Hungry bears breaking into cars and cabins at Yosemite National Park in California are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Bears have learned it’s easy to get into the driver’s seat if they “place their claws on top of car doors and peel them off,” reports AP. Relocating the black bears hasn’t […]
Heard around the West
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Glacier’s road is going to the dogs
WEST GLACIER, Mont. – The first director of the National Park Service, Stephen T. Mather, saw the Going-to-the-Sun road as a way to hold Glacier National Park together. Mather proposed building the road in the early 1920s to lure a “great flow of tourist gold” to remote northern Montana, and to convince miners and loggers […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
A writer rouses Flagstaff with guerrilla journalism
Twilight settles around the cabin a few miles outside of Flagstaff, Ariz., where Mary Sojourner lives with her seven cats, her wood stove and the tools of her trade – a new Mac Performa computer, a laser color printer, a telephone and fax machine. Sojourner – her chosen name – makes her living from writing. […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
A mountain town locks out gated communities
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – Jim Mehen’s first gated golf community dropped into Flagstaff 10 years ago the way a fine putt drops into a cup on a lush green. But when the northern Arizona developer proposed another golf enclave last fall, it didn’t even make the fairway. Faced with strong public opposition, Mehen withdrew his plans […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
A timber town rallies for roads
CASCADE, Idaho – The open-air protest was hastily organized, but Idaho Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth found time to travel to this timber town of 900. “You’re the best environmentalists in the world,” she told 500 cheering people who had gathered to close the road through town with logging trucks and send a message to the […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Judges get FREE lessons on property rights
The Montana resorts around Yellowstone National Park are a long way from Washington, D.C., Cleveland, or even Denver, and that, as much as a thirst for knowledge, may be what has attracted about 180 federal judges since 1992 to seminars on property rights and environmental issues. These aren’t just any federal judges. These are the […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Begging bears are back in Idaho
REXBURG, Idaho – A cinnamon-colored bear ambles over to the green GMC camper truck, sniffs the tires and stands up on his hind legs. The 400-pound predator paws at the hood and laps at the bug-spattered windshield, behind which sits a giddy young family of four packed on the truck’s bench seat. They’re not in […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Dear Friends
Skipping an issue … There will be no July 20, 1998, issue of High Country News. Twice a year, HCN skips an issue so that staff can skip town, or at least avoid the office. The next issue will be dated Aug. 3, 1998. A day in the life … It is the week before […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Democrats struggle to regain a foothold
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. I remembered it as always the biggest rally before the general election, over at the Slovenski Dom, the Slovene lodge’s meeting home in my hometown of Rock Springs. Democrats from Sweetwater County, the party’s big, reliable stronghold in Wyoming, showed up to drink beer, […]
Posted inJuly 6, 1998: Riding the Wyoming 'brand'
Riding the Wyoming ‘brand’
Editor’s note: A year ago, High Country News carried a lead article by Wyoming journalist Paul Krza (pronounced Cur-zay) titled, “While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills … and languishes.” The theme of his story was that an alliance between the state’s ranchers and minerals-energy industry had turned Wyoming into a low-tax, low-wage, anti-environmental […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
It is cruel to fool a fish
Dear HCN, Ted Williams in his essay on fishing said that “What so offends the animal-rights crowd about catch-and-release is that there can be no motive other than fun” (HCN, 5/25/98). This statement, while true, only gives half of the reason. The other is much more important and severe. When a fish is hooked and […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
The same beast stalks the West
Dear HCN, Thanks for Jon Margolis’ piece exposing the West’s new menace (HCN, 4/27/98); for far too long, the recreation/tourism industry has been treated with kid gloves, wrongly presumed environmentally benign. Yet, while I applaud questioning the motives of the American Recreation Coalition, there is hidden in Margolis’ analysis a seriously flawed and potentially destructive […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
How tamarisk tripped a senator
Dear HCN, Only a couple of years ago Utah Sen. Bob Bennett appeared at a town meeting and, in response to some agitated inquiries, produced a magnificent color photograph of a green canyon in southern Utah. This was his proof that the area was even greener now than it was in another photograph of the […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Holy hyperbole!
Dear HCN, As a fan of fire (and past pulaski-wielding partisan of that subgenus “flamebo heroicus’), I read the article about early fires in the West by Mark Matthews with great interest (HCN, 5/25/98). The various signs and symptoms he surveyed were familiar: “I’ve never seen things burn this well, this early in the year.” […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Pat Tucker and Bruce Waide respond
Dear HCN, A complete review of the situation is the subject of a book, not an article, but in response to Mr. Macfarlane’s more salient complaints: 1) There was no reliable documentation of wolves breeding in central Idaho, despite the efforts of trained, professional biologists to find them. If wolves had, as Mr. Macfarlane claims, […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Wolves deserve protection
Dear HCN, Pat Tucker and Bruce Weide’s article on wolves contains many errors (HCN, 4/13/98). Wolves were not “occasional loners’ in central Idaho’s wilds, prior to the recent release, as their article asserts. There is ample evidence that wolves did inhabit the Greater Salmon-Selway Ecosystem, dating back to the first confirmed sightings from the late […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Entrenched agency culture is hard to change
Dear HCN, Is there any hope that change will come from within either the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service? My naive answer as a former federal public-lands agency employee used to be “yes,” if enough conservationists and a few good leaders entered the ranks. Now, after 20 years, my answer is a feeble […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Mike Dombeck – as seen from the ground
Dear HCN, I just read your April 27 story about Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. As a member of a Forest Service family that has been stuck in Idaho for almost seven years, I’d like to add a field perspective to opinions about Mr. Dombeck. The direction that keeps coming down from Washington, D.C., is […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
In search of Mount Rainier’s power
What is it like to become obsessed with a mountain? In The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, Bruce Barcott describes how he circled the mountain on foot and interviewed mountaineers, climbing guides, priests, historians and scientists before he and his father attempted to scale the country’s highest volcano. Barcott, a […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Leeches and cod liver oil
Ever wonder if you could have survived the measles epidemics and the streets that ran with sewage in the West’s early days? An exhibit of over 200 artifacts from the 1880s to World War II at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore., might test your imagination. The exhibit features an “aroma interactive” of Native […]