers complained that the birds, which can grow to six feet from tail to beak, interfered with their game.…
Want to sponsor a wolf?
The nonprofit Wolf Education and Research Center, in Ketchum, Idaho, has begun a new program encouraging people to contribute directly to the annual costs of returning wolves to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. It supports logistical expenses, estimated at over $500,000, which include radio collars and tracking equipment as well as field operations. The…
Bare land at Bear Lake
People who live near drought-plagued Bear Lake, along the Idaho-Utah border, don’t want to see water levels drop another four feet. Yet dredging by Utah Power & Light, which aims to dig a 2,000-foot channel to a pumping station at the north end of the lake, would do just that. The company needs the water…
Called on the carpet
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt was called before the House Resources Committee Jan. 26 to defend the government’s $6.7 million wolf restoration program. Republicans, who now dominate the committee, charged that state and individual rights have been subordinated to the federally protected wolves. “I strongly believe, Mr. Secretary, that not only have your wolves…
Jackson voters say yes to planning
At a time when the nation’s electorate has turned decidedly anti-government, Jackson, Wyo., voters said yes to an extensive set of new zoning and land-use regulations. The new laws, which curb commercial, lodging and residential growth in town, won with 55 percent of the ballots in a Jan. 31 special election. Eight hundred and fifty…
Tips for surviving in the New West
I am intrigued by Ed Marston’s statement (HCN, 12/26/94) that “There have been a bunch of studies of this new economy by environmental groups and their economists; almost all welcome it.” The economy of the New West is not necessarily better – just different. It brings with it new opportunities but also new problems. Our…
Holy water
Most people know that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Less known is that it may guarantee freedom to irrigate. Bill Nelson, a part-time farmer in drought-stricken northeast Oregon, says his new Church of the Holy Water has one central tenet: Its 25 members must have unlimited water use. He hopes…
Why bother to save the West?
Ed Marston’s call to save the West (HCN, 12/26/94) was a well-intentioned plea for protecting the population and communities here from the larger forces at work upon them. Sadly, it lacks a historical context and appears to invoke the same type of preservationist mentality that is often damned when it is wielded by environmentalists. Implicit…
Grazing fees drop
Only a few months ago, ranchers who graze their animals on federal lands were bracing themselves for significant fee increases proposed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. But intense pressure from the livestock industry forced Babbitt to jettison the attempt (HCN, 1/23/95). Now, under the federal formula, fees will decline this year by 19 percent, from…
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…
Salmon plan attacked
The federal government is shopping around its latest plan for saving endangered Snake River salmon, and environmentalists aren’t buying it. Like its predecessors, the 1995 draft biological opinion for the operation of the federal hydropower dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers relies heavily on flushing juvenile salmon downstream with water from upstream reservoirs in…
Utah wilderness bill under way
Utah’s congressional delegation has once again promised a Utah BLM wilderness bill, and this time – to the dismay of environmentalists – it may be able to deliver. Gov. Mike Leavitt, representatives Enid Greene Waldholtz, Jim Hansen, and Bill Orton (the lone Democrat), and senators Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch are all working on a…
Grass-roots strategy for salmon
Hoping to sway the outcome of a pending federal recovery plan for Snake River salmon, 45 environmental and fishing groups have come up with a plan of their own. The groups, all members of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition, recently presented their 45-page recommendation, Wild Salmon Forever, to the National Marine Fisheries Service. It…
Dear Friends
Now playing at the Cheyenne Opera HCN poetry editor Chip Rawlins recently traveled from his home in the small town of Boulder, Wyo., to the Wyoming Capitol to take a peek at his tax dollars at work. To his amazement, Chip found himself watching an opera he thinks was called The Merchants of Menace. He…
Apaches send a signal to nuclear industry
Four years ago, Mescalero Apache Rufina Laws says, she dreamed of iridescent water streaming out of a mountain onto a meadow. It was radioactive, killing all it touched. That nightmare propelled Laws to wage a one-woman fight against a plan for a nuclear-waste storage site on the New Mexico reservation. Just about everyone, from public…
1995: Cecil Andrus knew how to take a stand
Cecil Andrus tells the story about how, as a young logger in Orofino, Idaho, he would skid logs down streambeds because it was the easiest way to move them. Skidding, for those who don’t know the rough-and-ready truths about logging, rips up the land and streams. “Those of us in logging in those good old…
Salmon campaign fractures over how to include people
SALMON, Idaho – Environmentalists ignited a firestorm in central Idaho by requesting a blanket injunction on all logging, mining and grazing on six national forests to protect endangered salmon habitat. U.S. District Judge Daniel Ezra of Honolulu, filling in for a sick Idaho judge, granted the injunction on Jan. 12, lighting the fuse. Within a…
Waaaaaaaaaaaahh! The West refuses to be weaned
RESERVE, N.M. – Ah, the West, where the spaces are wide open and the skies are big, where they know when to hold “em and when to fold “em, where the handclasp is a little stronger and the smile dwells a little longer and where, above all, men are men. Not really. In fact, the…
From freedom to FedEx: Wolf B13 killed
SALMON, Idaho – Just nine days after her release into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, a Canadian wolf found her way out of central Idaho’s maze of steep snow-covered mountains. Sixty air miles from where she had been set free, the wolf trotted straight into Gene Hussey’s cattle herd about 25 miles south…
Freed wolves roam up to 20 miles a day
Note: this article is a sidebar to a news article titled “From freedom to FedEx: Wolf B13 killed.” Fourteen remaining Canadian wolves released last month into a central Idaho wilderness are giving U.S. Fish and Wildlife trackers a run for their money. Two wolves have left Idaho and headed north into Montana. One was about…
Forest activists retrench and grope for support
Nearly 400 West Coast forest activists who gathered in Ashland, Ore., last month were faced with a sobering civics lesson: Their foes in Congress and statehouses throughout the West had captured the populist high ground. The fourth Western Ancient Forest Conference, sponsored by the Ashland-based environmental group Headwaters, is an annual gathering of the forest…
No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
ARCO, Idaho – They stand like giant tombstones in a graveyard. Hundreds of black cottonwood trees – all dead or just barely hanging on – line the dry cobblestones of the Big Lost River. Charlie Traughber cusses state water authorities as he points out decaying groves of cottonwoods across the Big Lost River Valley. “Gawd,…
River purity is a new goal for all sorts offarmers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry. On a clear evening in the Magic Valley of southern Idaho, Don Campbell heads down a hill to check on his catfish. They’re enclosed in a group of raceways below his house overlooking the Snake…
Environmentalists and feds try to save Idaho’s rivers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry. You can’t have a healthy river without water. But it used to be state policy to choke off the Middle Snake at Milner Dam and divert all of its flow into irrigation canals. Some life…