In one of the most beautiful – and affluent – parts of central Idaho, 182 cabins on the Sawtooth National Forest have for decades been the best real estate bargain around. Many of the cabins are in stunning locations like Petit Lake, a remote body of water at the northern tier of the 2.1 million-acre […]
Taxpayers subsidize cheap vacations
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Heard around the West
If your product is ostrich and emu and you call your Missoula, Mont., business the Alternative Meat Market, it just makes sense to try to send some un-beef steaks directly to the White House, right? Right, though marketer Kim Mecca first found herself trapped in switchboard limbo. Finally she connected with White House chief usher […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Rail merger brings delays, derailments
Last year’s merger between the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads was supposed to create a 35,000-mile transportation system with greatly improved service west of the Mississippi River (HCN, 8/5/96). But shippers are complaining that they’re losing millions of dollars because of bad service from UP, now the nation’s largest railroad. Service is so bad […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Cows get marching orders
Tucson environmentalists beat stream-loving bovines
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
On a Montana ranch, big game and big problems
DARBY, Mont. – It’s almost September, and dozens of “shooter bulls” have been turned into the shooting enclosure of Big Velvet Elk Ranch, just south of here, in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Ranch owner Len Wallace has booked 80 clients for the fall and every one of them is going to shoot a trophy elk, […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Y2Y: A vast concept gets a hearing
WATERTON, Canada – The irony wasn’t lost on anyone attending the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) conference in Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park Oct. 2-5. As some 300 environmentalists, wildlife biologists, federal, state and provincial employees and Native North Americans met, mountain goats scavenged for garbage in the heart of town and three grizzly bears munched on […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Dear friends
El Nino 1, Denver 0 The Denver area’s horrendous weekend of Oct. 24-26 began with blowing snow and didn’t quit until some 21 inches had fallen. The storm spared the western half of Colorado and most ski areas, but 10 people in the eastern part of the state, as well as livestock, died in the […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Reclaiming a lost canyon
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – The first time Phil Pennington saw Glen Canyon was in June of 1961, from the window of a search plane. A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Pennington and a handful of university hiking club members had come to southern Utah to backpack in the canyonlands. A few […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain
“We’ve done our best and worst and a lot of inattentive average work in settling this our Western place.” – Colorado Justice Greg Hobbs, at Bishop’s Lodge 1997 “It would be quite a remote period before (the Upper Colorado Basin) would be developed – 50 or 100 or possibly 200 years.” – Delph Carpenter, testifying […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s two feature stories: “A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain” and “Reclaiming a lost canyon.” The proposal to drain Lake Powell is exhilarating. Not because it is necessarily a good idea. That remains to be seen. The proposal is exhilarating because it means democracy […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Water project creates bad precedent
Dear HCN, Heather McGregor’s article on the proposed sale of the Collbran reclamation project does a good job of making a complex dispute understandable (HCN, 9/15/97). Nonetheless, there are a couple of points in the article I need to address. I represent a dozen western Colorado, regional and national environmental groups, as well as the […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Humans are more dangerous
Dear HCN, I am writing in response to your article, “A Colorado reality check: lions roam and kill” (HCN, 8/4/97). The article draws attention to two mountain lion attacks that took place during July in Colorado. While everyone would agree these attacks are tragic, your story, and the rather melodramatic headline, draws too much attention […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
A law is a law is a law
Dear HCN, I read with great interest your article about alternative housing, “Earthships’ in Taos County, N.M. (HCN, 9/1/97). The builder asserts he is not creating a subdivision because he is not selling parcels of land and so he refuses to abide by state and county subdivision laws. Hogwash. This developer is circumventing important laws […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Some questions about bison
Dear HCN, The Great Plains Restorative Council seems to have a worthy goal of letting the bison go free, but I’ve got some questions for letter-writer J. Manos (HCN, 9/15/97). To what degree is his organization influenced by political correctness? How will the farmers be compensated for the loss of their land? When herds of […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Get the fundamentalists out of Yellowstone
Dear HCN, Thank you for an outstanding Yellowstone issue (HCN, 9/15/97). Ecologist Charles Kay’s opinion alone was worth the price of a year’s subscription. I’m an ex-park ranger with years of sad experience with the fundamentalism that has taken over the environmental movement. Kay is justified in stating that “Environmentalists believe that North America was […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Wildfire also goes boom-bust
Dear HCN, Montana Sen. Conrad Burns and ecologist Richard Keigley seem to share a common discontent: Both criticize land-management policy in Yellowstone National Park (HCN, 9/15/97). Burns recently chastised Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for park policy that let bison die in the park last winter. Burns said the deaths were proof that “natural regulation” is […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Burning down the woods
An Arizona timber company that accidentally burned 8,000 acres on the Coconino National Forest last year will be allowed to bid on a salvage timber sale in the burned area. The fire began in May 1996, in a smoldering slash pile left by Stone Forest Industries. The fire burned 8,000 acres north of Flagstaff and […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Tooele sputters through first year
-You don’t start a $500 million piece of equipment and expect it to hum like a jewel the first time you turn it over. It’s gonna have bugs in it,” says Gary Griffith, a county commissioner in Tooele County, Utah. He’s talking about the Army’s chemical weapons incinerator 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Big trees fall in contested sale
Big ponderosa pine trees came crashing down Sept. 30 near Ojo Caliente, N.M., after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied yet another attempt by the environmental group Forest Guardians to stop part of the La Manga timber sale. “This is the last 3 percent of the forest that has old-growth […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Activists wade through mudslides
Idaho environmentalists say that while the Senate debated cutting subsidies for logging in September, the Forest Service withheld politically damaging evidence that logging on steep slopes harms forests and native fish. After heavy rains triggered 905 massive mudslides during the winter of 1995-96 on the Clearwater National Forest in central Idaho, agency officials ordered an […]