Michelle Childers, 20, was driving along the Lochsa River near Kamiah, Idaho, with her husband, Daniel, 22, when a spruce tree crashed through the passenger-side window. When Daniel saw where the tree had gone, he started to panic, reports The Associated Press. “I asked him ‘What? Where is it?’ ” Childers said. Her husband answered, “It’s in your neck.” Thirteen inches of tree limb were impaled in the woman’s neck, but after six hours of surgery, Childers is reportedly recuperating well.

This week's HCN Reader photo looks like a magical sunrise in a winter fairyland. Although much of the West remains cloaked in the fall-to-winter transition, bits of winter peek through here - we thought this image offered a nice preview of what's to come.  Add your photo to our reader pool on Flickr - we pick one a week to post on the Grange blog.

Today, for the first time in 15 years, leaders from the United States' 564 federally recognized Indian tribes met with political leaders in DC to discuss the problems that blight their communities: lack of adequate health care, lack of adequate employment, lack of, well, a lot of things.

The day-long summit began with opening remarks from President Barack Obama, who promised to make good on some of his campaign commitments: 

Without real communication and consultation, we're stuck, year after year, with policies that don't work on issues specific to you and on broader issues that affect all of us. And you deserve to have a voice in both.

I know that you may be skeptical that this time will be any different. You have every right to be, and nobody would have blamed you if you didn't come today. But you did. And I know what an extraordinary leap of faith that is on your part.

The President continued with a laundry list of policies and appointments he's made to prove that, this time, the tumultuous relationship between the First Nations and the federal government will smooth out a little bit: Huge chunks of the federal stimulus package have gone to obtaining more jobs on reservations, improving educational opportunities and fighting domestic violence in Indian Country. In 90 days, Obama expects every Cabinet member to give him a detailed plan on how they're going to implement President Bill Clinton's 1994 executive order to establish regular communication between the tribal and federal governments.

It’s not a joke, though it sounds like one: A new law signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, R, allows people to walk into a bar carrying concealed weapons, though once there, they can’t order a drink. The National Rifle Association’s Todd Rathner insists the law makes perfect sense: “Any time law-abiding gun owners can carry firearms into more places, the safer the public is,” he told The Week magazine. There are 5,800 bar owners in Arizona, and many of them seem less than thrilled with the new law, calling it government intrusiveness. Over 1,300 owners quickly requested state-issued “No firearms allowed” placards to post in their establishments, reports the Arizona Daily Star.

Cathy Warner, co-owner of the Boondocks Lounge in Tucson, said she’s learned that a bar is never a good place for firearms. “I don’t care if people walk in and don’t have a drink. How do you know the person hasn’t already had a drink, unless they’re falling down?”

Don't ask me how I found this. Okay, go ahead and ask: I was actually hard at work researching a story and, during one of those long, winding, fruitless trips down Google lane, I stumbled upon this. It was at roughneckcity.com, which is such a cool site that I'm hesitant to share it with all of you.

A couple of years back, Ray Ring wrote a powerful (and award-winning) cover story for HCN: Disposable workers of the oil and gas fields. Like so many of Ring's stories, it shed light on things many of us would rather not look at (see his most recent, Roadless-less, for another example of this sort of investigative reporting).

I immediately thought of Ring's harrowing story when I saw this and other videos on the roughneckcity site. Then, I thought: Wha...??? Apparently, some roughnecks cope with the agony and loss of oil rig accidents by making and posting videos of them, like this heartfelt piece, complete with Eagle's soundtrack.

The last time anybody looked, no national forests grew in Washington, D.C., so why should the city get almost $3 million in stimulus funds to fight wildfires? Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and other Western representatives are wondering, because their region is home to most national forests and the super-expensive wildfires that sweep through, destroying homes and killing firefighters. “The last major fire in D.C. was likely lit by British troops in 1814,” Republican Sen. Barrasso told The Associated Press. “There are many wasteful and wild schemes born in Washington, but this takes the cake.”

Well, not exactly, says a spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service. While the stimulus law specifies “wildland fire management,” the term is elastic and includes efforts to promote forest and ecosystem health. A D.C.-based nonprofit, Washington Parks & People, will get nearly $2.7 million to create green jobs and improve the city’s tree canopy.

    Lately I've encountered two novels which annoyed me because they treated burro and mule as synonyms, which they are not. The most recent was Abandon, by Blake Crouch; the title of the other one does not leap to mind.
 
    Mules and burros are related, but they're not the same animals. Start with the familiar horse, Equus caballus. An uncut male is a stallion and a female is a mare.
 
    Then there's the burro, Equus asinus, also known as an ass or donkey. Males are jacks and females are jennies.
 
    Donkeys and horses can interbreed and produce offspring which are almost always sterile. Most commonly, a jack breeds with a mare to produce a mule, which has big donkey-like ears.
 
    When a stallion and jenny breed, the result is a hinny; they're odd-looking beasts and the only time I've ever seen one was in a comedy act at the county fair rodeo.
 
