MOAB, Utah – Mountain bike pilgrims who come to ride Moab’s Slickrock trail find something new these days: a tollbooth. Next to the booth, a sign reads: “Welcome to Sand Flats. All fees are used here for improvements.” A visit to this mecca of mountain biking now costs $1 per person if you’re walking or […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
The land is still public, but it’s no longer free
Skip Edwards sits at one end of a long table, looking like a criminal facing a parole board. He argues passionately before nine stern faces. “We are taking the soul out of the reason for public lands,” he says. “We are losing our freedom to roam our open spaces, for a pittance to balance the […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
At Mount St. Helens fees go dangerously high
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. At Mount St. Helens National Monument in Washington state, the money problems began two years ago, when officials had to close the Silver Lake Visitors’ Center four days a week. The funds just weren’t there to keep the center open full time. Things got […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
No cheap thrills in the Grand Canyon
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For years, rafters and kayakers have paid to float the muddy Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park. Typically, the trip cost private boating groups about $130. When the price jumped to around $1,500 per group for the trip last spring, boaters were shocked. […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
It’s time for the public to pay up
Throughout the West, the forests are alive with the sound of bellyaching. This time it’s not loggers or ranchers who are at war with federal land-management policies, but rather backpackers, birdwatchers and anglers. They want federal lands managed more for recreation and wildlife, but they aren’t willing to pay for it. Take, for example, the […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Greens, as usual, are easy to bait
Environmentalists, the criticism goes, are naive about economics. I think that’s generous. Most of us in the movement work for substandard wages because we believe in the cause. Even worse, we expect others to make similar sacrifices, preserving rivers, forests and wildlife regardless of the consequences to struggling families or communities. That’s one reason why […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Guy Clark: Fees draw fire from two public-land users
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Guy Clark is an avid hunter who lives in Crawford, in western Colorado. He grew up on a ranch bordering the West Elk Wilderness, a place he calls “my back yard.” The Bureau of Land Management plans to impose a user fee on another […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Barbara Sutteer: Fees draw fire from two public-land users
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Barbara Sutteer, a career National Park Service staffer, has roots in both the Northern Ute and Cherokee tribes. She is former superintendent at Little Bighorn National Monument and now works as a tribal liaison officer for the Park Service in the agency’s Denver office. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
BLM gives trespassing farmers a break
Twin Falls, Idaho – When his boss here at the Bureau of Land Management made a personal business deal with a farmer cited for plowing up public land, Mike Austin, 52, thought he was doing the right thing by reporting a conflict of interest. Now he says he’s being punished for it. Austin, a realty […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
What’s underneath the Staircase?
With a pen stroke last year, President Clinton put to rest a decades-old conflict between extraction and conservation. He established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the threat of coal and oil development on southern Utah’s remote Kaiparowits Plateau blew away. So most people thought. But on June 6, Conoco Inc., the largest subsidiary of […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Babbitt brings in new brass
In one fell swoop, the president and the Interior secretary have ushered in a new Interior Department. New directors of the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Surface Mining and National Park Service were sworn into office Aug. 4, after easily surviving Senate confirmation hearings. All four face major challenges […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
How the West was destroyed
The Lochsa Story: Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains Bud Moore. Mountain Press Publishing Co., Box 2399, Missoula, MT 59806, 1996. $20, paper. Illustrated. Many boys grow up dreaming of becoming a mountain man, to hunt, fish and trap in a wild country. Bud Moore lived the dream. As a boy in the 1920s, he […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
A negligent bureau?
What is the Bureau of Land Management doing in the woods? Not much good, says Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national organization of resource management employees. The watchdog group’s latest project, a Comprehensive Study of the Public Domain Forestry Program of the Bureau of Land Management, details what it calls rampant negligence within the […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
Utah Paiutes put the brakes on chaining
When over 250,000 acres of central Utah’s public lands burned in last summer’s wildfires, the Bureau of Land Management began its routine land-clearing procedure: chaining. But soon after the BLM tractors started up this spring, dragging a heavy chain between two vehicles to uproot dead trees and create a new seed bed of churned-up earth, […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
BLM ditches law-enforcement rules
With hundreds of millions of acres of federal land sprawled across a sparsely populated West, Bureau of Land Management rangers often legally fill in for state and county law officers. But last fall, when the BLM published “plain English” regulations that detailed the agency’s existing authority over gun use, drunken driving and other matters, some […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
BLM braces for Mormon pioneers
A million people – more than double Wyoming’s population – are expected to visit the state’s portion of the 150-year-old Mormon Pioneer Trail this spring and summer. The impending stampede has the Bureau of Land Management planning temporary closure of some trail sections. “At this point nobody knows the size of the elephant,” says BLM […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Uproar over Owyhee
It’s been 15 years since the Bureau of Land Management wrote a management plan for the 1.3 million-acre Owyhee Resource Area in southwest Idaho, and the agency’s attempt to revise it isn’t sitting well with ranchers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts. BLM officials were caught off guard in November when several hundred critics showed up at […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Drug smuggler’s ranch falls into public lands
CLARK, Wyo. – Stewart Allen Bost had a dream, he told his drug ring buddies while smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into south Florida in 1986. He wanted to own a ranch in Wyoming. So after retiring from the drug trade, he bought a secluded riverfront spread here, then guarded it and his […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Jobs open up in Washington
A jumble of changes at the nation’s land-management agencies leaves two top posts empty. The opening at the Bureau of Land Management will be filled temporarily by Sylvia Baca, a New Mexico native. Baca’s permanent job is as deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management, also in the Interior Department. She replaces Michael Dombeck, […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Columbia Basin plan staggers home
It was heralded as the flagship of an effort to launch ecosystem management in the interior Northwest, an unprecedented attempt to knit together the needs of people and nature. So far, the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project has languished for three years and cost taxpayers $40 million, with few tangible results. The first draft […]