Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Open for business.” MILES CITY, Mont. – After it drains the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, the Tongue River flows north to join the Yellowstone near this eastern Montana city. The Tongue doesn’t carry a lot of water, but it’s a lifeline for […]
Eric Whitney
Posted inJuly 31, 2000: Out of the darkness
Mining out the middleman
In Montana, locals and industry bypass agencies and forge a new road
Posted inJanuary 17, 2000: STOP
Nuns get a windfall
The wind didn’t exactly blow dollar bills through the door of the Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton, N.D. But two years after the monastery’s Catholic sisters installed two windmills 100 feet high, their electric bill was cut almost in half for a savings of $18,000 in two years. “We’ve been here for over 30 years, […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
Can a hog farm bring home the bacon?
MELLETTE COUNTY, S.D. – In this vast, largely empty sea of rolling prairie grass, where little is shiny and new, the sun mirroring off the galvanized silver roof panels of 24 enormous, brand-new hog barns is a remarkable sight. It’s the start of the largest-ever development on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. North Dakota-based Bell Farms […]
Posted inAugust 16, 1999: Standing up for the underdog
An island becomes a protest ground
PIERRE, S.D. – Thunderheads had been building over South Dakota’s capital city, and by dusk, most locals, on the lookout for a tornado, took cover. But a dozen or so Sioux Indian activists, camped in tepees and nylon tents on La Framboise Island in the middle of the Missouri River, didn’t go anywhere. They’ve been […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Beware of orange clouds
Earth-shattering explosions are a fact of life in northeast Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Each week millions of pounds of explosives are detonated as the basin’s 17 open-pit mines rearrange thick layers of earth and extract the coal beneath. Sometimes blasting also creates clouds of nitrogen oxide gases. Luann Borgialli was alarmed in January when one […]
Posted inMarch 29, 1999: Wheeling and dealing
Where do we put the condos?
DRIGGS, Idaho – This southeast Idaho town is like a forgotten cousin to the ski mecca town of Jackson, Wyo., 40 miles away on the other side of Teton Pass. The wave of development that has descended on Jackson has mostly bypassed this part of Idaho, even though both communities share a spectacular view of […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
South Dakota tells a mine to stay put
DEADWOOD, S.D. – South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow, R, has a reputation for getting tough with Canadian companies. The popular four-term governor made news last fall when he stopped Canadian farm exports at his state’s borders, but environmentalists say his attempt to salvage a bad mining situation is wrongheaded and could only make things worse. […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 1998: We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight
Dreams of new industry go up in smoke
WILLISTON, N.D. – An empty warehouse, a crooked smokestack and a few tons of hazardous waste in a decayed industrial district on the edge of town are all that remain of a company that five years ago opened to fanfare. This isolated Missouri River town of 14,000 people on the northern prairie had welcomed Dakota […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Judge settles Telluride wetlands dispute
The Environmental Protection Agency has won a seven-year dispute with the Telluride Ski and Golf Co. (Telski) over the resort’s destruction of protected wetlands that feed the San Miguel River, one of two undammed rivers left in Colorado. U.S. District Court Judge John Kane accepted a $3.8 million settlement against the company last month, requiring […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
One win, one loss
Fall brought both good and bad news for the Telluride Ski and Golf Company. The western Colorado company got another green light Oct. 22, to double its skiing terrain, when the Forest Service rejected an appeal by environmentalists. But in a separate agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, Telski will pay a $1.1 million fine […]