Small businessman Tom Huerkamp fights the building of prisons in the rural West and looks for other ways to generate an economy.
Will an illegal BLM study seal southern Utah’s fate?
I’m writing a book on the Colorado Plateau and it has been one of the joys of my life. The library work has been fascinating but the best research has been with a backpack and a boy. Philip, then 13, and I headed out from Boulder, Colo., for southern Utah just after his classes ended,…
Mining reform might sneak back
While other environmental debates rage in Congress, negotiations over reform of the 1872 Mining Law are quietly proceeding behind closed doors in the Senate. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., is at the center of the give-and-take. In March, Campbell and Sen. Bennett Johnston, D-La., introduced a bill, S. 639, that they said is almost identical…
Dan Beard resigns
With the surprise resignation June 12 of Dan Beard as director of the Bureau of Reclamation, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has lost one of his most effective lieutenants (HCN, 3/20/95). Although Western water has long been a contentious issue, his reign has been quiet, especially when compared with grazing and logging. In announcing his departure,…
Summitville mine boss indicted
The former environmental manager of Colorado’s bankrupt Summitville mine, one of the worst and most expensive environmental disasters in Colorado history, was indicted June l6 on 35 charges of conspiracy, felony violations of the Clean Water Act, and two counts of falsifying records. EPA investigators charge that in l990 mid-level manager Tom Chisholm knowingly discharged…
L-P’s problems mount
Officials at Lousiana-Pacific expected the worst and they got it. On July 16 the company and two former managers of its Olathe, Colo., waferboard plant were indicted on 56 counts including conspiracy, fraud and violation of environmental laws. Federal prosecutors and EPA criminal investigators charge that plant managers tampered with an emissions monitor in Olathe,…
When Tuttle walks, will they listen?
Larry Tuttle, director of the nonprofit Center for Environmental Equity, left his Oregon home on May 10 to go for a walk – an 1,872 mile walk. The mileage represents Tuttle’s impetus for taking to the West’s highways – to support reform of the 1872 General Mining Law. “Pending congressional mining reform is a sham,…
Colorado’s prison slayer
One man’s quest to unshackle a rural economy
Poor, rural places are magnets for prisons
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. New prisons aren’t getting built at the scene of the crime. A 1991 federal survey found that 390 prisons were located in rural and small-town settings, housing 44 percent of all state and federal prisoners. More than 200 of those prisons…
Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front: Sell It or Save It?
… And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay? Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away. — John Prine The early years of my life were spent in southern West Virginia. Dad…
Crime is big business, on both sides of thelaw
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. You may have heard the joke: By the year 2000, everyone in the United States will either be in prison or working for one. But prisons and the jobs and spinoff businesses they create are no joke. Prison-construction budgets nationwide topped…
How Colorado’s hunters lost 90 acres to 300 prisoners
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. Tom Huerkamp’s vision of the Delta Correctional Facility as a center for scientific research matches the state of Colorado’s goal when it began using the site in 1964. “The state’s noble experiment,” as a local newspaper called it at the time,…
Xerox copiers and black helicopters
In early June, Congressman Scott McInnis, a Republican from Colorado, materialized at the Interior Department building in Washington, D.C., and demanded immediate entrance. Unfortunately for the course of history, he had forgotten his photo I.D. and it took him and the reporter he had in tow 10 minutes to get past the guards. (His forgetfulness…
A small mountain town shows prisons can be good neighbors
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. When a new $223 million maximum security federal prison was recently completed in Caûon City, Colo., people began to call the central Colorado community the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” But prisons are nothing new for Fremont County: it first hosted a…
Heard Around the West
The Missoulian, a Montana daily, ran an intriguing Help Wanted: “Sheepherder with miniumum of 30 days’ experience. Attends sheep grazing on open range, herds sheep using trained dogs. Guards flocks from predators and from eating poisonous plants … Food, housing, tools, supplies and equipment provided. Hours variable, on call 24 hours, 7 days … One…
Lettie Hellman
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Colorado’s prison slayer. Lettie Hellman is a native of Colorado’s Western Slope. Since the mid-1980s she has promoted prisons for Delta County. Her husband, Bill, also a proponent of prisons, runs an auto dealership in the town of Delta, population 4,000. “I’m not crazy…
Wolves bring Yellowstone to vivid life
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – Dawn … low clouds … swollen river. Like a field of dark toadstools the herds of resting bison take shape across the water. Above them on the grassy benches elk begin to move – cows and calves, a few of the very young ones still hobbling. Geese fly down the…
Dear Friends
Skipped issue Librarians especially should note that there will be no July 10 issue. This annual break allows readers to catch up on articles they haven’t read, and to get out into the great outdoors while it is still great. Getting into the higher outdoors is difficult around Paonia. Kebler Pass, which links us to…
Battle likely over Utah wilderness
As expected, Utah’s Republican delegation has introduced a wilderness bill covering portions of the state’s spectacular canyon country. And as expected, Utah environmentalists hate it. HR 1745 designates wilderness in 49 areas, totaling 1.8 million acres. Most areas are small parcels, ranging between 7,000 and 90,000 acres. The largest include Desolation Canyon on the Green…
Ski resort flops in midst of land boom
Once considered a done deal, a planned ski resort near Steamboat Springs, Colo., suffered a major setback in early June when the principal investor pulled out. Houston-based spokesman Jack Crumpler said the decision by Mitchell Energy to “no longer participate in the funding and active development” of Lake Catamount doesn’t kill the resort. But it…
Salvage logging wounded but not dead
In his first veto, President Clinton derailed a plan to double salvage logging over the next two years and exempt livestock grazing on national forests from environmental laws. The Rescissions Bill combined $16.4 billion in cuts, mostly from existing social programs, as well as $7.3 billion from aid to Oklahoma City and areas in California…
As landfills tighten up, midnight dumpers spread out
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – Some people hiking through Verde Valley in central Arizona stumble upon a spot that just doesn’t smell the way a piûon-juniper forest should. A strong chemical odor fills the air and there’s a large, wet blotch on the otherwise dry ground. After testing the soil, the U.S. Forest Service determines that somebody…
Salvage logging yields logs and controversy
BOISE NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho – Two years after an award-winning salvage harvest of burned timber, a half-dozen former log-storage areas along Little Rattlesnake Creek look like open wounds. Only a few wisps of grass cling to acres of disturbed ground littered with broken branches, ashes and partly burned wood. Gritty soils bleed directly into the…