A new generation of fire managers works with fire, rather than just fighting it. Also in this issue: Ski bums try to survive in Ketchum, Idaho; the Sierras get a conservancy, and a river gnaws away at a tribal reservation
Hunting: It’s a lot about the gun
I read Tom Reed’s essay in the Oct. 11 issue and was struck with the anti-gun rhetoric and the doom and gloom about the state of hunting in the West. First, although Tom considers the National Rifle Association a mere dispenser of propaganda, he should understand that it’s one of the few organizations that fights…
Everett Ruess lives!
I was delighted to see your story about the Udall clan (HCN, 10/11/04: The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington). The story made me think about the time I first met Mark Udall. It was May of 1976, and my two buddies and I were camped on a bench above the Escalante River across…
Memories of Mo Udall
Thank you so much for your wonderful article about the four Udall congressmen. I knew Mo as a child in Tucson, and worked on his presidential campaign. I often meet younger people who never heard of him, especially now that I live in Iowa, far from the West I love. Mo was a giant man,…
Steward Udall wasn’t all green
I respect the sum total of Stewart Udall’s accomplishments and would certainly prefer him to the current administration’s secretary of Interior. But it is not accurate to portray his record as a string of “unambiguous environmental victories” as does Ray Ring (HCN, 10/11/04:Udall patriarch laments startling changes). In 1963, Secretary Udall supported damming the Grand…
Mark Udall should step up
I enjoyed your story, “The Coyote Caucus takes the West to Washington” (HCN, 10/11/04: The Coyota Caucus takes the West to Washington). The question to me is, will Mark Udall step up and be a conservation leader? I have concerns, owing to an issue in a federal enclave largely in Mark’s district, Rocky Mountain National…
Think global (warming,) act local
The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a new nonprofit in Colorado, is taking a backyard approach to the global problem of climate change. “Our main thrust is what (global warming) can mean right here, and that is more drought, more fire, and less biodiversity,” says founder Stephen Saunders, a 30-year Colorado resident. “It’s threatening what makes…
Calendar
The Watershed Management Council’s 10th Biennial Conference will be held in San Diego on Nov. 15-19. Titled “Watershed Management on the Edge: Scarcity, Quality and Distribution,” the conference will include speakers Christine Kehoe, speaker pro tempore of the California Assembly, Andy Horne of the Imperial Irrigation District, and Fred Keeley, the executive director of the…
An unfinished life in Wyoming
A new novel from Wyoming’s own Mark Spragg relies less on the distinctive landscape of the West and instead explores the more universal territory of a fractured family. Still, most of An Unfinished Life unfolds on a Wyoming ranch near fictional Ishawooa, “elevation 5,313, population 1,783.” Seventy-year-old Einar Gilkyson lives a lonely life on a…
Follow-up
After three years of negotiations, wilderness in Idaho’s Owyhee Canyonlands is one step closer to reality (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the Middle Path). On Oct. 22, the Owyhee Initiative voted 8-0 to forward its 500,000-acre wilderness proposal to the Owyhee County Commission, which quickly sent it on to Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. A spokesman for Crapo…
A new breed of ‘ski bums’ is anything but
Young people have to get creative if they’re going to survive in mountain towns
Saving wildlife, one animal at a time: Veterinarian Kathleen Ramsay
ESPAÑOLA, New Mexico — Kathleen Ramsay found her calling in a veterinary school lab, when a man brought in a golden eagle caught in a foothold trap. “He threw the trap and chain at me, with the eagle flapping in the trap,” she says. “(That’s when) I decided … to help animals that could no…
Who took the ‘farm’ out of the Farm Bureau?
It’s an organization “preying upon the very people it claimed to help,” said Frances Ohmstede, 40 years ago, about the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Its policies lead rural America further and further into debt and poverty,” said her husband, Bryce. “It’s a financial empire built for their own benefit,” added Alfred Schutte, the Ohmstedes’ friend…
Keepers of the Flame
GILA NATIONAL FOREST, New Mexico — In April 2003, a thunderstorm built over southwestern New Mexico’s Black Range. Clouds darkened the skies above soft-shouldered hills and steep canyons covered by dense thickets of juniper and piñon pine and galleries of tall ponderosa pine. Sometime around 2:00 in the afternoon, lightning struck on Boiler Peak, northwest…
New ways to work in the woods
In mid-October, an extraordinary group of people gathered in Ouray, Colo., below the already snow-corniced ridges of the San Juan Mountains. It was the annual meeting of the National Network of Forest Practitioners, a group that was founded in 1990 as an alternative to professional foresters’ groups, whose emphasis was mainly on making money for…
Dear friends
YOU KNOW MORE THAN WE DO If you’re flipping through this paper in search of election results, stop. Due to a fluke in our print schedule, we’re sending the issue to press on Oct. 29 — four days before election day — but it won’t hit your mailbox until Nov. 8, almost a week after…
American — and proud of it
Until I traveled to Holland recently, I didn’t know how irreversibly American I am. Perhaps I’m not precisely a patriot — the word comes from the Latin for father — but I’m certainly one deeply identified with my native land. In Amsterdam, people eyed me with pity, suspicion or loathing as soon as I opened…
Judge vaporizes Yellowstone snowmobile ban
A second judge will likely demand some limits on winter traffic
Heard around the West
WYOMING Residents of a golf course community near Grand Teton National Park are distressed about a hunter killing a bull moose in their midst. The animal, which sported a huge set of antlers, had been a regular visitor to the Teton Pines neighborhood, wandering from one backyard to another. This time it was accompanied by…
The Sierra gets ‘a pocket’ for conservation funding
An idea born on the coast moves inland— but can it work in other states?
River turns against a salmon tribe
Clear-cutting and riverbank armoring have helped erode a reservation