Can land trusts save the West’s disappearing open space?
Communities
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
A land-trust toolbox
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When land-trust staffers get together, they can sometimes sound more like a group of real estate lawyers than environmental advocates. The deals they broker are complicated, but they use a few basic tools over and over again. A conservation easement is a legal agreement […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
‘We didn’t even know what a land trust was’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Sanctuary Forest was founded in 1987 to protect Big Red, a 2,000-year-old redwood tree in Northern California’s Mattole River watershed. “We started with 11 people, since it took 11 of us to join hands and stand around this one particular tree,” says executive director […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
‘We need a whole paradigm shift’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In 1990, the McDowell-Sonoran Land Trust was founded to protect a 36,000-acre, billion-dollar chunk of private and state land near the affluent community of Scottsdale, Ariz. “We realized we weren’t going to raise that money selling T-shirts, so we went to the city,” says […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
‘Our first focus is the landowner’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust is the first land trust founded by agricultural producers. Jay Fetcher, a rancher in Colorado’s Yampa Valley, hit on the idea of a cattlemen’s land trust when he and his family put an easement on their land in […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
‘We have a stake in the place’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The Five Valleys Land Trust in Missoula, Mont., was founded 27 years ago to protect the area’s river corridors. The group has since broadened its mission, and has protected over 15,000 acres with easements or acquisitions.Recently, the trust purchased 1,000 acres of land on […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
‘The growth wasn’t organic’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Utah Open Lands is a statewide group that holds about 18,000 acres in conservation easements. In 10 years, it’s grown far beyond the expectations of executive director Wendy Fisher, who helped start the group in Park City when she was finishing her senior year […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
Burgers bolster Colorado open space
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. On their way to Steamboat Springs, Colo., skiers and snowboarders from Denver skirt the open, snow-covered pastures of the Yampa River Valley. Snowhounds who enjoy those condo-free vistas can now help preserve them – by chowing down on hamburgers after a day on the […]
Posted inFebruary 28, 2000: Acre by acre
A prof takes on the sacred cow
Wyoming’s Cowboy Joes jump on a grazing critic
Posted inFebruary 14, 2000: Land of the fee
Shaping the Sierra
Even though he is now a professor of planning and landscape architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, Timothy P. Duane manages to fold his childhood memories and love of the “Range of Light” into this hefty and complex book about one of the West’s rapidly developing mountain zones. Like many Westerners with an attachment to […]
Posted inJanuary 31, 2000: Searching for pasture
Searching for pasture
Note: this feature article is accompanied by this issue’s Uncommon Westerner profile: “Not your average beauty queen.” At the college of agriculture at Utah State University, a controversy has erupted over a flock of sheep. It doesn’t look like much at first; it concerns the politics of academic funding and the logistics of breeding livestock. […]
Posted inJanuary 17, 2000: STOP
Fund remembers student of science
Matt Clow, 30, was fascinated by whirling disease. As a Montana State University graduate student, he wanted to find out why young Arctic grayling and cutthroat trout fall prey to the disease that is spreading throughout the West’s waters. In June 1998, Matt Clow drowned after his boat capsized on a lake near Dillon, Mont. […]
Posted inJanuary 17, 2000: STOP
Silverton Avalanche School
Learn everything you need to know about avalanches, snow safety and rescue at the Silverton Avalanche School in Silverton, Colo. Two levels of training are available, both with field sessions, over three weekends in January and February. Call the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office at 970/387-5531 (only between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
Treasure Valley’s housing not so golden
Despite a strong economy and low interest rates, the nearly 20,000 Latinos in southwest Idaho have a hard time finding affordable housing. According to Wayne Hoffman, a reporter at the Idaho Press-Tribune, Latinos in Treasure Valley are 2.5 times more likely to be denied conventional home mortgages and home improvement loans than whites. Hoffman’s report, […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
New resort in the San Juans?
Back in the 1980s, Pagosa Springs, Colo., resident Betty Feazel helped lead a successful campaign to stop a proposed ski area in the rugged, undeveloped San Juan River’s East Fork Valley. But now, says the award-winning activist, who has lived in the area for 77 years, the fight may be starting all over again. Back […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
Gracias
-I was like everybody else,” says photographer Celia Roberts. “I’d go to the grocery store and get some broccoli and not think, “Might that last hand that touched it be the one that picked it?” “””Lest we also forget, Roberts is here to remind us. “Gracias,” her bilingual, year 2000 calendar, illuminates the lives of […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
All you can eat at Pueblito del Paiz
Ted Medina slams down a pan of, oh God, what is it? A pig’s head. Snout, eyes and yellowish toasted ears bubbling like Picasso’s own dinner. “You name it, it’s all good!” says Ted, stocky, aproned and grinning from under a cap emblazoned Denver Fire Department. “Here, you nibble on this bit here. It’s good!” […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
An upscale development divides a town
DONNELLY, Idaho – Dave Dewey used to lead a peaceful life in this bucolic town. The 28-year-old Valley County resident lived a typical Joe Citizen existence, working as a concrete contractor, raising a family, and serving on the county planning and zoning commission. Then came WestRock. Touted as a world-class resort plan, the sleek “WestRock […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Hard times in rural Idaho
Some portions of rural Idaho that suffered economically 15 years ago are doing well today. Formerly sleepy spots like the Teton Valley are faced with exploding populations, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash., are growing together along a corridor of development. But not all of Idaho is booming. The state’s third Profile of Rural […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Coming home to the country
EKALAKA, Mont. – We called it the Mother Tree: a mature ponderosa pine on the crest of a small hill, with an acre or so of seedlings and saplings draping the hill’s leeward side, a mini-forest in the making that was the product of scores of pinecones shed by that lone adult. We drove past […]