IDAHO Construction has begun 90 miles north of Boise on the first new ski resort in North America in two decades (HCN, 12/20/99: An upscale development divides a town). Developer WestRock Resort envisions a year-round operation with a 3,600-acre ski hill, 2,000 luxury housing and hotel units, and an 18-hole golf course near tiny Donnelly, […]
Recreation
Posted inNovember 11, 2002: Behind the gate
How to make your own Yellowstone, Mexican style
A corporate behemoth races to restore a Coahuilan gem
Posted inWotr
On the road in the New West of Wyoming
The hitchhiker looked a little wild-eyed, or maybe shocked, when I stopped on the highway shoulder. “Where are you going?” I shouted. “Cody, Wyoming,” he said, staring through thick glasses at the canoe on my roof rack. He had no pack, no bag, nothing that identified him as either a local or an ordinary traveler. […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2002: Shadow Creatures
Yellowstone goes retro
Yellowstone is not only our first national park; in 1922, it was also the nation’s second-largest bus company (right behind Greyhound), operating a fleet of 400 yellow convertible buses for visitors who traveled to the park by rail. But by the 1960s, as automobiles became the preferred transportation to the park, the yellow buses were […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2002: Shadow Creatures
Jet Ski riders circle the wagons
Starting Nov. 6, watercraft will be banned from Lake Powell
Posted inOctober 14, 2002: Democrats kick back: The politics of growth
Peer pressure
Violence against National Park Service law enforcement employees – including shootings and assaults – increased 940 percent in 2001. And just this past August, Mexican fugitives killed a park ranger in Organ Pipe National Monument in Arizona. These alarming statistics are included in a report released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a private nonprofit […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2002: The Royal Squeeze
Rough riding
More than mere annoyances, tearing up trails or disturbing the peace, all-terrain vehicles are deadly, according to a report published last month by the Consumer Federation of America, Bluewater Network and the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. The ATV Safety Crisis Report says that ATV accidents have injured more than 111,000 people in the last […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2002: Backlash
When nature calls, don’t follow your instincts
GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (11,600′) – With the Middle Teton Glacier glistening on one side, the jagged West Face of the Grand Teton looming above on the other, and most of eastern Idaho spread out like a tablecloth far below, the Lower Saddle is a breathtaking place. But something else is taking my breath […]
Posted inAugust 5, 2002: Land or money?
L.A.’s rivers get some respect
CALIFORNIA A new proposal could someday turn the lower Los Angeles River and the San Gabriel River – now little more than concrete-lined ditches – into one of the nation’s few urban national parks. In June, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave a tentative thumbs-up to a bill from U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., […]
Posted inJune 24, 2002: The buzz business
Mount Hood recreation may go big time
Will a destination resort push out pear orchards?
Posted inJune 10, 2002: Hatching reform
Permanent user fees in the pipeline
Agencies struggle toward a unified public-lands pass
Posted inJune 10, 2002: Hatching reform
In the throat of a black hole
I am standing over this crevice of Antelope Canyon, a thin fissure in the bedrock of far northern Arizona, a tourist attraction on the Navajo Reservation. It is dark down there, as if I am looking through the cracked roof of a mosque into an unlit interior. A metal ladder leads down and I follow […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Hansen pops a wheelie
UTAH If Utah Rep. Jim Hansen has his way, northern Utah forests may become a Mecca for ATV riders. In April, the 11-term Republican and chairman of the House Resources Committee introduced a bill that would create the Shoshone National Recreation Trail along hundreds of miles of backcountry roads mostly in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
Does desert cross cross the line?
CALIFORNIA A white cross cemented atop a rock outcropping in Mojave National Preserve has become the center of a fight over religious freedom on public land. The six-foot cross, made of metal pipes, was erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and has served as a local gathering point for Easter sunrise services. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Zion’s geriatric cottonwoods
UTAH Steep river canyons lined with cottonwood trees are the signature landscape in Utah’s Zion National Park. But a new report issued jointly by the park and the Grand Canyon Trust finds that without intervention, the giant trees will likely vanish in the next few decades. That’s because the trees in the lush forests that […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Land exchange could short-change monuments
ARIZONA A land-exchange referendum slated for the November ballot could set the stage for shifting the borders of the Sonoran Desert and Ironwoods national monuments, two of President Clinton’s 11th-hour designations (HCN, 1/29/01: Monumental changes). Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Arizona Gov. Jane Hull have conferred several times in the past year about how to […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Braking development in the Breaks
MONTANA When then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited Montana’s Missouri Breaks on a rafting trip down the Missouri River in 1999, he roused fears among some that if the area were declared a monument, it would be put off-limits to oil and gas leasing. Shortly thereafter, the Bureau of Land Management awarded a series of leases […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Forest Service gives climbers the slip
OREGON Rock climbers are clinging a bit more tenaciously to crags on federal lands now that the U.S. Forest Service has all but outlawed climbing at a network of caves outside of Bend, Ore. To protect dwindling populations of bats and to preserve the caves, which are sacred to the Confederated Tribes of the Warm […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
A road through a national monument?
NEW MEXICO Albuquerque, N.M., is growing so quickly that Petroglyph National Monument, currently on the outskirts of town, is likely to be enveloped by the city in the next 20 years. Some planners want to build a road through the monument, which now divides the west side of Albuquerque from the rest of the city […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Winter-use plan lurches toward the finish line
Note: This is a sidebar to a feature story about how snowmobilers dominate the small town that’s the main gateway to Yellowstone National Park (West Yellowstone, Mont.). — The simplest way to evaluate snowmobile traffic in Yellowstone National Park is to flip-flop the season to summer: Imagine if most of the people touring the park […]