They have weathered volcanic eruptions and landslides, seen woolly mammoths come and go and outlived the dinosaurs. Now the Pacific Northwest’s white sturgeon are enduring the scrutiny of scientists who want to understand more about North America’s largest fish. The scientists working for Washington and Oregon have been tagging white sturgeon in the Columbia River […]
Wildlife
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Jackson Hole tries “unnatural’ elk management
-Three, four, five. There are a lot of them!” says the driver of the minivan with Georgia plates parked beside the highway. Behind us, a screen of spruces hides the famous peaks of Grand Teton National Park. In front of us, on a sagebrush plain golden with June flowers, are the rich brown coats and […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Wet summer a bust for firefighters
MISSOULA, Mont. – Across the West it’s been a good year for rain and a bad one for firefighters. Heavy snows, spring rains and little dry lightning have made this fire season a bust so far. In the Northern Rockies area, the Forest Service says 1,052 fires had burned less than 10,000 acres by Aug. […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Agencies dunk endangered songbird
ROOSEVELT LAKE, Ariz. – A tall stand of Asian salt-cedars next to a man-made reservoir is the last place anyone would expect to find colonies of one of America’s most endangered bird species. But that’s exactly where several southwestern willow flycatchers were flitting on a warm mid-June afternoon. Less than six inches tall and pale […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Feds take on a sneaky species
Two years ago, Pat Mehlhop waded through a willow thicket on the shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico, carrying a 20-foot-long pole with a mirror attached to one end. The ecologist with the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program was in search of what has become a rarity along the state’s waterways: the […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
The buffalo underground: Now it can be told
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. – Shortly after last New Year’s Day, Vickie Dyar’s cat started acting strangely. When the gift-store owner stepped into the frigid air to investigate, she saw deep tracks leading through the deep snow toward a small barn near the house. As Dyar walked toward the barn, a bison, its magnificent black head […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Will Wyoming warm to wolves?
The second week of April is a brutal time to drive through Wyoming; windblown blizzards coat everything with ice. But that’s what 70 people in Cheyenne did last spring to view my photographic safari about the return of wolves to Wyoming and Montana. I was prepared for more than brutal weather. While antagonism toward wolves […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Keep America green: Hire an illegal alien
From 1975 to 1987, I inspected tree planting in the Klamath National Forest on the Oregon-California border. So I had to laugh a while ago at a quote in a newspaper story about illegal aliens apprehended while planting trees in the Boise National Forest here in Idaho. “The Forest Service does not knowingly hire contractors […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Crossing borders to save hawks
For more than a decade, biologist Brian Woodbridge watched hundreds of Swainson’s hawks raise their young in the fields of Butte Valley in northern California. Each fall, the birds headed south, but Woodbridge spotted a strange pattern. “I noticed that some years a lot more adults returned from migration than others,” he says. “That really […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Something fishy about this pollution
Industrial waste. Raw sewage. Atlantic salmon. One of those wasn’t considered an environmental threat until recently. Environmentalists from Washington charge that escapees from large floating salmon farms in Puget Sound should be regulated just like factory and sewage-plant discharges. They say Atlantic salmon raised in hatcheries compete with wild stocks, spread diseases through accumulated wastes […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Abnormal amphibians
Have you ever been mucking about in the local swamp and found a one-eyed frog or a five-legged salamander? If you have, you’re not alone. In the last decade, malformed amphibians have turned up in about a dozen states around the country, including Washington, Oregon, California and North Dakota. Herpetologists, the scientists who study amphibians […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Fleeting forests
For more than two decades, Utah wilderness advocates have been chanting, “5.7! 5.7!” Now, a similar cry is rising in Idaho: “8 million! 8 million!” There are 8 million acres of unprotected roadless land in Idaho’s national forests, according to Idaho’s Vanishing Wild Lands, a report by the Wilderness Society. The number is falling fast. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Injunction shakes forests
Federal judges sided with environmentalists in July, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service has failed to make good on its promise to protect endangered species in Southwestern forests and streamside areas. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a six-week ban on over 20 timber sales and barred grazing on 11 Southwestern […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
A small victory for logging protesters
Opponents of Oregon’s timber industry are hoping a small court victory will energize their cause. On Aug. 5, five activists fended off federal trespassing charges stemming from protests at the Warner Creek fire sale in the Willamette National Forest (HCN, 9/2/96). For almost a year, hundreds of protesters blockaded a Forest Service road into the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Dombeck shakes up agency
Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck announced Aug. 8 that he will move some of the agency’s top managers. In the coming months, two of the West’s most spotlighted regional foresters will shuffle off the map. Hal Salwasser, regional forester for Montana, northern Idaho and North Dakota since 1995, is headed to Berkeley, Calif., to run […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
5.7, 5.7, 5.7 …
The rallying cry “5.7 million acres’ has become well known in Utah as the amount of wilderness pushed by a coalition of environmental groups. But because the proposal for wilderness preservation on Bureau of Land Management land was created 10 years ago, says Kevin Walker, a staffer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a fresh […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
A timber town yells for help
Town officials in Forks, Wash., have been pressing state and federal governments to make good on promises to bail out timber towns. They say money promised under President Clinton’s 1993 Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative, which helped timber-dependent towns with federal funds, hasn’t reached the communities that need it most. Now, Forks has convinced the state, […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
At war with a bunch of mice: Confessions of an ex-pacifist
Six years ago I bought a cabin in the mountains of eastern California. Though my fortunes rise and fall, almost every night I’ve thanked the millions of stars that I could look to the high crests and hear birdsong in the Jeffrey pines. A year ago my illusion of haven fell apart. One of my […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
Volunteers test county claims in potential wilderness areas
In Utah, one way counties fight a possible designation of wilderness is by claiming a road runs through it. Some commissioners in Utah who fear that wilderness will ruin local economies cite a law dating from 1866, R.S. 2477, to claim rights-of-way through Bureau of Land Management lands that might be considered roadless. But are […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
No-show lets roads roll
For the second time in two years, the House of Representatives has shied away from a proposal to make timber companies pay for their logging roads in national forests (HCN, 6/9/97). In July, representatives voted 211-209 against an amendment that would have slashed $41.5 million in roads funding. “We clearly had the votes to win,” […]