It’s June 5, and spring is hitting hard in Montana’s Paradise Valley. The Yellowstone River is over its banks. Water the color of creamed coffee washes around streamside cottonwoods and drowns fence posts. Storm clouds over the snow-heavy high country mean there’s more on the way. I’m riding shotgun with Richard Keigley, an ecologist with […]
Recreation
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
One scientist’s forbidden fruit
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “This is the tree that started this mess,” says Richard Keigley, kneeling for a closer look at the trunk of a scraggly juniper. The tree stands on a hillside above Mammoth, just inside the northern gate of Yellowstone National Park. Its base is as […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Politics tangles with science
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As bison pushed their way out of Yellowstone National Park last winter, Republican lawmakers from the surrounding states of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana blasted the Park Service for allowing the herd to get out of control. When the Park Service responded by citing a […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Close those roads
Up Stevens Gulch near Paonia, Colo., some Coloradans want to drive all-terrain vehicles on logging roads the Forest Service once promised it would close off. Now, the agency is offering two more timber sales, which means even more road construction, and then more ATVs. The Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Western Slope […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Utah’s bumbling obscures a valid complaint
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now that government has become show business, one must classify political activities not according to ideology, party or faction but by genre. Is the senator (president, governor, whatever) wearing the smiling comedy face today, or the gloomier mask of the drama? Sometimes, though, there’s little doubt, as is the case with the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Cold weather crowds
Winter is becoming like summer in the greater Yellowstone area, at least if you’re talking about crowds. The past two decades have seen a rising tide of winter visitors, especially snowmobilers and skiers, and with them new concerns for agency managers. This flood of visitors threatens both the health of the wilderness areas and the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Bear myths
-Human sexual activity,” claims a Forest Service brochure titled Backpacking, “attracts bears.” “I’ve never found any studies on the topic,” counters Alaskan author Dave Smith in his new paperback book, Backcountry Bear Basics: The Definitive Guide to Avoiding Unpleasant Encounters. “If you think about it, we’re often told to make noise to avoid surprising bears; […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
A do-over in Telluride
Environmental activists may get a second shot at containing the ski industry in Telluride, Colo. Supervisor Robert Storch of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests has reversed his approval of a ski area expansion onto public land. “In the interest of fairness,” Storch wrote the regional forester on June 30, “I have agreed […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
A Colorado reality check: lions roam and kill
On July 17, 10-year-old Mark David Miedema was hiking minutes ahead of his parents in Rocky Mountain National Park when an 88-pound pregnant female mountain lion attacked. The lion had fled by the time the family found the unconscious boy. Miedema, who choked on his own vomit, was dead when park rangers arrived. Three hours […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
‘Thrillcraft’ leave a polluted, contentious wake
“What we ought to do is establish parks for motorized recreational use, and shove all the ATVs and all the jet skis in there and let ’em run over the top of each other and break each other’s eardrums,” says Ric Bailey, the outspoken director of the Hells Canyon Preservation Council, a coalition of commercial […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
No parking in the parks
The public has spoken: America’s national parks are crowded. Consumer Reports asked 40,000 of its subscribers to rate their experiences in America’s national parks. The survey found that along with spectacular scenery, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon offered headaches over parking, bad roads and too many people. Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, ranked 27th […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Darkness un-Vailed
Night skiing on Vail Mountain is in the dark – for now. After four years of research, Vail Associates unveiled plans last month to light up Vail Mountain for evening skiers and snowboarders. But local residents – unimpressed by a high-tech Hungarian lighting system – forced the company to reconsider the proposal that had already […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Bills target Antiquities Act
Still seething over President Clinton’s 1996 creation of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument last fall, Utah lawmakers are trying to turn their anger into law. A bill co-sponsored by Utah Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett would require the president to get approval from a state’s governor and from Congress before establishing […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Proposed ski resort does a face plant
After a 25-year battle, opponents of a proposed ski resort in Eagle County, Colo., have reason to celebrate. The brainchild of developer Fred Kummer, Adam’s Rib ski resort was slated for Forest Service land halfway between Vail and Aspen (HCN, 2/19/96). But after a two-year review, the agency frowned on Kummer’s plans for condos, restaurants […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
The slaughter of bison reopens old wounds
When Rosalie Little Thunder first heard about last winter’s slaughter of bison outside Yellowstone National Park, she asked her father what it meant. “He said, ‘It’s an attack on our culture again. It is us they have feelings toward and they’re taking it out on the buffalo,’” said Little Thunder, a Lakota Sioux who lives […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
Will the bison killing resume next winter?
With half of Yellowstone’s bison now hanging in meat lockers or filling the bellies of grizzly bears, the spring of 1997 was supposed to end the “buffalo war” outside America’s oldest national park. But though the guns are silent following the largest slaughter of wild bison in the 20th century, a bitter debate continues. The […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast
The president’s new monument forces southern Utah to face its tourism future.
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Yellowstone’s ‘geyser guy’ was one of the park’s best friends
In the spray of Old Faithful, in the shimmer of heat within Yellowstone’s turquoise pools, in the steam rolling through the pines, Rick Hutchinson looks back at us. Rick was Yellowstone’s geyser guy, a geologist who was the foremost authority on the world’s foremost collection of geysers and hot springs. I say “was.” But I […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cars and wilderness collide on a rim
Separating Oregon and Idaho, Hells Canyon is so vast between rim and river it forms two distinct climates. The Snake River that shaped it is gathered from 30 rivers crossing five states; its gorge is the deepest cut by a river in North America. Standing on the wind-carved Oregon side of Hells Canyon eye-to-eye with […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
Planes beat out quiet
After hearing the complaints of air tour operators, the Federal Aviation Administration recently delayed setting up new flight-free zones over the Grand Canyon for another year. Critics blasted the postponement, which came 10 months after President Clinton ordered an immediate reduction of noise at the park. The FAA is trying to shrug off the National […]