    I asked a mule-breeder friend about the differences between hinnies and mules: "A mule generally gets the best of both parents -- a donkey's smart head on a horse's strong body. A hinny usually turns out the other way around, which is why hardly anybody breeds them."
 
    The burro has bloodlines that breeders track. As for the sterile mule, the old saying is that he has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity (though racing mules have been cloned in recent years).
 
    The big ears on the mule inspired the name of our Western mule deer; the jack rabbit, with the long ears, gets its name from jackass-rabbit.
 
    But even though they both have equine features with some impressive ears, the mule and the burro (or ass or donkey) are not the same, and I wish people would quit confusing these animals that continue to do a lot of the world's hard work.
 
 
 

Today the Arizona Republic wraps up an excellent three-part series on coal, water and green jobs conflicts on Indian lands in northern Arizona.

Sunday's story focuses on the Navajo Generating Station near Page, responsible for pollution haze over the Grand Canyon and ranked as the nation's third-largest emitter of nitrogen oxides by the EPA, who now wants the plant to clean up its act:

In the two months since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed rules that would require costly new air-scrubbing equipment at the plant, the debate has escalated into a war of increasingly dire predictions: Tribal economies could collapse. The plant itself could close. The price of water sold to Phoenix and Tucson could quadruple.

The coal-fired power plant and the mine where it gets its coal -- which lies on the Hopi and Navajo reservations -- provide hundreds of jobs to the tribal communities. The plant is also the powerhouse behind the Central Arizona Project (CAP) Canal, providing the electricity to move water from the Colorado River down to the thirsty southern metropolises of Phoenix and Tucson. The EPA's proposed rules would result in costly changes to the plant, costs which would likely be passed on to power customers.

Monday's story took a closer look at Joe Shirley Jr., president of the Navajo Nation, and his battle with environmentalists and tribal concerns, something HCN editor Jonathan Thompson recently discussed. Shirley, who denies the impacts of climate change, says he's fighting for the interests of the Navajo people:

"I'm working on independence, period," he said. "If it takes green jobs to get us back to standing on our own two feet, I'm for green jobs. If it takes Desert Rock or Navajo Generating Station...I'm for Desert Rock and Navajo Generating Station."

Today's story reports on a similar dilemma on the Hopi reservation, where jobs in the coal mines and power plant clash with environmental conservation interests--leading to conflicts among tribal government members. Some believe coal is a resource that should be exploited by the tribe to boost the economy, while others see the industry threatening the tribe's ecological heritage.

All three stories present different angles of the same larger story: in the debate between economy and ecology, who wins?

“Wildlife officials are counting down the days” until black bears head for the high country to den up for the winter, reports the Aspen Times. It’s been an exasperating year, admits the state’s Division of Wildlife. The bears have grown ever smarter about breaking into Aspen homes, forcing open refrigerators and even — three times this summer –– attacking and injuring locals at night. This bad behavior hurts bears as well: Wildlife officers killed 12 this summer. After hungry bears broke into an outdoor freezer at the Main Street Bakery & Café four or five times, owner Bill Dinsmoor finally figured out a deterrent: He electrified a mat in front of the freezer. Shoe-wearing staffers never felt a jolt when they stepped on the mat, but the two bears “tormenting” Dinsmoor all summer apparently did. Once the mat shocked them, they retreated, though it may be only a matter of time before the bears figure out the shoe thing.

Landowners unhappy with government regulations are protesting this fall -- by locking out hunters.  Fred Hirschy, a Montana rancher, says he's been losing cattle to wolves and is fed up with the lack of response from Montana's wildlife department, reports The Montana Standard. For years Hirschy had allowed moose and deer hunters onto his land in exchange for state payment, but this fall he hung up the No Trespassing sign. Then he told those disgruntled hunters that he'd open his land to hunting again if they'd call Fish, Wildlife and Parks and complain about wolf management. 

It's a growing trend, apparently. The Standard reports numerous incidents across Montana and other Western states of landowners denying hunter access in anger -- over grazing restrictions, shorter hunting seasons, even over a state wildlife department's purchase of a ranch. Some landowners have even asked hunters to sign a petition for a cause before allowing them onto the property.

The landowners say blocking access is an effective tool for getting government to listen to their concerns, but wildlife officials say it can create more problems than are solved:

"When people use hunter access to make a political statement or to gain leverage on a particular issue, sometimes the implications or consequences go far beyond the target that the landowner might have intended," he said.

For example, if a group of hunters has a trip planned and learns it won't have access to a particular ranch days ahead of time, it's left scrambling. The group could quickly make plans in the same area and keep its accommodations, or decide on an entirely different part of the state.

That could hurt hotel owners, restaurants and other businesses that count on hunting season business.

If you've encountered situations like this or have heard of similar cases, post a comment and let us know.  Also see our story on a different but related issue: "Private landowners become lords of the public estate".