The state of Wyoming remains stuck in the Old West and trapped by its myths and boom-and-bust cycles, while outside its boundaries the New West comes to life.
Ecological Consultants for the Public Interest
The nonprofit Ecological Consultants for the Public Interest, founded five months ago by Boulder, Colo., lawyer Randall Weiner, has already made headlines. On behalf of a Denver neighborhood exposed to a hydrogen-chloride spill, the environmental consulting firm sued Vulcan Chemical Co., which had failed to provide adequate warnings and information to residents. The neighborhood has…
Coalition says: Stop logging watersheds
In 1996, floods and landslides exacerbated by decades of logging forced over 200,000 Oregon residents to boil their drinking water. Now, the Oregon Natural Resources Council and 20 other conservation organizations want the Forest Service to stop all logging of municipal watersheds in the Northwest. Streams draining Forest Service lands provide drinking water to two-thirds…
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
The government’s planning team for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is seeking ideas. The team, which includes the BLM and Utah’s Advisory Council on Science and Technology, wants proposals for papers on the geology, paleontology, biology and archaeology of the new monument. Scientists and planners at a symposium in November will assess the papers and…
San Luis heats up again
The historic town of San Luis in southern Colorado is shaking again from the rumble of logging trucks. After a halt in timber cutting due to spring mud, 15-20 trucks a day started hauling logs in early June from the mountainous Taylor Ranch, called La Sierra by the predominantly Hispanic residents below. The 77,000-acre ranch…
Bolting blues
The Access Fund, an advocacy group of over 7,000 rock climbers, says a proposed federal rule could kill climbing in BLM wilderness areas. The proposal prohibits “physical alteration or defacement of a natural rock surface in wilderness.” Sally Moser, executive director of the Access Fund in Boulder, Colo., says without bolts or nylon webbing and…
Weighing in on mining rules
When the Bureau of Land Management announced in early May that it would hold forums around the West before changing its mining regulations, both mine operators and mining opponents rallied their troops. GREEN, a program of Defenders of Wildlife, sent an e-mail asking environmentalists to attend the scoping meetings “if it is humanly possible.” Laura…
Not for aggies only
Those who think the phrase “agricultural press’ is an oxymoron should take a look at Oregon’s Capital Press, which covers ag issues in the Northwest with intelligence, perspective and a minimum of hysteria. While the weekly is definitely not an environmental publication, it covers much the same ground in a calm and informative way. Its…
Cove-Mallard warms up for another summer
No sooner had the courts given the Forest Service a go-ahead to resume logging in Idaho’s Cove-Mallard than activists took to the woods to begin a sixth straight year of protest. Nez Perce National Forest officials responded by arresting two activists perched in 40-foot-high tripods. The June 18 arrests came one week after U.S. Magistrate…
No parking in the parks
The public has spoken: America’s national parks are crowded. Consumer Reports asked 40,000 of its subscribers to rate their experiences in America’s national parks. The survey found that along with spectacular scenery, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon offered headaches over parking, bad roads and too many people. Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, ranked 27th…
Hanford workers point the finger
Since a May 14 minor explosion at the Hanford, Wash., Plutonium Reclamation Facility, four employees say they are experiencing symptoms associated with toxic chemical exposure. Ten employees were outside the facility in a trailer at the time of the explosion, which was caused by chemicals accidentally allowed to concentrate in one of the plant’s holding…
Riches and Regrets
In 1990, Colorado voters approved limited-stakes casino gambling in the three old mining towns of Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek. Riches and Regrets: Betting On Gambling in Two Colorado Mountain Towns explains why. Gambling was promoted as a way to save towns, but it became a way to shred communities. After gambling arrived,…
Get your ash off our mountain
People leave things in wilderness areas: toilet paper, orange rinds, even beer cans. But in the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, Ariz., it’s human remains that are littering the Coconino National Forest. Last month, Native Americans in Arizona were upset when newspapers reported that a deceased Navajo woman’s ashes had been scattered in the…
