I killed my first deer on an October morning, two days after my 14th birthday. I was hunting on my grandmother’s ranch in south-central Colorado, and I can still see that deer, ghost-gray in the dawn, its form more like smoke than animal. I remember how my chest was tight and my arms and legs […]
Tom Reed
Posted inWotr
Can grizzly bears and homeowners get along
Houses march to the Wyoming skyline like fat clouds stacked in a troubled sky. There’s open space, too, long sweeps of it, mostly irrigated, mostly covered with cows or alfalfa. The ranches are keeping this country open but every year a new ranch is “ranchetted,” chunked up like cheese, sold, fenced, housed. This is the […]
Posted inSeptember 24, 2001: River of dreams
In the house of the grizzly
We have begun to think of this place as ours. Every year, we cross the creek, ride up the long slope to the timbered bench, then drop into the meadow, as we have for a decade. It’s a coming home; a flood of memories of previous hunts, good times, hard work; a shared experience of […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
In the ’90s, trapping still has a role
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The heyday of the mountain man lasted only a few decades, ending in the 1830s, when both the market and the supply of beaver fizzled out. But the tradition lives on. In towns around the West, and even in the Midwest, “mountain men” celebrate […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Is trapping doomed?
The day after Christmas 1997 is a day that Liz Kehr shudders to remember. Kehr and her husband, Kevin Feist, live in the Flathead Valley in northwestern Montana, snug against Glacier National Park. It’s a place where publicly owned land stretches for miles in all directions, though in the past 10 years the valley has […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Trapping in the United States
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Long before Europeans came to the North American continent, natives were using traps to catch animals and fish. Eskimos used whalebone nooses to snare waterfowl, the Hopis used dead-fall rock slabs to kill fox and Aleutian Indians used barbed spikes to catch bears. According […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
A Wyoming trapper seeks pelts, and beauty
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. You can hear the pleasure in his voice. “Look at those beauties. Hello, ladies, hello, you beautiful things,” says Tom Lucas. Five bighorn ewes wander away from us, only slightly alarmed at two humans in their territory. “I just love seeing wildlife.” Tom Lucas […]
Posted inMay 25, 1998: Tackling tamarisk
Ranchers fight a railroad
SOUTH DAKOTA, WYOMING Ranchers fight a railroad Ranchers living on the prairie of southwestern South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming say they’re being railroaded. The Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern railroad wants to extend its line 144 miles from South Dakota into Wyoming to the Powder River Basin’s coal mines. About 54 miles of the new line […]
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
Wyoming: The last tough place
There’s a Wyoming hunter I know who lucked out one year. He’s a big man, well over six feet, who commands a room without even opening his mouth. He’s also a mule man. I’ve never seen him ride anything else. He likes wild country where grizzlies outnumber men and that’s where he likes to hunt […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Elk are the battleground
The state of Wyoming wants to give 2,000 elk a shot in the rump and has asked a federal court for permission. Each winter as many as 10,000 elk migrate down from the deep snows of Yellowstone National Park and surrounding lands (HCN, 9/15/97). They spend the winter on the National Elk Refuge just outside […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
Montana man charged in wolf killing
A 42-year-old unemployed Red Lodge, Mont., man has been charged with killing one of 15 wolves restored to Yellowstone National Park. Chad McKittrick appeared in U.S. District Court on May 18, where he faced misdemeanor charges of illegally killing the large male wolf. A hunting partner turned McKittrick over to authorities, who found the wolf’s […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
Wyoming tribes get support to keep a river wet
As the Wind River slices through the 2.2 million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, home to some 8,000 Shoshone and Arapaho tribal members, it becomes the “most abused water system in the Western United States,” says Tom Dougherty of the National Wildlife Federation. But Indians aren’t the abusers. Dougherty says the culprits are non-Indian […]
Posted inMarch 20, 1995: The fight for Reclamation
Governor shoots wolf bounty bill
Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer, a newly elected Republican, recently vetoed a bill that would have placed a $1,000 bounty on wolves shot outside Yellowstone National Park. The legislation would have authorized payment to hunters who shoot wolves outside the park and offered free legal defense for the hunters if prosecuted by federal agencies (HCN, 1/23/95). […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
Forest Service dunked by its own ‘witch hunt’
HELENA, Mont. – A federal judge has sided with an ex-forest supervisor who was forced out of his job in 1993. Judge Joseph H. Hartman ruled July 15 that former Helena National Forest Supervisor Ernie Nunn should be offered reinstatement as a forest supervisor in Region One as well as back pay with interest amounting […]
Posted inSeptember 20, 1993: Triumph, Idaho, to EPA: Get out
Snarls dominate lightly attended wolf hearings
Protesters at hearings throughout Wyoming demonstrate against wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone. To read this article, download this HCN issue in PDF format. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Snarls dominate lightly attended wolf hearings.