An Oklahoma senator’s financial fix for our national treasures.
National Park Service
Posted inNovember 11, 2013: Cosmic Prospecting
The Latest: NPS creates new winter-use plan in Yellowstone
BackstoryFor years, there’s been fierce debate over snowmobile access to Yellowstone National Park. In the early ’90s, as many as 1,900 snowmobiles swarmed the park daily, boosting local businesses but angering environmentalists concerned about air pollution and disturbed wildlife. Under President Bill Clinton, the park began phasing out snowmobiles altogether. But it changed course under […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
Conservation fund turns 50
Friends and foes agree: The 50-year-old Land and Water Conservation Fund needs a facelift. Created to bankroll conservation projects with royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling, the Fund has long been plagued by political wrangling. Congress is authorized to put in $900 million a year, but often appropriates far less. In 2015, the Fund’s […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Lake Mead’s retreat leaves Nevada ghost town high and dry
Looking down on a Nevada valley from a rocky ledge near the edge of Lake Mead, it was hard to believe that the bustling town of St. Thomas had ever thrived here. A woman shielded her eyes from the October sun and asked our guide, “Is this it?” Eighty years ago, neighbors gossiped under cottonwood […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Will Los Angeles bring its cougars back from the brink?
In fall of 2011, biologists Dan Cooper and Miguel Ordeñana installed 13 remote cameras in a 4,000-acre patch of wild hills known as Griffith Park, above Los Angeles, Calif. Each month, they combed through predictable images of a near-urban ecosystem: Coyotes marking, bobcats stalking, deer browsing the chaparral. One evening last March, however, they got […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Will the Badlands become the first tribal national park?
Oglala Lakota leaders hope to transform their bombed-out Badlands and help lift the tribe out of poverty, but it won’t be easy.
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Congress thwarts effort to reduce Grand Canyon noise pollution
Helicopter noise is a fundamental — but annoying — part of most Grand Canyon experiences. In 1987, Congress directed the Interior Department to quiet the airborne sightseeing cacophony. After years of public debate, the National Park Service was due to release final recommendations for reducing noise this month. But a last-minute provision snuck into an […]
Posted inWotr
Life among the Bluffoons
It’s not a well-traveled road in southeastern Utah, not far from the Arizona line, so chances are you haven’t seen two new, brick and stone signs close to the quiet town of Bluff that proudly say: “Bluff, Utah, established 650 A. D.” And you assumed that the Mormons settled Utah! No, local history for this […]
Posted inWotr
A good ranger stands up to bad bureaucrats
When a woman ran to the front door of Yellowstone Park Ranger Robert M. Danno with a small bundle in her arms and a panicked look on her face, he grabbed the medical kit the National Park Service had issued to him. Danno, whose duties included emergency medicine as well as law enforcement, carried the […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
A Q&A with former Colorado National Monument head Joan Anzelmo
In 1976, fresh from the University of Maryland with degrees in French and Spanish, Joan Anzelmo began her National Park Service career greeting international tourists at the agency’s new Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. But it wasn’t long before the former “city girl” came out West, where she spent most of her 35-year tenure, including […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Stitching habitat together across public and private lands
In October 1983, ahead of an unusually harsh winter, groups of pronghorn in south-central Wyoming began what should have been a routine journey to their sage-freckled winter range on the Red Rim near Rawlins. But a newly completed, five-foot-tall, 28-mile-long woven wire fence blocked the way. Rancher Taylor Lawrence said he’d erected it around the […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Did the Park Service bow to pressure from Coca Cola on its bottle ban?
It was an ambitious plan: Ban the sale of individual plastic water bottles in the Grand Canyon to cut waste in the nation’s second-most visited national park. But in December 2010, just two weeks before the prohibition was to take effect, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis postponed it indefinitely, citing impacts to concessionaires and […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service discriminates against poor kids
The summer before last, I took a four-day hike through the backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in the Washington Cascades. I’m accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when, after miles of travel off the trail, I heard the voices of teenagers wafting toward me. I met the intrepid boys […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western game wardens go after poachers
A thick autumn snowfall still carpeted the ground when Colorado district wildlife manager Tom Knowles got the tip that put him on the trail of the “Missouri boys.” The informant, a hunter named Michael Xavier, said that three men who had licenses only for cow elk had killed at least one bull elk in Rio […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Killing for conservation in national parks
To work for the National Park Service is to undergo a kind of transformation. I wake up in boxers and an oversized T-shirt, and, 20 minutes later, I’m standing outside my cabin in pressed green jeans, a buttoned and tucked-in gray shirt, bulky brown belt and hiking boots. At 5 feet tall, 100 pounds, I’m […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
In national parks, where are all the fossils?
When it was established in 1922, South Dakota’s Fossil Cycad National Monument possessed the world’s most significant beds of fossilized, Cretaceous Age cycads, large, fern-like plants. But management was left to local ranchers, and paleontologists working the site received limited federal support. By the time the state historical society offered to take over in 1955, […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Park Service finally drafts a solution to conflicts over canyon flights
Hermits Rest, Grand Canyon National Park At the end of the road along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, past Hermits Rest, a famous rock cabin built in 1914 that’s now a rustic souvenir and snack shop, there’s an inviting rock outcropping where you can stretch out in solitude and gaze across the canyon. On a […]