Lakes vanish – and then return
Over the past decade, a 10-mile stretch of lakes, creeks and a waterfall in southwestern Washington’s Lincoln County disappeared. This spring, they came back. Pacific Lake, Tule Lake and Delzer Falls, all part of the Lake Creek water system, are among the watering holes that dried up, much to the dismay of local residents. A…
The Wayward West
Two years ago, Earl Shumway became notorious by bragging about looting archaeological artifacts and then receiving the most severe prison term yet for this crime – 78 months. Now, a U.S. appeals court has decided that the sentencing was too severe for Shumway’s crime of pillaging an Anasazi infant’s burial blanket, among other grave goods.…
Hopis aren’t the villains
Dear HCN, Hopi Tribal Chairman Ferrell Secakuku announced on April 1 that the Navajo squatters remaining on Hopi land would be given until Feb. 1, 2000, to sign 75-year leases, yet Cate Gilles’ article (HCN, 3/31/97) portrays the Hopis as villains in this sad affair. The truth is that the U.S. government created the problem…
Goats don’t belong in Olympic National Park
Dear HCN, I suspect High Country News will soon have its fill of communications about Olympic Mountain goats, but Mr. Markarian’s letter of May 12 should not go unchallenged. All of the evidence he cites in support of the idea that the goats are native to the Olympic Mountains is suspect. First, the Gilman expedition,…
Wolf pups proliferate
As scores of bison and deer perished last winter in and around Yellowstone, one species was there to take it all in. Literally. Yellowstone’s wolf packs found feast where others fell to famine. Eight of Yellowstone’s nine wolf packs produced 11 litters last spring. This could double the park’s total wolf population of 47. Although…
Pigs can’t fly
Dear HCN, In your article in the June 9 Western Roundup section, Randal O’Toole stated that he “would have each national forest operate autonomously, allowing each to sell its trees at fair-market value. Forests would not be subsidized by tax dollars but funded by their own profits. Ideally, Congress would have little to do with…
Republican riders toppled
Facing growing disgust from the American public as well as inner-party revolt, Republican congressional leaders abandoned riders that stalled a flood relief bill for more than a month. President Clinton vetoed an early bill because it contained several unrelated measures – one of which would have opened public lands to road building. He blamed Republican…
Are we so shallow of spirit?
Dear HCN, We Americans are really something (-The Sacred & Profane Collide…,” HCN, 5/26/97). We spend a century trying to annihilate the natives so we can steal all their best land, land that contains their holiest sites, their natural cathedrals. Somehow a few manage to survive our onslaught, but we banish these people to hostile…
Coffee drinkers can choose
Dear HCN, I wish to comment on the Hotline item, “Coffee is bad for birds,” in the May 12 issue of HCN. The article left the impression that consumers, until now, could not obtain shade-grown (bird-friendly) coffee. Actually, bird-friendly coffees are and have been available to the discerning coffee drinker. This is an important consumer,…
Our role as stewards
Dear HCN, I was pleased to see your feature on “Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel” (HCN, 4/28/97). Too often those in the environmental movement blame Christianity for promoting ideas that lead to degradation of the earth. There have also been too many Christians who have not understood that the environmental movement has been doing…
Petroglyphs and pavement collide
A proposed road through Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque continues to be paved with controversy. The latest round features a standoff between Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Pueblo Indian leaders. Domenici, who met recently with the Pueblos for the first time since proposing the bill in April, says the road would reduce traffic congestion around…
Water Partnerships
As the West’s demands on water increase, so does the need for cooperation among agricultural, city and recreational interests. Collaboration, an idea with increasing popularity in the West, will be addressed July 30-Aug. 1 at the 22nd annual Colorado Water Workshop in Gunnison, Colo. Water Partnerships: Can Competing Users Cooperate to Manage a Vital Resource…
The Bear Essential
