Feature

Can Nevada bury Yucca Mountain?

The unexpected power shift in the U.S. Senate raises environmentalists' hopes that the high-level nuclear waste dump proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which once seemed unstoppable, may not be a "done deal" after all.

Dear Friends

Dear Friends

HCN skips issue for summer break; Paul Larmer is new HCN editor, and former editor Betsy Marston takes his place in charge of Writers on the Range; condolences on the death of Marge Miller of Fruita, Colo.

An activist to the end

Friends and admirers mourn the sudden, mysterious death by drowning of lesbian activist and environmentalist Tary Mocabee of Montana's Mission Valley.

News

The Latest Bounce

House passes Interior appropriations bill; Coeur d'Alene Indians own lower third of lake; Wind River Reservation tribes want electoral districts redrawn; Neal McCaleb can fix BIA trust fund problems; eco-arsonist Jeffrey Michael Luers sentenced in Oregon.

Luxury homes torched in Tucson

In Phoenix, Mark Warren Sands is charged with burning down eight trophy homes, but the June arsons that burned three brand-new, vacant luxury homes in Tucson's Pima Canyon Estates remain a mystery.

Rancher goes down kicking

Montana elk-rancher Len Wallace, angry at Initiative 143 banning commercial hunts on game farms, is foiled in his attempt to give his herd to the Crow Indians, because of laws set up to halt the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease.

Varmint hunters sidelined in Wyoming

In Wyoming, Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest Supervisor Mary Peterson bans sport shooting of prairie dogs at Thunder Basin National Grassland.

Tribes fight to clear the roads for salmon

Twenty tribes file suit against the state of Washington, saying that the state violates treaty rights by not repairing the thousands of culverts that prevent endangered salmon from returning to their spawning grounds.

Missing: One truckload of fuel

More than 7,000 gallons of diesel fuel accidentally dumped in a water-quality monitoring well at Copper Mountain ski resort, Colo., have yet to be found.

A maverick mayor takes on sprawl

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson delights anti-sprawl activists and angers Legacy Parkway supporters by personally joining a lawsuit to kill the controversial highway.

Heard Around the West

Heard around the West

Battery-powered mowers; Idaho potato forgery; "Twin Peaks" vs. "Rattlesnake Ridge" school in Ariz; Black Hawk levels mountain for casino; funeral-planning seminars; video game on WTO protests; Casper, Wyo., renaming Wyo. high school after Dick Cheney.

Letters

Greens are still a minority

Ed Marston's revisionism

Not all tribes like golf

Rocks that look like chimneys

Sovereignty: never having to say 'may I'

Related Stories

A bitter valley waits

Residents of Nevada's Amargosa Valley, not far from Yucca Mountain, seem to be mostly ambivalent over the prospect of the high-level nuclear waste dump opening.

The greening of the Nevada Test Site

The Nevada Test Site - notorious for decades of nuclear bomb-testing - is now home to gentler science, including work on alternative energy and the greenhouse effect, and on cleaning up the site's radioactive contamination.