High Country News November 19, 2001
Feature
Bringing back the bosque
Along New Mexico's Middle Rio Grande, pueblo tribes are working to bring back the disappearing bosque - the cottonwood gallery forest that once lined the river, offering habitat, shade and leafy bounty to a dry landscape.
Dear Friends
Dear Friends
Balmy weather; welcome to new assistant editor Matt Jenkins and new assistant business manager Gretchen Aston-Puckett; good books, and visitors.
Uncommon Westerners
'Scholarship, sainthood and simplicity'
Frank C. Craighead Jr. is remembered as a famous grizzly bear authority, an environmentalist and a writer who lived consistently with his principles.
News
Outspoken Yellowstone ranger gagged
Yellowstone seasonal ranger Bob Jackson is first told to be quiet and then sent home for talking about the problem of hunters using salt licks on the park's boundaries to lure deer, elk and grizzly.
The Latest Bounce
Cheap Canadian lumber imports; Jack Blackwell regional forester in CA; Biologist Gene Schoonveld fears research spread CWD; ELF bombs BLM wild horse facility near Susanville, CA; Colo. voters derail monorail proposal.
Homeland security drafts rangers
Western public-land rangers are being pulled from their regular jobs and reassigned back East, guarding federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and serving as temporary sky marshals.
Global market squeezes sheep ranchers
Foreign competition, low prices and increasing labor costs have sent the U.S. sheep industry into a decline that is felt especially in Idaho.
Resort counties push for legal workers
The Rural Resort Region, a coalition of five Colorado counties, is pressing for a new guest-worker program to legitimize the immigrant workers needed by their resorts.
Nuclear storage site splinters Goshutes
A proposed high-level nuclear waste storage area on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in western Utah is coming under attack from some tribal critics as well as other opponents.
Pollution pickle sours landowner
Cleaning up asbestos-laden soil around a warehouse owned by the Minot, N.D., Park District may cost the district a lot, with the previous owner long gone and the source of the asbestos, W.R. Grace, now bankrupt.
Will salt sink an agricultural empire?
Mike Delamore of the Bureau of Reclamation is trying to solve what seems an impossible problem: draining the salt building up on California's farmland while protecting water quality in the San Francisco Bay Delta.
Cows to heat homes
In Oregon's Willamette Valley, electricity for 65 homes will be produced from "bio-gas" from the manure of 400 Holstein cows.
Bonneville trout denied protection
For the third time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to grant the Bonneville cutthroat trout a place on the endangered species list.
Savage controversy peacefully resolved
An Oregon irrigation district has agreed to breach the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River.
Will the circle be broken?
The state of Washington is considering logging circles of land set aside in 1997 as habitat for endangered spotted owls.
Mining reform gets the shaft
Environmentalists say the Interior Department yanked the teeth from Bruce Babbitt's new set of hard-rock mining regulations when it decided to go with a much-watered-down version.
Essays
We are the Oil Tribe
Within the American Oil Tribe, oil matters so much and yet means so little that we refuse to even think about the fact that we are going to run out of it.
The importance of being nowhere
The writer muses about his good fortune in falling in love with an Arizona landscape that nobody else seems to have noticed.
Heard Around the West
Heard around the West
Troublesome book makes it hard to get on an airplane; helicopter snack flight in Albuquerque; pig judge sounds off; Dutch oven is Utah's Official Cooking Pot; square watermelons from Japan; honeymoon domestic abuse; journalists have lost flair.
