The brine-shrimp industry of Great Salt Lake has helped put that misunderstood ecosystem under a microscope; can the lake be saved from its history of abuse and a rapidly increasing population around it?
Outlandish slaughter
Dear HCN, In Ed Marston’s review of Char Miller’s book, Gifford Pinchot and the Foundation of Modern Environmentalism (HCN, 3/18/02: Will the real Gifford Pinchot please stand up), he states that “the Forest Service, safe within the Department of Agriculture, went on to slaughter the national forests after World War II.” How outlandish! If so,…
Native crops for the niche West
Dear HCN, Ed Quillen’s essay rings a bell here in our Carson Valley (HCN, 4/1/02: The ‘Niche West’ reconnects us to the land). We have a thriving native seed company, and during the last two years we have discovered native crops on several of the valley ranches. The development pressure has been enticing local ranchers…
Zion’s geriatric cottonwoods
UTAH Steep river canyons lined with cottonwood trees are the signature landscape in Utah’s Zion National Park. But a new report issued jointly by the park and the Grand Canyon Trust finds that without intervention, the giant trees will likely vanish in the next few decades. That’s because the trees in the lush forests that…
Sibley said it for me
Dear HCN, The George Sibley article is one of the best I have ever read (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town). He has summed up how we have given away the mountain towns we came to Colorado to enjoy. Most of us are just mad and can’t express our frustrations. George has expressed our…
Under charter plan, forests would fall
Dear HCN, I am skeptical of the concept of “Charter Forests” (HCN, 3/18/02: Can ‘charter forests’ remake an agency?), especially when I observe who is backing it – the timber industry and its supporters in Congress and the Bush administration. Under the guise of streamlining decision making within the Forest Service, the real intent appears…
The Latest Bounce
Off-roaders in the Mojave Desert must yield to the desert tortoise, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. In early April, the agency, acting under a court agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity, closed 18,000 acres in the western Rand Mountains to dirt bikers, in an effort to help the desert tortoise, which continues…
But, can they reproduce?
Dear HCN, After reading Erika Trautman’s article, “Will listing hurt the Colorado lynx?” (HCN, 1/21/02: Will listing hurt the Colorado lynx?), I decided to do more research about the reintroduction program in Colorado. One of the more crucial points of the article seemed to be buried at the end of the article. Tonya Shenk, head…
Bush will edit NW Forest Plan
The Bush administration thinks the Clinton-bred forestry plan that has governed – and limited – Northwest logging since 1994 is a failure and needs overhaul or replacement (HCN, 7/26/93: Clinton vs. Foley: House speaker is furious at plan to protect Northwest forests). The Northwest Forest Plan procedures that aim to protect habitat for endangered species…
‘Sense of place’ bought and sold
Dear HCN, A very heartfelt essay by George Sibley (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town). Unfortunately, Colorado is not the only place in the West which is suffering this plight. Before moving to Reno 12 years ago, I was a resident of Truckee, Calif., 30 miles “up valley” to the west. The former railroad/mill…
Griz ordered to get scarce
WYOMING Grizzlies, wolves and other “unacceptable species” may want to rethink future visits to counties and towns in western Wyoming. In March, two counties and two city councils passed regulations that ban the animals. They were reacting to new federal regulations that require bear-resistant food storage and a minimum distance between campsites and food, trails…
Re: ‘Looking for the good’
Dear HCN, I want to belatedly thank you for Barbara Schuster’s fantastic article on silencing LDS trash talk (HCN, 2/4/02: Why the bad rap for Mormons?). I grew up in the Idaho end of Cache Valley and was never a part of the “Salt Lake Society,” thus missing things here in SLC at that time.…
Mountainfilm
In 1979, a group of mountain enthusiasts put together a festival of 25 films in Telluride, Colo., to celebrate mountains and the people who love them. Twenty-four years later, Mountainfilm still focuses on rocks, but has expanded to include cultural and general environmental topics among its more than 40 films and art exhibits, symposia, slide…
Roslyn development update
Dear HCN, A belated thank you for your coverage of the resort development slated for lands adjacent to our fine town of Roslyn, Wash. (HCN, 3/4/02: Development threatens historic town). Since your report, Trendwest Resorts, Inc., has been sold to the very large hotel and travel company, Cendant Corporation, for $894 million in stock. The…
Sagebrush artistry
Nevada potter Dennis Parks celebrates his exit from the rat race in a new memoir, Living in the Country Growing Weird. With his wife and two sons in tow, Parks left a tenure-track professorship in Southern California 30 years ago, settled in Tuscarora, Nev., a ghost town, and founded a pottery school that today attracts…
Sprawl is in the numbers
Westerners are all too familiar with the phenomenon of “urban sprawl,” as development creeps farther from city limits and eats up more land. A study released by the nonprofit Numbers USA offers new insight into the causes of sprawl, emphasizing the contribution of population growth to changes in land use. Weighing Sprawl Factors in Large…
Fateful harvest a scary read
Sometimes recycling is more pernicious than we’ve all been taught to believe. In 1997, Patty Martin, mayor of the small town of Quincy, Wash., discovered that the local agricultural chemicals provider had been mixing leftover pesticides with other chemicals and passing the “recycled” mixture off to farmers as a beneficial soil additive. The crusading mayor…
Wildlife Saloon
In arid areas where streams run only during the spring or during storms, deer, elk and bighorn sheep can have a hard time finding a drink. Now, an artificial water hole called the “Wildlife Saloon” lets animals drink their fill. On the surface, all you can see is a small, mostly buried stock tank. The…
Leave my town out of your ‘Top 10’
Help me with a quick survey: Pick the “10 Best Towns” that people call home in America. Go ahead, take a minute. I’m betting Driggs, Idaho, wasn’t your top choice. But that’s assuming you didn’t pick up the March issue of Men’s Journal while waiting for a root canal and see its list of the…
The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Researchers scramble to understand one of the West’s most neglected ecosystems
Dear Friends
Ex marks the spot We love those ex-interns, especially when they land in some Western locale and start sending in stories. This issue is an intern tour de force: Tim Westby, who spent time here in the summer of 1999, penned our cover story on the misunderstood and much abused Great Salt Lake, near whose…
Wilted West staggers into summer
Meager snow pack leaves reservoirs low, fire danger high
Are Wyoming’s feedgrounds a hotbed of disease?
Conservationists’ proposed phaseout could cause elk herds to plummet
Heard around the West
Alligators have arrived at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where they are enrolled in a research project. The fanged fauna from Florida must wear plastic masks over their long snouts, and once they’ve begun tooling along on a treadmill at one mile per hour, scientists start measuring their breathing. Alligators are peculiar…
Muscle car of the prairie
I drove out east in the car with the crumpled front end. It was a vintage 1966 Pontiac LeMans with no muffler. At 60 miles an hour it roared like an F-16. The dry western wind whipping through the open windows made me feel alive and powerful. A year earlier, when I was 15, my…
Suburbanites compete for the lake’s freshwater
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Great Salt Lake’s fate largely turns on three rivers that flow out of the Wasatch and Uinta mountains. But as population booms along the Wasatch Front and water-use rates remain among the highest in the nation, development pressure is mounting on the Bear, Weber…
Lake stops sprawl in its tracks … for now
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As Salt Lake City and its suburbs have sprawled across the Wasatch Front, little sleep has been lost over Great Salt Lake. So it was hardly a surprise to anyone last August when bulldozers started rolling through lakeside marshes, laying the foundation for what…