Attention writers: The free magazine, The Bear Essential, is holding its first annual Edward Abbey short fiction contest, deadline Sept. 2. Editor Tom Webb tells us judges want unpublished “quality work with a Western environmental aspect” and that winners receive $100 to $500. For more information, write The Bear Essential, P.O. Box 10342, Portland, OR…
The West weathers unusually wet times
With a huge snowpack in the high country threatening severe floods this spring, Westerners prepared for the worst. They beefed up dikes and levees and stockpiled sandbags in anticipation of the big melt (HCN, 5/22/97). But for most, the worst never came. Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in…
While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills … and languishes
CASPER, Wyo. – In 1984 an ambitious young legislator from southwestern Wyoming made a startling statement. Ford Bussart was on everybody’s short list as Democratic candidate for governor in 1986. The Democrats, though a distinct minority in Wyoming, had held the governorship for 12 years under Ed Herschler, and they saw Bussart as his likely…
Wyoming is “open for business”
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. That’s the theme pushed by Gov. Jim Geringer, a Republican elected in 1994. It’s been used before, and it hasn’t worked. Nor have these other themes: Wyoming is a good place to raise families; Wyoming has an educated workforce; companies will thrive in Wyoming…
Dear Friends
A skipped issue Twice a year, the High Country News staff takes pity on its readers and stops the flow of news for a fortnight. This bonus issue, with its four extra pages, will have to take the place of the skipped July 21 issue. Our next issue will be dated August 4, 1997 -…
A Wyoming coal town comes of age
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. WRIGHT, Wyo. – Sometime this fall, a trickle of construction workers should begin arriving in this town of 1,300 tucked on the southern edge of Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin. By next summer, their ranks will swell to about 850, most living in temporary…
Sensory deprivation on the High Plains
Note: this story is one of three feature stories in this issue about Wyoming’s boom and bust economy. I’m always searching for omens, like any fool. As we left Missoula, Mont., in 1995 for Campbell County, Wyo., and as our moving van came into the orbit of Gillette, I fiddled with the radio dial and…
After 120 years, the Nez Perce come home
PARADISE, Ore. – A few weeks ago, when I ran down a slippery road near here, the soggy weather seemed unfortunate. It was the day of a naming ceremony and salmon feast celebrating the return of the Nez Perce, a Northwest tribe driven from this region 120 years ago. The Nez Perce were returning as…
Taxing the wrong side of the tracks
Note: this story is one of three feature stories in this issue about Wyoming’s boom and bust economy. In every discussion about taxes in Wyoming, some ominous voice notes that mineral revenues are in decline. Sooner or later, the voice warns, the tax base is going to have to be diversified – code for shifting…
Heard around the West
For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats Las Vegas. This gambling boomtown dares to downsize New York’s Statue of Liberty, compress Egyptian pyramids into city-block-size containers, and as wry writer Dave Barry put it in a bazillion dailies recently, “every week or so somebody out there builds a new casino the size of Czechoslovakia, but with more…
In Oregon, tension over coho and trees
When federal biologists listed coho salmon under the Endangered Species Act in early June, logging protesters staking out the China Left timber sale in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest hoped their work was done. They were disappointed. The day of the listing, which protects threatened coho in streams along the Oregon-California border, forest supervisor Mike Lunn…
A lot is at stake in Supreme Court case
INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. – There’s a vacant lot in this town that’s been discussed before the U.S. Supreme Court. The two-fifths-of-an-acre lot, a boggy tangle of willows and ponderosa pines beside narrow Mill Creek, is one of the few remaining undeveloped patches. Houses crowd around, all part of a subdivision built in the 1960s and…
Agency wants to shoot down gun club
TUCSON, Ariz. – Forest Service officials have long dreamed of shutting down the Tucson Rod and Gun Club’s shooting range, but when they tried to silence the gunfire in March, they found themselves in the club’s crosshairs. The shooting range, which the gun club has leased from the Forest Service since the early 1950s, skirts…