A skipped issue Twice a year, the High Country News staff takes pity on its readers and stops the flow of news for a fortnight. This bonus issue, with its four extra pages, will have to take the place of the skipped July 21 issue. Our next issue will be dated August 4, 1997 – […]
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Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
The West weathers unusually wet times
With a huge snowpack in the high country threatening severe floods this spring, Westerners prepared for the worst. They beefed up dikes and levees and stockpiled sandbags in anticipation of the big melt (HCN, 5/22/97). But for most, the worst never came. Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
A lot is at stake in Supreme Court case
INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. – There’s a vacant lot in this town that’s been discussed before the U.S. Supreme Court. The two-fifths-of-an-acre lot, a boggy tangle of willows and ponderosa pines beside narrow Mill Creek, is one of the few remaining undeveloped patches. Houses crowd around, all part of a subdivision built in the 1960s and […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
In Oregon, tension over coho and trees
When federal biologists listed coho salmon under the Endangered Species Act in early June, logging protesters staking out the China Left timber sale in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest hoped their work was done. They were disappointed. The day of the listing, which protects threatened coho in streams along the Oregon-California border, forest supervisor Mike Lunn […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Taxing the wrong side of the tracks
Note: this story is one of three feature stories in this issue about Wyoming’s boom and bust economy. In every discussion about taxes in Wyoming, some ominous voice notes that mineral revenues are in decline. Sooner or later, the voice warns, the tax base is going to have to be diversified – code for shifting […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Sensory deprivation on the High Plains
Note: this story is one of three feature stories in this issue about Wyoming’s boom and bust economy. I’m always searching for omens, like any fool. As we left Missoula, Mont., in 1995 for Campbell County, Wyo., and as our moving van came into the orbit of Gillette, I fiddled with the radio dial and […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
A Wyoming coal town comes of age
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. WRIGHT, Wyo. – Sometime this fall, a trickle of construction workers should begin arriving in this town of 1,300 tucked on the southern edge of Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin. By next summer, their ranks will swell to about 850, most living in temporary […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Wyoming is “open for business”
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. That’s the theme pushed by Gov. Jim Geringer, a Republican elected in 1994. It’s been used before, and it hasn’t worked. Nor have these other themes: Wyoming is a good place to raise families; Wyoming has an educated workforce; companies will thrive in Wyoming […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills … and languishes
CASPER, Wyo. – In 1984 an ambitious young legislator from southwestern Wyoming made a startling statement. Ford Bussart was on everybody’s short list as Democratic candidate for governor in 1986. The Democrats, though a distinct minority in Wyoming, had held the governorship for 12 years under Ed Herschler, and they saw Bussart as his likely […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
A recent encounter in Utah
Dear HCN, While visiting our newest national monument last weekend, we stopped at a small store in Boulder, Utah, to buy gas, dog food and a few groceries. When we asked if the store had a microwave and sold frozen burritos for a quick lunch, the pleasant saleswoman replied, “Sorry, we’re not really into fast […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Bills target Antiquities Act
Still seething over President Clinton’s 1996 creation of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument last fall, Utah lawmakers are trying to turn their anger into law. A bill co-sponsored by Utah Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett would require the president to get approval from a state’s governor and from Congress before establishing […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Climbing ban fails
The Forest Service recently reversed its February ban on rock climbing at Cave Rock in South Lake Tahoe, despite Indian claims that the site is sacred. Agency policy now prohibits climbers from installing new hardware in the rock but allows them to scale the cliff. Washoe Indians say the continued presence of recreationists and some […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Darkness un-Vailed
Night skiing on Vail Mountain is in the dark – for now. After four years of research, Vail Associates unveiled plans last month to light up Vail Mountain for evening skiers and snowboarders. But local residents – unimpressed by a high-tech Hungarian lighting system – forced the company to reconsider the proposal that had already […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
The Wayward West
Stymied by a Republican Congress, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has borrowed from Broadway to express his opinions. On May 12, he staged a mock 125th birthday party for the 1872 Mining Law, complete with cake, and gave title to federal land containing up to $110 million worth of gold to a mining company for $620. […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Genealogy of a mining company
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Tracing Summo USA’s family tree is not easy. The company is wholly owned by Summo Minerals, a Canadian company. Summo Minerals, however, does nothing but own its American company. In fact, all of its offices, employers and operations are in Denver, Colo. Downstairs from […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Boise pushes on its river, and the river shoves back
The “New West” has settled along the banks of the Boise River. An urge to live and work near rushing water has transformed a braided, meandering waterway, once cloaked in nothing more than cottonwoods and rural attitudes, into an urban amenity flanked by office parks, pubs and a forest of pricey homes. Think of riverfront […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Heard Around the West
If this is heresy, so be it: We’ve begun to pity bureaucrats in the West who take the brunt of the public’s contradictions and righteousness. When some of these non-elected officials stick their necks out to protect a public resource, they often get them cut off. And because they’re “public” servants, all of us get […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Las Vegas may shoot craps with its water
LAS VEGAS, Nev. – An opinionated scientist and a vocal group of senior citizens are trying to stop the juggernaut of growth here. So far, they haven’t had much effect. Las Vegas keeps on booming. But they’ve raised the specter that the city may be fouling its water supply. Larry Paulson is a biology professor […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Did agency get in bed with loggers?
Last month, when environmentalists began digging through federal documents about logging in Idaho’s Payette National Forest, they thought they’d found evidence of a Forest Service-timber industry conspiracy. Members of the Neighbors of Cuddy Mountain and the Idaho Sporting Congress discovered records of a 300-year-old grove of fir and pine trees that the Forest Service denied […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
What to do about a nasty fish
When California fisheries biologists discovered northern pike in Lake Davis, 70 miles north of Lake Tahoe, they had a fix: 26,000 gallons of poison. Killing all the fish in the Plumas County lake would prevent the voracious, non-native pike from migrating down the Feather River to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where they could destroy the […]