Bishop, Calif., is a hot spot for the lively new sport of bouldering, but some fear that the new generation of rock-climbers is short on environmental ethics, treating nature as little more than an outdoor climbing gym.
Also in this issue:Even as wildfires blaze in Arizona and New Mexico, and President Bush’s forest-thinning plan moves through Congress, Western governors counsel moderation in logging and suggest more research and collaboration.
Water bottles flood landfills
Californians drink a quarter of the nation’s bottled water, but they recycle only 16 percent of the bottles. The rest — 1 billion water bottles a year — are tossed into the state’s landfills. “We have developed the very healthy habit of drinking more water, but we have not developed a healthy habit of recycling…
Demolish the dam, sayeth the Lord
Champagne corks popped recently in the office of the Clark Fork Coalition, a Montana environmental group. On April 15, the Environmental Protection Agency sided with the Clark Fork River, calling for the removal of the Milltown Dam and its toxic reservoir, just east of Missoula. “We’re thrilled,” says Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the coalition. “This…
War on fire takes a toll on fish
One fish kill stretched five miles down Washington’s Omak Creek, and wiped out more than 10,000 trout and steelhead. Another fish kill hit five miles of Colorado’s Mancos River. Others hit several Oregon streams. The cause? Fire retardants dropped by airplanes, as federal agencies battled wildfires during the past three years. The plume of chemicals…
Hood River dam’s days are numbered
PacifiCorp agreed in June to remove the Powerdale Dam on the Hood River in 2010, after reaching a settlement with state and federal agencies, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, local stakeholders and environmentalists. The 80-year-old dam was due for a new federal operating license in 2000, which would have required expensive new…
Pesticides killing frogs? Poppycock.
In his article, “Agriculture exacts a price in the High Sierra,” Cosmo Garvin has indicted California’s Central Valley agriculture for the decline of frogs in the Sierra Nevada (HCN, 5/26/03: Agriculture exacts a price in the High Sierra). Despite the fact that pesticide residues found in mountain frogs are far below lethal levels, the argument…
Pesticides and frogs – it’s worse than we thought
The article on frogs and pesticides is useful, but incomplete (HCN, 5/26/03: Agriculture exacts a price in the High Sierra). At a recent Rachel Carson Council seminar in Baltimore, Md., two researchers presented their findings. Tyrone Hayes of Berkeley, Calif., found, in both laboratory and field tests, that very low levels of atrazine, a pesticide…
Follow-up
In the game of tug-of-war on the Klamath River, farmers just lost a little bit of ground (HCN, 6/23/03: ‘Sound science’ goes sour). In order to keep water in Upper Klamath Lake for two species of endangered suckers, and in the Klamath River for threatened coho salmon, the Bureau of Reclamation has told farmers to…
Lori Piestewa’s real lesson
l Recently, High Country News and other papers ran rather long stories about Lori Piestewa, a Hopi lady in the armed forces who was killed over in Iraq (HCN, 5/26/03: The tangled messages of a servicewoman killed in combat). I doubt that many of the Hopis thought very highly of her joining the military. The…
Back on the range?
A century ago, the federal government took the Salish and Kootenai tribes’ land and bison for a wildlife refuge. Now, the tribes want to take back control. MOIESE, montana — Here on the National Bison Range, 350 to 500 bison roam a lush, mountain-hemmed prairie, part of a rich community of wildlife that includes bighorn…
Report brandishes cold facts about U.S. energy
A new report by the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that we wean ourselves from foreign oil, not by drilling in Alaska or the Rocky Mountains, but by using less of it. Titled U.S. Energy Security Facts, the report says energy efficiency saved Americans about $365 billion in 2000. Those savings are our nation’s biggest and…
Log on for fire news
Get ready for this summer’s fire season by checking out a new Web site at Northern Arizona University. Launched May 1, “Forest Fire and the American Southwest” is “a one-stop-shopping site for information about forest fire in the Southwest,” says John Grahame, designer of the Web site. “There is a lot of fear about the…
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
There is no better guide to fire in the West than Stephen Pyne, who spent 15 years fighting fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and has written 16 books on fire. The 32 essays in his most recent book, Smokechasing, are a mixed, uncoordinated group, but so brilliant and thoughtful that they…
Bikers want back in to national park
Tucson’s fat-tire fanatics are pushing Saguaro National Park to reopen its Cactus Forest Trail to mountain bikes. In 1991, under pressure from the local biking community, the National Park Service opened the 2.5-mile route to mountain bikers. The trail — the first in a national park to allow mountain bikes — was jointly maintained by…
Who’s managing climbers?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” Devils Tower National Monument, Wyo. Twenty-three Indian tribes claim cultural ties to this 1,200-foot volcanic butte, which, on busy summer days, crawls with upward of 120 climbers. To ease conflicts between climbers and Native Americans using the site for…
Invasion of the rock jocks
Have rock climbers turned from environmental crusaders into an environmental menace?
One park clamps down on climbers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” In November 1992, managers at Hueco Tanks State Historic Site were gearing up for another busy climbing season, when vandals scrawled what staffers suspected was gang-related graffiti across one of the park’s most visited rock art sites. Known as…
Speak up, ‘quiet recreationists’
At long last, the good people who make our beloved backpacking tents and climbing ropes and kayaks have taken some responsibility for helping us trample freely about the Western wilds. In May, Peter Metcalf, co-founder of the climbing-gear company, Black Diamond, gave Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt an ultimatum. Leavitt had just signed deals stripping 2.6…
Climbers: More than just fun-hogs?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Invasion of the rock jocks.” If the climbing community has a unified public voice, it’s the Boulder, Colo.-based Access Fund, a group that fights to keep crags open to climbers. The group isn’t just about “all access all the time,” says Access Fund board…
Dear Friends
We need a vacation! Don’t be surprised that High Country News isn’t in your mailbox two weeks from now. Each summer, we skip an issue, to give staffers a chance to crawl out of their cubicles and frolic in the hills. Your next issue should arrive August 4. The board comes to Paonia The High…
As fires rage, governors counsel discretion
The Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative gets little support from the Western Governors’ Association
Fire in the West: It’s no simple story
As scientists who have long grappled with the complexities of fire history in the West, we take issue with Ray Ring’s overreaching storyline that the recent spate of stand-replacing forest fires reflects wholly natural processes operating across all Western landscapes (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle). Ring further asserts that the main driver of recent crown…
‘New Homestead Act’ would boost dwindling towns
Law aims to attract young entrepreneurs to the West’s depopulating fringes
Reinstating the heir to the Truckee River
A mammoth trout, thought to be extinct, could live again in a Nevada river
A ravaged river gets a new life
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Reinstating the heir to the Truckee River.” Twenty miles east of Reno on the McCarran Ranch, downstream from the famed Mustang Ranch brothel, there’s a 75-foot wide, meandering — and bone-dry — riverbed. Less than 200 feet…
Once touched by drought, you never forget
From the mothers of my family, I learned about poverty and drought, experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. When I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one day from Nebraska toward my grandparents’ farm. She had not, she announced later, seen…
Trees help clean the West’s dumps
Phytoremediation tackles everything from dry-cleaning solvents to formaldehyde
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA It had to happen: Orange County is running out of rural land for gigantic housing developments. “We don’t have any dirt left,” a real estate analyst told the Los Angeles Times. There are still plans for up to 42,000 homes and condos on about 54 square miles. But the easy paving-over is over, and…