Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If a single family could illustrate Montana’s love-hate relationship with mining, it would be the Garlands, who run Garland’s General Store, along Lincoln’s main strip. Cecil and Barbara Garland established the store in the 1950s, but their daughter Teresa, 44, is in charge now. […]
Where one sister sees gain, another sees ruin and loss
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
A gold mine is a city until the ore runs out
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If the McDonald gold mine is built as currently planned, it will resemble a city of eight square miles. It will be thirsty. Each day it will use an average 2.5 million gallons of water, equivalent to 420,000 toilets flushing. It will also be […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Montana’s army of writers tested the power of the pens
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Writer David James Duncan left Portland for Missoula and promptly became obsessed. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. The author of The River Why and The Brothers K had come to Montana to write his next novel and do some fishing, alongside other […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Gold mines exist in a shaky financial world
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When Phelps Dodge sold its share in the McDonald Mine this fall, no one was much surprised. The company had tried to get rid of its 72.5 percent share in 1994, when, after having spent over $42 million, it asked its partner, Denver-based Canyon […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Mine wastes haunt a mythic river
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. On paper, the Blackfoot River, which begins at the Continental Divide and flows 132 miles to the west, doesn’t seem poetic. Roads and clear-cuts line its shores. Mining waste runs through its water. In 1975, a tailings dam broke, spilling sludge into the headwaters […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Montana on the edge: A fight over gold forces the Treasure State to confront its future
Note: several sidebar articles, including a timeline of the Zortman-Landusky mine and accounts by several stakeholders telling their views in their own words, are available in the “Sidebar” section of this online issue. LINCOLN, Mont. – When you ask Lee Pattison whether she thinks a mammoth gold mine will be built a few miles from […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the ‘last, best place’
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature story. Pity Montana. Everyone wants a piece of it. Most desire its trout streams, the solace of its open spaces, its stunning mountains. Mining companies want the metals buried beneath this incomparable landscape. Hardrock mining is already big business in Montana. But it could soon get bigger. […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Termite tenacity
Termites build their homes to last. The evidence is in New Mexico, where a team of University of Colorado scientists have identified termite mounds dating back to the Jurassic period, 155 million years ago. More than 100 sandstone pillars, some as high as 20 feet and six feet in diameter, were found over the last […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Get to work
The Student Conservation Association is offering 1,200 interns an opportunity to put rhetoric into action. The SCA is seeking applications from people who want expense-paid internships in places as diverse as Alaska and Puerto Rico. Interns usually work with conservation projects in national parks and on forests, as well as on private land, doing everything […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Adding a height surcharge
Dear HCN, To add a user-fee note from California: On Mount Shasta, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is charging climbers $15 each to go above 10,000 feet, plus $5 per day to park at backcountry trailheads. The information officer at the ranger station told me that the fees were being put in place to avoid placing […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Turn rice straw into homes
Dear HCN, Writer Marc Reisner, in “Deconstructing the age of dams’ (HCN, 10/27/97), notes that rice straw needs a market outlet. Perhaps straw bale construction is not popular in California, but it is catching on in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. It is inexpensive, kind to the environment, and a substitute for adobe construction, which […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Expose the developers early
Dear HCN, Thanks for the Sept. 29 article on the “green” subdivision in Springdale, Utah, but it’s too bad the article did little more than lament a done deal. I propose you inaugurate a column of insensitive subdivisions and list names and phone numbers of unscrupulous developers, and local planning/elected officials who can alter or […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
On Wyoming’s peculiarities
Dear HCN, The Wyoming stories by Paul Krza, Jeffery Smith and Hugh Jackson were insightful (HCN, 7/7/97). Having lived just north of the Wyoming border, in Billings, Mont., for many years, I used to watch those license plates from Wyoming pull into shopping malls and stores, load up the trunk and head home without paying […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Firefighters embody skill
Dear HCN, In the article, “Wet summer a bust for firefighters,” Thomas Power, an economist with the University of Montana, said, “These are some of the best-paying jobs for unskilled labor in Montana” (HCN, 9/15/97). Calling forest firefighting an unskilled job is condescending as well as untrue. Anyone who has worked on a hot-shot crew […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Bye-bye, Glen Canyon Dam
Dear HCN, Draining Utah’s Lake Powell isn’t such a silly notion (HCN, 11/10/97). The river is filling the reservoir with sediment, and in the not-too-dim future much of the reservoir will become little more than a muddy plain. Once the reservoir contains more mud than water, the dam’s contribution to power production also will dwindle. […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Cheers for Mr. Chairman
Dear HCN, Ed Marston’s remarks about Wayne Aspinall and his allies demonstrates that Marston lived in another world during Mr. Aspinall’s tenure as chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee (HCN, 11/10/97). Theocracy, indeed! Mr. Aspinall may have been Mr. Chairman, but his accomplishments came about because of his ability to forge political compromise […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
No kudos for Tortolitans
Dear HCN, I can remember when Tortolita near Tucson was undeveloped land, raw and ruggedly beautiful. Now it’s a suburb. So I was surprised and a little disappointed by the one-sided way that Tony Davis reported on the incorporation of the town of Tortolita (HCN, 9/29/97). I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Ancient cedars get a life
Environmentalists have always said that old-growth trees are worth more alive than logged. Recently, the Forest Service seconded that thought. In October, after five years of negotiations, the agency allowed Idaho sawmill owner Mark Brinkmeyer to swap his 530-acre grove of 1,200-year-old trees at the headwaters of Idaho’s Upper Priest Lake for 2,200 acres of […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
One dam falls, another rises
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – A dam proposed for the Diamond Fork River near Provo, Utah, all but died this October. The Central Utah Water Conservancy District backed off in the face of financial concerns and rising public opposition, pulling the dam from the “preferred alternative” in an environmental impact statement. One of the last […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Tribe doesn’t dig it
The remains of an ancient village on the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Arizona are going to stay buried. After spending almost $1 million on plans and studies, the tribe’s council has decided not to build a casino on the ruins (HCN, 9/1/97). The decision came after officials from the Sells […]