The aliens have landed and they’re killing the natives. It may sound like the plot of a bad movie, but it’s real life: Alien species threaten the survival of native plants and animals across the country. In the report, America’s Least Wanted, The Nature Conservancy has named the 12 most threatening invaders of our nation’s […]
Alien invasions
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Go native
Native plants are enjoying a new celebrity with Western gardeners, landscapers and conservationists. But just what makes a plant a native? Art Kruckeberg, a botanist at the University of Washington and a founder of the Washington Native Plant Society, says the short answer is this: Natives are plants that were here before European contact. The […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
The houses that HUD built
On the Tulalip Indian Reservation in Washington state, taxpayers’ money administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development built a 5,300-square-foot home for a couple making $92,000 a year. That mansion soon became a symbol of excess for a five-part Seattle Times series in December documenting tribal housing scandals. Because of deregulation of […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
This trip’s to the pits
It’s not exactly the Grand Canyon, but your next Arizona vacation could include the enormous crater of an open-pit copper mine. ASARCO Inc. ow offers bus tours of its Mission Mine near Tucson, hauling visitors to an overlook of the two-mile-long, 13’4-mile-wide hole deep enough to hide a 100-story building. Tourists can also see “the […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
When parks close, towns lose
For Nevada fishing guide Jim Goff, who works at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, last winter’s government shutdown cost him a lot of money. “The first week they closed down, I had charters booked every day. I lost $1,200,” says Goff. Goff’s experience as a result of the 26-day shutdown was not unique. A […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Whose West is it?
Developers, planners, attorneys and conservationists will talk about urban and rural land development at the sixth annual conference on land use, sponsored by the Denver-based Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, March 13-14. High Country News publisher Ed Marston will debate what’s happening to the economy and culture of the New West with William Perry Pendley, […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Private boaters unite
After witnessing one wrangle too many between private and commercial boaters in the Grand Canyon, Tom Martin decided to take action. This winter he formed the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association, a counterpart to the nonprofit group for professionals, the Grand Canyon River Guides. “The park seems to know what it wants and Grand Canyon […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Idaho says no to grizzlies
Idaho says no to grizzlies An Idaho agency has become the biggest opponent of a plan to bring grizzly bears back to the state. At the Idaho Fish and Game Commission’s January meeting, Twin Falls member Fred Wood said that the group should tell the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it “flat-ass’ opposes the agency’s […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Jobs open up in Washington
A jumble of changes at the nation’s land-management agencies leaves two top posts empty. The opening at the Bureau of Land Management will be filled temporarily by Sylvia Baca, a New Mexico native. Baca’s permanent job is as deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management, also in the Interior Department. She replaces Michael Dombeck, […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Boats may get bounced
Personal watercraft, those zippy, grown-up toys with names like Jet Ski, Sea Doo and Wave Runner, may soon be banned from Lake Tahoe. Some members of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the California-Nevada coalition that governs local development, have recommended ridding the lake of them, and a decision on the controversial issue is expected Feb. […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Planning begins at the ballot box
Even though Wyoming locals lost a lawsuit to stop an 18-hole golf course and 600 homes near the town of Big Horn, they took revenge: They ousted one of the county commissioners who had allowed the new development. The Wyoming Supreme Court ruling concerned the Powderhorn, a golf course resort that will be built outside […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
A-LP makes a hit list
Colorado’s Animas-La Plata project, the controversial water development plan entangling two rivers, two tribes, and nearly every politician in the state (HCN, 11/11/96), has been named one of a dozen “corporate welfare” schemes on a Washington hit list. The list was announced by Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, chair of the House Budget Committee. His coalition […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Lost and found
When last summer’s fires scorched more than 4,700 acres in Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, one of the park’s rare petroglyph panels, Battleship Rock, was damaged beyond repair. Vegetation surrounding the site burned so hot that the rock’s surface and its 1,000-year-old pecked designs fractured and flaked off. But the fire also revealed sites park […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Utahns fight over flights
A recent decision by a Utah county to permit backcountry helicopter skiing on a private ranch above Salt Lake City has mobilized opposition. Heli-skiing opponents, including nearby residents and backcountry skiers, worry that the decision will open the door to more helicopter ski lifts along the Wasatch Front. The company awarded the permit is already […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
When it’s 25 below and dropping
I was playing poker the other day with a bunch of guys, mostly middle-aged and older, mostly native Montanans like myself. Every so often somebody would put on an extra coat, go outside and start the car, come back to play a few hands, then bundle up and turn the engine off. Nobody found this […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Heard around the West
We should all have the problem Mark Wattles has just south of Portland. “I have a lot of money. I don’t know what to do with all the money I have,” he told the Oregonian. Hollywood Entertainment Corp. president Wattles does think he needs a bigger house, so he’s building a 50,000-square-foot mansion on the […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
‘I kill them and cook them’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When officials from the Montana Department of Livestock decided they needed help slaughtering bison leaving Yellowstone National Park, they thought of Mac Carelli, owner of C&C Meats in Sheridan, Mont. Even though he says scores of reporters have been all over him “like ugly […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
We’d rather have weeds, Missoulians say
MISSOULA, Mont. – This city’s Mount Sentinel seems an unlikely place for an environmental battle. Not a grand mountain by Western standards, it’s a stoop-shouldered hill that bears the University of Montana’s “M”. It is covered mostly by open meadows, and, like much grazing land in western Montana, it is infested with weeds alien to […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
‘Ugly’ addition must go
When it comes to enforcing scenic easements on private property within Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area, the Forest Service plays hardball. The agency went to U.S. District Court in March 1995, when it discovered a barn-style addition to Kenneth and Sharon Walker’s A-frame. The Forest Service had paid previous owners of the property $26,000 in […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Clinton’s budget blows off a wilder West
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Teddy Roosevelt was in town the other day, arguing that the country is short-changing its parks and forests. No, this is not a time warp. This was Theodore Roosevelt IV of New York, an investment banker, a conservationist and – best of all – a Republican. It was a nice touch, having […]