No sooner had the courts given the Forest Service a go-ahead to resume logging in Idaho’s Cove-Mallard than activists took to the woods to begin a sixth straight year of protest. Nez Perce National Forest officials responded by arresting two activists perched in 40-foot-high tripods. The June 18 arrests came one week after U.S. Magistrate […]
Cove-Mallard warms up for another summer
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Weighing in on mining rules
When the Bureau of Land Management announced in early May that it would hold forums around the West before changing its mining regulations, both mine operators and mining opponents rallied their troops. GREEN, a program of Defenders of Wildlife, sent an e-mail asking environmentalists to attend the scoping meetings “if it is humanly possible.” Laura […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
San Luis heats up again
The historic town of San Luis in southern Colorado is shaking again from the rumble of logging trucks. After a halt in timber cutting due to spring mud, 15-20 trucks a day started hauling logs in early June from the mountainous Taylor Ranch, called La Sierra by the predominantly Hispanic residents below. The 77,000-acre ranch […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Coalition says: Stop logging watersheds
In 1996, floods and landslides exacerbated by decades of logging forced over 200,000 Oregon residents to boil their drinking water. Now, the Oregon Natural Resources Council and 20 other conservation organizations want the Forest Service to stop all logging of municipal watersheds in the Northwest. Streams draining Forest Service lands provide drinking water to two-thirds […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Petroglyphs and pavement collide
A proposed road through Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque continues to be paved with controversy. The latest round features a standoff between Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Pueblo Indian leaders. Domenici, who met recently with the Pueblos for the first time since proposing the bill in April, says the road would reduce traffic congestion around […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Republican riders toppled
Facing growing disgust from the American public as well as inner-party revolt, Republican congressional leaders abandoned riders that stalled a flood relief bill for more than a month. President Clinton vetoed an early bill because it contained several unrelated measures – one of which would have opened public lands to road building. He blamed Republican […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Wolf pups proliferate
As scores of bison and deer perished last winter in and around Yellowstone, one species was there to take it all in. Literally. Yellowstone’s wolf packs found feast where others fell to famine. Eight of Yellowstone’s nine wolf packs produced 11 litters last spring. This could double the park’s total wolf population of 47. Although […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Heard around the West
For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats Las Vegas. This gambling boomtown dares to downsize New York’s Statue of Liberty, compress Egyptian pyramids into city-block-size containers, and as wry writer Dave Barry put it in a bazillion dailies recently, “every week or so somebody out there builds a new casino the size of Czechoslovakia, but with more […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
After 120 years, the Nez Perce come home
PARADISE, Ore. – A few weeks ago, when I ran down a slippery road near here, the soggy weather seemed unfortunate. It was the day of a naming ceremony and salmon feast celebrating the return of the Nez Perce, a Northwest tribe driven from this region 120 years ago. The Nez Perce were returning as […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Dear Friends
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 – […]
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 […]